Virginia Eubanks: I wanted to start out with a story. There's a figure in Yoruban myth called Legba. He's often called "the god who limps," and the reason that he limps is because he has one foot on earth and one foot in heaven. He's one of the most powerful of the gods because everything that goes between heaven and earth and earth and heaven have to go through him. Also, in a lot of music, especially Cuban and Brazilian and Puerto Rican, anything that's brushed up against Santeria and Voodoo, there are types of songs called "Songs for Legba," where there's this skipped beat, this missed rhythm. That limp. He also, of course, is called the devil when he moves over to most Western cultures...

Sandy Stone: Of course...

VE: In a lot of ways, this issue of Brillo has expressed some profound suspicions about where the body of the "other" fits into cyberspace. As women or men of color, or any group that is placed on the boundaries of society, outside the "dominant paradigm," a lot of folks have every reason to be suspicious of something that comes so obviously from the first-world military industrial interests. At the same time, though, it's important to remember that (like any good trickster) we may stand in a position of privileged knowledge, a knowledge, like Legba's, of both worlds. A lot of us are already good shape shifters, boundary crossers, because we've had to be.

It puts us in a good position to use the medium in powerfully creative ways. So, I wanted to talk to you a bit about viral knowledge, and Legba, and this mix between the world of colonizer and the world of the colonized. The obvious example would be Santeria or Voodoo, where the traditional African religions mixed with Catholicism to create something very powerful, and very scary (at least for the colonizer).

We may stand in a position of privileged knowledge, a knowledge of both worlds.

Do you think we can do the same thing in cyberspace?

SS: Yes, and even better. Cyberspace is a great place for any kind of viral energy. It's a place in which memes are us, there's nothing else in there, really, except for memes. You're looking at an environment whose name is actually change - that's what it's all about - so basically, the matrix of cyberspace is Coyote, it's already trickster for many reasons, not the least of which is that hardware as we know it is basically trickster and software as we know it basically trickster. It doesn't take very much metaphorization to see that. You turn on your machine and the next thing you know, you're being laughed at. This is something we've been talking about a lot in my grad class, Postmodern Gothic, recently. In this particular time, even more than other times, the idea of the virus is so big, because of the ways in which we have internalized the things that happen to us, not by virtue of a psychological twist, but by the ways thing happen. We've gone from the age of pneumonia, the black death, scarlet fever on into AIDS - things that work with retroviruses. And the most interesting of all is the way that mad cow disease travels - which is not by normal units of replication at all, but by sub-units that are very, very hard to find, things that waver on the boundary of that which is alive and that which isn't alive, and that, therefore, occupy a realm of almost pure symbology. Like the most ancient symbology of all - if you found somebody's real name, you owned them, now we've got a thing where symbology is really capable of doing shit like that. We're at the level where the world is operating increasingly by infection. But not necessarily from without, things happen to us now that change us from the inside, like genetic engineering, when you get injected with a structure, a symbol, something that changes you from the inside.

It's kind of eerie, a little chilling, that the 'Net happens now. That we happen to have not just the 'Net, but a world-wide web of communication which is not only the Internet but which is also the private lines financial institutions use. The more we study the way economics work, and I'm going to use that horrible phrase, "economics at the close of the mechanical age," it begins to look like some kind of quasi-sentient organism. When you look at the way late capitalism works, there's this weird idea that some kind of replication is going on that we're no longer in control of, that's going to eat us alive.

VE: The reason I brought up Legba, besides this being a Halloween issue (I have to mention the devil at least once), is exactly that - there's some kind of mythical beast being created in the tension between at least two worlds - and it's in a tremendous position of power, despite the limp.

SS: This is the return of the pyscho-cyber-geneto-repressed! It has all of the best features of that. You take something that is essentially benign, in which there are a lot of functions to knit a culture together. You wreck it, which causes the culture to go on the rocks of somebody else's colonization, and then it reappears in some savage form within your own and eats you alive. And you know, this date is not just the days of ghouls and goblins, but is the time in many cultures where the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest.

VE: More ghosts, more goblins, more viruses?

SS: Exactly. How that comes back is witches, ghosts and goblins, which is amazing - how Legba comes back.

VE: And he shows up to give us just a little push into chaos, a taste of another world.

SS: The thing that is so interesting is that even though the colonists always manage to get by, you know, "We live with guilt, but that's okay," but still there's this thing that comes up, the darkness that comes up from really deep within and does the ghost and goblins number on us. At the moment, that's the best that the colonized can hope to do. To work a little fear. Ultimately, whether that's transformative enough to make a difference is really hard to say...

VE: Look at Haiti! There's a place where the colonized rose up and ousted (in fact, killed) the colonizer, and if you believe the rumors, used Voodoo to do it. Although some would argue with me on that one...

Are we the ghosts and goblins of cyberspace?

SS: I think what would be really interesting is if the Haitian section moved here, and messed us up as badly as Haiti. VE: So, are we the ghosts and goblins of cyberspace? Are you a ghost and goblin of cyberspace?

SS: I try to be. As best I can, and I think we all are, in our way. But I think it takes a lot more to be terrifying. In the first place, there's a problem with the way cyberspace is perceived right now. It's perceived as this great place of freedom and new possibilities...

VE: Pffff on that! A resounding pffff!

SS: At least we're beginning to wake up to the reality. In this unclean space in which the colonizers are already bringing down the dead hand of the church, or at least the dead hand of the cyber church, we're already having to fight back. People are fighting back, in their strange ways.

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