Douglass Rushkoff - Cyberia

Douglas Rushkoff

Cyberia

Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Preface to the 1994 paperback edition

A lot has happened in the year or so since I wrote this book. More

than usually

happens in a year. Thanks to technologies like the computer, the modem,

interactive media,

and the Internet, we no longer depend on printed matter or word of mouth to

explore the

latest rages, innovations, or discoveries. By the time a story hits the

newstands, most insiders

consider it old news" and are already hard at work on the next flurry of

culture-bending

inventions and activities.

Cyberia is about a very special moment in our recent history -- a

moment when

anything seemed possible. When an entire subculture -- like a kid at a rave

trying virtual

reality for the first time -- saw the wild potentials of marrying the latest

computer

technologies with the most intimately held dreams and the most ancient

spiritual truths. It is a

moment that predates America Online, twenty million Internet subscribers,

Wired magazine,

Bill Clinton, and the Information Superhighway. But it is a moment that

foresaw a whole lot

more.

This book is not a survey of everything and everyone cyber" but

rather a tour through

some of the regions of this new, fledgling culture to which I was lucky

enough to gain

access. Looking back, it is surprising to see how many of these then-absurd

notions have

become accepted truths, and disheartening to see how many of the most

optimistic appraisals

of our future are still very far from being realized.

Cyberia follows the lives and translates the experiences of the

first few people who

realized that our culture was about to take a leap into the unknown. Some of

them have

succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and are now practically

household names. Others

have met with catastrophe. Still others have simply faded from view, their

own contributions

to the cyberian renaissance already completed.

The people in this book, and thousands of others like them around

the world,

understand the implications of our technologies on our culture, thought

systems, spiritual

beliefs, and even our biological evolution. They still stand as the most

optimistic and

forward-thinking appraisers of our civilization's fate. As we draw ever

nearer to the

consensually hallucinatory reality for which these cyberians drew the

blueprints, their

impressions of life on the edge become even more relevant for the rest of

us. And they make

more sense.

Douglas Rushkoff

New York City, 1994

Introduction

Surfing the Learning Curve of Sisyphus

On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of feeling

like an immigrant in a

place where your children are natives--where you're always going to

be behind the

8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can

learn it. It's what I

call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are

going to be

comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and

ambiguity. I look at

confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not everybody feels

that way. That's

not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's

based on the ability of

people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion

as a way of life,

concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't

control anything. At best

it's a matter of surfing the whitewater.

--John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and cofounder of the

Electronic

Frontiers Foundation

The kid who handed me the brightly colored flyer must have figured

I was younger or

at least more open-minded than I really am. Or maybe he had me pegged from

the beginning.

Sure, I had done a little experimenting" in college and had gotten my world

view a bit

expanded, but I was hardly ready to immerse myself in a subculture as odd,

or as influential,

as this one turned out to be.

The fractal-enhanced map-point" leaflet announced a giant, illegal

party -- a rave,"

where thousands of celebrants would take psychedelics, dance to the blips of

computer-generated music, and discuss the ways in which reality itself would

soon conform to

their own hallucinatory projections. No big deal. Bohemians have talked this

way for years,

even centuries. Problem is, after a few months in their midst, I started

believing them.

A respected Princeton mathematician gets turned on to LSD, takes a

several-year

sabbatical in the caves of the Himalayas during which he trips his brains

out, then returns to

the university and dedicates himself to finding equations to map the shapes

in his psychedelic

visions. The formulas he develops have better success at mapping the weather

and even the

stock market than any have before.

Three kids in San Francisco with a video camera and a broken hotel

magnetic key

encoder successfully fool a bank cash machine into giving them other

people's money.

A new computer conferencing system immerses people so totally in

their virtual

community" that an alterego takes over a man's willpower, and he finds

himself out of

control, randomly propositioning women who happen to be online."

A science fiction writer, after witnessing the spectacle of a child

in hypnotic symbiosis

with a video arcade game, invents a fictional reality called Cyberspace -- a

consensual

hallucination" accessed through the computer, where one's thoughts manifest

totally, and

reality itself conforms to the wave patterns.

