The Happy Mutant Handbook

A whole generation has grown up with computers and cable, VCRs and voicemail. It's not surprising that a brand-new culture has blossomed--with its own jargon, its own style, and its own definition of fun. This is a full-color treasury of brain candy, eyeball kicks, and reality hacking projects, with tips on everything from joyriding on the information superhighway to running your car on kitchen grease.

In the wrong hands, this book would receive a dousing of gasoline and a quick flick of the Bic. In the right hands, this is a delightfully subversive manual for a lifetime of fun.

This is the do-it-yourself handbook for enjoying our media-saturated world by tinkering with how it works. Pulls together the kookiest and most engaging ideas from the Internet, great suggestions on "culture jamming" (a practice of co-opting the resources, messages, and brain-washing machinery of existing media, pioneered by Adbusters magazine), and generally jam-packed with loads of fun ideas and funny material.

Notable contributors include Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, R.U. Sirius, Richard Kadrey, and that most prolific of all authors, Anonymous.

(Editor's note: In some ways, the Happy Mutant philosophy is the cyberspawn of the behavioral shenanigans of the Dadaists, Surrealists, or the lesser-known but more interesting Situationists. )