Cyberia Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace by Douglas Rushkoff
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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 1 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 2 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.