Then, in a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy, the science fictional

concept of a reality that

can be consciously designed begins to emerge as a held belief--and not just

by kids dancing

at all night festivals. A confluence of scientists, computer programmers,

authors, musicians,

journalists, artists, activists and even politicians have adopted a new

paradigm. And they want

to make this your paradigm, too.

The battle for your reality begins on the fields of digital

interaction. Our growing

dependence on computers and electronic media for information, money, and

communication

has made us easy targets, if unwilling subjects, in one of the most bizarre

social experiments

of the century. We are being asked to spend an increasing amount of our time

on a very new

sort of turf----the territory of digital information. While we are getting

used to it by now, this

region is very different from the reality we have grown to know and love. It

is a boundless

universe in which people can interact regardless of time and location. We

can fax paper''

over phone lines, conduct twenty-party video-telephone conversations with

participants in

different countries, and even "touch'' one another from thousands of miles

away through new

technologies such as virtual reality, where the world itself opens to you

just as you dream it

up.

For example, many of these computer programs and data libraries are

structured as

webs, a format that has come to be known as hypertext.'' To learn about a

painter, a

computer user might start with a certain museum. From the list of painters,

he may select a

particular portrait. Then he may ask for biographical information about the

subject of the

portrait, which may reveal a family tree. He may follow the family tree up

through the

present, then branch off into data about immigration policies to the United

States, the

development of New York real estate, or even a grocery district on the Lower

East Side. In a

hypertext video game, a player might be a detective searching a room. In the

room is a chest

of drawers. Select a drawer. The drawer opens, inside is a note. Point to

the note, and text

appears. Read the note, see a name. Select the name, see a picture. One item

in the picture is

a car. Select the car, go for a ride through the neighborhood. See an

interesting house, go

inside...

Maybe this isn't all that startling. It has taken several decades

for these technologies

take root, and many of us are used to the way they work. But the people I

met at my first

rave in early 1990's San Francisco claimed they could experience this same

boundless,

hypertext universe without the use of a computer at all. For them,

cyberspace can be accessed

through drugs, dance, spiritual techniques, chaos math, and pagan rituals.

They move into a

state of consciousness where, as if logged onto a computer, the limitations

of time, distance,

and the body are perceived as meaningless. People believe that they move

through these

regions as they might move through computer programs or video

games--unlimited by the

rules of a linear, physical reality. Moreover, they say that our reality

itself, aided by

technology, is about to make a wholesale leap into this new, hypertextual

dimension.

By handing me that damned rave promotional flyer, a San Franciscan

teenager made it

impossible for me to ignore that a growing number of quite intelligent, if

optimistic, people

are preparing themselves and the rest of us for the wildest possible

implications of our new

technologies. The more time I spent with these people, the less wild these

implications

seemed to me. Everywhere I turned, the conclusions were the same. Quantum

physicists at the

best institutions agree that the tiniest particles making up matter itself

have ceased to behave

with the predictability of linear equations. Instead, they jump around in a

discontinuous

fashion, disappearing, reappearing, suddenly gaining and losing energy.

Mathematicians,

likewise, have decided that the smooth, geometric model of reality they have

used since

Euclid first drew a triangle on papyrus is obsolete. Instead, using

computers, they churn out

psychedelic paisley patterns which they claim more accurately reflect the

nature of existence.

And who appears to be taking all this in first? The kids dancing to

electronic music at

underground clubs. And the conclusion they have all seemed to reach is that

reality itself is

up for grabs. It can be dreamt up.

Now this all may be difficult to take seriously; it was for me--at

first. But we only

need to turn to the arbiters of reality--mainstream scientists--to find this

confirmed. The

ability to observe phenomena, they now believe, is inextricably linked to

the phenomena

themselves. Having lost faith in the notion of a material explanation for

existence, these

quantum physicists and systems mathematicians have begun to look at the ways

reality

conforms to their expectations, mirroring back to them a world changed by

the very act of

observation. As they rely more and more on the computer, their suspicions

are further

confirmed: This is not a world reducible to neat equations and pat answers,

but an infinitely

complex series of interdependencies, where the tiniest change in a remote

place can have

systemwide repercussions.

