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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

Douglass Rushkoff - Cyberia(1).pdf

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