cyberia

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Cyberia

Life in the Trenches of

Hyperspace

By Douglas Rushkoff

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

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CyberiaLifeintheTrenchesofHyperspaceByDouglasRushkoffPrefacetothe1994paperbackeditionAlothashappenedintheyearorsosinceIwrotethisbook.Morethanusuallyhappensinayear.Thankstotechnologieslikethecomputer,themodem,interactivemedia,andtheInternet,wenolongerdependonprintedmatterorwordofmouthtoexplorethelate...

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cyberia

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