When computers crunch data from real-world observations, they do

not produce

simple, linear graphs of an orderly existence but instead churn out phase

maps and diagrams

whose spiraling intricacy resembles that of an ancient mosaic, a coral reef,

or a psychedelic

hallucination. When the entire procession of historical, biological, and

cosmological events is

reanalyzed in the light of modern mathematical discoveries like the fractal

and feedback

loops, it points toward this era--the turn of the century--as man's leap out

of history altogether

and into some sort of timeless dimension.

Inklings of what this dimension may be like come to us through the

experience of

computer hackers and psychedelic tripsters, who think of themselves not as

opposite ends of

the spectrum of human activity but as a synergistic congregation of creative

thinkers bringing

the tools of high technology and advanced spirituality into the living rooms

of the general

public. Psychedelics can provide a shamanic experience for any adventurous

consumer. This

experience leads users to treat the accepted reality as an arbitrary one,

and to envision the

possibilities of a world unfettered by obsolete thought systems,

institutions, and neuroses.

Meanwhile, the cybernetic experience empowers people of all ages to explore

a new, digital

landscape. Using only a personal computer and a modem, anyone can now access

the

datasphere. New computer interface technologies such as virtual reality

promise to make the

datasphere a place where we can take not only our minds but our bodies along

for the ride.

The people you are about to meet interpret the development of the

datasphere as the

hardwiring of a global brain. This is to be the final stage in the

development of Gaia,'' the

living being that is the Earth, for which humans serve as the neurons. As

computer

programmers and psychedelic warriors together realize that "all is one,'' a

common belief

emerges that the evolution of humanity has been a willful progression toward

the construction

of the next dimensional home for consciousness.

We need a new word to express this boundless territory. The kids in

this book call it

Cyberia.

Cyberia is the place a businessperson goes when involved in a phone

conversation, the

place a shamanic warrior goes when traveling out of body, the place an acid

house'' dancer

goes when experiencing the bliss of a techno-acid trance. Cyberia is the

place alluded to by

the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of every

science, and the

wildest speculations of every imagination. Now, however, unlike any other

time in history,

Cyberia is thought to be within our reach. The technological strides of our

postmodern

culture, coupled with the rebirth of ancient spiritual ideas, have convinced

a growing number

of people that Cyberia is the dimensional plane in which humanity will soon

find itself.

But even those of us who have never ventured into a house club,

physics lab or

computer bulletin board are being increasingly exposed to words, images and

ideas that shake

the foundations of our most deeply held beliefs. The cyberian paradigm finds

its way to our

unsuspecting minds through new kinds of arts and entertainment that rely

less on structure

and linear progression than on textural experience and moment-to-moment

awareness.

Role-playing games, for example, have no beginning or end, but instead

celebrate the

inventiveness of their players, who wind their way through complex fantasies

together, testing

strategies that they may later use in their own lives, which have in turn

begun to resemble the

wild adventures of their game characters. Similarly, the art and literature

of Cyberia have

abandoned the clean lines and smooth surfaces of Star Trek and 2001: A Space

Odyssey in

favor of the grimy, posturban realism of Batman, Neuromancer, and

Bladerunner, in which

computers do not simplify human issues but expose and even amplify the

obvious faults in

our systems of logic and social engineering.

Not surprisingly, the reaction of traditionalists to this

expression has been harsh and

marked by panic. Cyberians question the very reality on which the ideas of

control and

manipulation are based; and as computer-networking technology gets into the

hands of more

cyberians, historical power centers are challenged. A bright young hacker

with enough time

on his hands can break in to almost any computer system in the world.

Meanwhile,

do-it-yourself technology and a huge, hungry media empire sews the seeds of

its own

destruction by inviting private citizens to participate through 'zines,

cable shows, and

interactive television. The hypnotic spell of years of television and its

intense public relations

is broken as people learn to deconstruct and recombine the images intended

to persuade them.

