The Book of Cao: Enlightenment Through a Poke in the Eye
Cult of the Dead Cow
cDc Communications
Grandmaster Ratte’ & Myles Long (eds.)
2006
155 pages
Like the two Phone Losers of America books, The Book of Cao is a print publication containing material that was produced by a group txt-file writers belonging to what can be broadly referred to as the ‘computer underground’. In the case of Cao, these text files were written over a six year period beginning in 1984, by a group of writers who called themselves the Cult of the Dead Cow (acronym: cDc) a small group of hacker weirdies that distributed their texts through the international BBS scene. The cDc txt files were ubiquitous on the BBSs of the mid-1990s (when I used to call them), and they were probably one of the overall best known series of txt .files of the entire library produced by that scene.
The original Cult of the Dead Cow text files covered a variety of content, ranging from computer game instructions to lyrics from punk and metal albums. What they are best remembered for are their absurd and disturbing literary txts that included scenes of graphic violence, sexuality, and assorted high weirdness. The texts collected into The Book of Cao are those that come closest to underscoring the name the group gave to themselves, as they mostly focus on the cow as a creature of devotion, and of a harbinger of apocalypse. Titles such as The History of the Bovinomicon, and The Nameless Pasture, evoke a bizarre cow-focused pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s already weird writing, while probably the most entertaining of the texts is the “issue” of “Cowbeater” magazine, which is a mock Tiger Beat for the hopelessly strange people who made up the BBS scene.
Again, like the PLA books, the material contained here is already available for free elsewhere, and has been for decades. Unlike the PLA books, this book from the computer underground contains no hack/phreak content outside of some minor references, and instead puts the odd humour and deranged interests of the cDc members (who influenced large numbers of other txt writers) on display. It should be noted then that the cDc are, in essence, a group of hackers who also had strong poetic/literary interests, and information pertaining to their hacktivist endeavours, while not mentioned in this book, can be found elsewhere. They are a predecessor to Anonymous in their fight against Scientology, (cDc begain criticizing the church in 1995) for example, and also in their development of hacking tools (such as the infamous Back Orifice application).
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