The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to reexamine

previously accepted

policies and prejudices.

Using media viruses,'' politically inclined cyberians launch into

the datasphere, at

lightning speed, potent ideas that openly challenge hypocritical and

illogical social structures,

thus rendering them powerless.

A new scientific paradigm, a new leap in technology, and a new

class of drug created

the conditions for what many believe is the renaissance we are observing

today. Parallels

certainly abound between our era and renaissances of the past: the computer

and the printing

press, LSD and caffeine, the holograph and perspective painting, the wheel

and the spaceship,

agriculture and the datasphere. But cyberians see this era as more than just

a rebirth of

classical ideas. They believe the age upon us now might take the form of

categorical

upscaling of the human experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional turf.

The people who believe all this, so far, are on the outermost

fringes of popular culture.

But, as we witnessed in the 1960s, the beliefs of fringe cultures can

trickle up through our

youth into the mainstream. In fact, we may soon conclude that the single

most important

contribution of the 1960s and the psychedelic era to popular culture is the

notion that we have

chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian counterculture

of the 1990s, armed

with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore

unmapped

realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and

purposefully.

This book is meant to provide a guided tour through that vision:

Cyberia. It is an

opportunity to take part in, or at least catch up with, a movement that

could be reshaping

reality. The cyberian explorers we will meet in the next chapters have been

depicted with all

their human optimism, brilliance, and frailty. Like the first pioneers of

any new world, they

suffer from the same fears, frustrations, and failures as those who stay

behind and watch from

the safety of familiarity. These are not media personalities but human

beings, developing their

own coping mechanisms for survival on the edges of reality.

Whether or not we are destined for a wholesale leap into the next

dimension, there are

many people who believe that history as we know it is coming to a close. It

is more than

likely that the aesthetics, inventions, and attitudes of the cyberians will

become as difficult to

ignore as the automatic teller machine and MTV. We all must cope, in one way

or another,

with the passage of time. It behooves us to grok Cyberia.

Most people think it's far out if we get virtual reality up and

running. This is much

more profound than that. This is the real thing. We're going to

find out what "being''

is. It's a philosophical journey and the vehicles are not simply

cultural but biology

itself. We're closing distance with the most profound event that a

planetary ecology

can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the chrysalis of

matter. And it's never

happened before--I mean the dinosaurs didn't do this, nor did the

procaryotes

emerging. No. This takes a billion years of forward moving

evolution to get to the

place where information can detach itself from the material matrix

and then look back

on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension.

--Terence McKenna, author, botanist, and psychedelic explorer

PART 1

Computers: Revenge of the Nerds

Chapter 1

Navigating the Datastream

Craig was seven when he discovered the catacombs.'' His parents

had taken him on a

family visit to his uncle, and while the adults sat in the kitchen

discussing the prices of sofas

and local politics, young Craig Neidorf--whom the authorities would

eventually prosecute as a

dangerous, subversive hacker--found one of the first portals to Cyberia: a

video game called

Adventure.

Like a child who wanders away from his parents during a tour of the

Vatican to

explore the ancient, secret passages beneath the public walkways, Craig had

embarked on his

own video-driven visionquest. As he made his way through the game's many

screens and

collected magical objects, Craig learned that he could use those objects to

see'' portions of

the game that no one else could. Even though he had completed whatever tasks

were

necessary in the earlier parts of the game, he was drawn back to explore

them with his new

vision. Craig was no longer interested in just winning the game--he could do

that effortlessly.

Now he wanted to get inside it.

I was able to walk through a wall into a room that did not

exist,'' Craig explains to

me late one night over questionably accessed phone lines. "It was not in the

instructions. It

was not part of the game. And in that room was a message. It was a message

from the creator

of the game, flashing in black and gold...''

Craig's voice trails off. Hugh, my assistant and link-artist to the

telephone net, adjusts

his headset, checks a meter, then acknowledges with a nod that the

conversation is still being

recorded satisfactorily. Craig would not share with me what the message

said--only that it

motivated his career as a cyberian. This process--finding something that

wasn't written about,

discovering something that I wasn't supposed to know--it got me very

interested. I searched in

various other games and tried everything I could think of--even jiggling the

power cord or the

game cartridge just to see what would happen. That's where my interest in

playing with that

kind of thing began ... but then I got an Apple.''

At that point, Cyberia, which had previously been limited to the

other side of the

television screen, expanded to become the other side of the computer screen.

With the help of

a telephone connection called a modem,'' Craig was linked to a worldwide

system of

computers and communications. Now, instead of exploring the inner workings

of a packaged

video game, Craig was roaming the secret passages of the datasphere.

By the time he was a teenager, Craig Neidorf had been arrested.

Serving as the editor

of an on-line magazine'' (passed over phone lines from computer to

computer) called Phrack,

he was charged with publishing (legally, "transporting'') a dangerous,

$79,000 program

document detailing the workings of Bell South's emergency 911 telephone

system

(specifically, the feature that allows them to trace incoming calls). At

Neidorf's trial, a Bell

South employee eventually revealed that the program'' was actually a

three-page memo

available to Bell South customers for less than $30. Neidorf was put on a

kind of probation

for a year, but he is still raising money to cover his $100,000 legal

expenses.

But the authorities and, for most part, adult society are missing

the point here. Craig

and his compatriots are not interested in obtaining and selling valuable

documents. These kids

are not stealing information--they are surfing data. In Cyberia, the

computer serves as a

metaphor as much as a tool; to hack through one system to another and yet

another is to

discover the secret rooms and passageways where no one has ever traveled

before. The web

of interconnected computer networks provides the ultimate electronic neural

extension for the

growing mind. To reckon with this technological frontier of human

consciousness means to

reevaluate the very nature of information, creativity, property and human

relations.

Craig is fairly typical of the young genius-pioneers of this new

territory. He describes

the first time he saw a hacker in action:

I really don't remember how he got in; I was sitting there while

he typed. But to see

these other systems were out there was sort of interesting. I saw things

like shopping

malls--there were heating computers you could actually call up and look at

what their

temperature settings were. There were several of these linked together. One

company ran the

thermostat for a set of different subscribers, so if it was projected to be

82 degrees outside,

they'd adjust it to a certain setting. So, back when we were thirteen or so,

we talked about

how it might be neat to change the settings one day, and make it too hot or

too cold. But we

never did.''

But they could have, and that's what matters. They gained access.

In Cyberia, this is

funhouse exploration. Neidorf sees it as like when you're eight and you

know your brother

and his friends have a little treehouse or clubhouse somewhere down in the

woods, and you

and your friends go and check it out even though you know your brother would

basically kill

you if he found you in there.'' Most of these kids get into hacking the same

way as children

of previous generations daringly wandered through the hidden corridors of

their school

basements or took apart their parents' TV sets. But with computers they hit

the jackpot:

There's a whole world there--a whole new reality, which they can enter and

even change.

Cyberia. Each new opening leads to the discovery of an entirely new world,

each connected

to countless other new worlds. You don't just get in somewhere, look around,

find out it's a

dead end, and leave. Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were fascinated by a few

winding

caves; cyberkids have broken through to an infinitely more complex and

rewarding network.

Each new screen takes them into a new company, institution, city,

government, or nation.

They can pop out almost anywhere. It's an endless ride.

As well as being one of the most valuable techniques for navigating

cyberspace,

hacking the vast computer net is the first and most important metaphor in

Cyberia. For the

first time, there is a technical arena in which to manifest the cyberian

impulses, which range

from pure sport to spiritual ecstasy and from redesigning reality to

downright subversion.

Crashing the System

David Troup gained his fame in the computer underground for a

program he wrote

called The Bodyguard, which helps hackers maintain their chain of

connections through a

long series of systems breaches. Through another ingeniously exploited

communications

system glitch, we spoke as he relaxed on his living room couch in Minnesota.

From the sound

of his voice I knew he was using a speaker phone, and I heard several of his

friends milling

about the room, popping open beers, and muttering in agreement with Troup,

Douglass Rushkoff - Cyberia

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