Cyberia

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 newsstands, 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.

What you have to remember as you read this book is that back in the 1980s, computers and everyone who got near them were decidedly uncool. So were science fiction, fantasy role-playing, and even – oddly, perhaps – psychedelic drugs. America had plummeted into the depths of conservative thinking, and in conservative times intellectuals don't fare well. Freaks fare even worse. And futurists aren't ever heard from. The 1980s was a time for nostalgia and traditional values. It seemed to many that the non-conformist and highly individualistic - if somewhat ungrounded - thinking of the 1960s had been forever lost.

But in San Francisco, a few scattered ex-hippies, university students, musicians., and other optimistic souls who felt particularly disenfranchised by the status quo began imagining an alternative possibility. Most of these people didn't know about one another. Some gathered in small groups; others worked alone. While one discovered the computer and invented virtual reality, another discovered the cognitive enhancement properties of herbs and began selling 'brain foods'. Kids in one town played fantasy role playing games, while kids in another began mixing and recording their own electronic music on cheap Casio instruments. A university class in Europe wrote programs that allowed people to share information on computers over telephone lines, while a math professor in Santa Cruz realized that non-linear math equations depict organic shapes.

The only thing that qualified me to write all this down was the fact that I happened to know people in each of these different areas - and realized that they didn't know about one another. They were doing very different things, of course, but it seemed to me they were all somehow related.

As you'll see, they were all groping towards the same thing: a sense of authorship over reality itself. Technology empowered these many uniquely different fringe and counterculture members to build, project, or just simply record their visions. For example, computers allowed scientists to model strange attractors; Xerox machines allowed teenagers to publish subversive magazines; online bulletin boards let underground psychopharmacologists share recipes for new psychedelics. In each case and many more, these low-cost and highly accessible technologies gave people a chance to realize their dreams on a level unimaginable to them before. And the people who felt the greatest need to take advantage of this opportunity were those who felt their needs were not being addressed by a mainstream culture that resisted anything new.

Cyberia appeared to be a way to crack open our civilization's closed-mindedness, and to allow for a millennial transition that offered something a lot better than apocalypse: consciously driven evolution.

Although many saw the computer as simply a great metaphor for the brain. Cyberians considered these terminals and their many networks to be extensions of the human mind. It was as if human beings - the many neurons of a planetary brain - were somehow hardwiring themselves together. Likewise, the people on these pages saw drugs less as a form of entertainment than a method of entramment: preparation and practice for the stresses of shepherding humanity to its next evolutionary level. Add to this the ideas about spirituality and rebirth trickling down to youth culture from the New Age movement, and you begin to smell renaissance.

Lofty thoughts, for sure - but that's precisely the point. Cyberia marks a moment where many people in many places saw these possibilities as very real. In a sense, they were right. And though Cyberia has not turned out to be quite as radical a departure from reality as its proponents imagined, the world isn't the same as it was ten years ago, either.

This was never meant as a book about the Internet. Still, that didn't stop its first publisher from cancelling Cyberia before it was to be published back in 1993, for fear that, "the Internet might be over by then". They compared the phenomena described in this book to the 'citizen's band' fad of the mid-1970s - a short-lived communications craze surrounding the use of trucker's two-way radios.

Of course the Internet craze went on quite a bit longer than my first publishers had anticipated. But it's far from over. No, not even the collapse of the speculative market frenzy surrounding the 'dot.com era' can challenge the essential drive for a more networked global culture.

Maybe this kind of optimism requires us to look at the Internet as less of an investment opportunity than a new kind of life form. That's the way we all used to see it in ancient times, anyway. Back in the 2400-baud, ascii-text era of ten long years ago, the Internet had nothing to do with the NASDAQ index. Until 1992, you had to sign an agreement promising not to conduct any business online just to get access to the Internet! Imagine that. It was a business-free zone.

How could such rules have ever been put in place? Because the Internet began as a public project. It was created to allow scientists at universities and government facilities to share research and computing resources. Everyone from the Pentagon to AI Gore saw the value of universally accessible information-sharing network, and invested all sorts of federal funds in building a backbone capable of connecting computers around the world.

What they didn't realize was that they were doing a whole lot more than connecting computers to one another. They were connecting people to one another, too. Before long, all those scientists who were supposed to be exchanging research or comparing data were exchanging stories about their families and comparing notes on the latest Star Trek movies. People from around the world were playing games, socializing, and crossing cultural boundaries that had never been crossed before. Since no one was using it to discuss military technology anymore, the government abandoned the network, and turned it over to the public as best they could.

The Internet's unexpected social side-effect turned out to be its incontrovertible main feature. Its other functions fall by the wayside. The Internet's ability to network human beings is its very life's blood. It fosters communication, collaboration, sharing, helpfulness, and community. Then word got out.

The nerdiest among us found out first. Then came those of us whose friends were nerds. Then their friends, and so on. Someone would simply insist he had found something you needed to know about - the way a childhood friend lets you in on a secret door leading down to the basement under the Junior High School.

How many of you can remember that first time you watched him log on? How he turned the keyboard over to you and asked what you want to know, where you want to visit, or who you want to meet? That was the magic moment when you 'got it'. Internet fever. There was a whole new world out there, unlimited by the constraints of time and space, appearance and prejudice, gender and power.

It's no wonder so many people compared the 1990s Internet to the psychedelic 1960s. It seemed all we needed to do was get a person online and he or she would be changed forever. And people were. A 60-year-old Midwestern businessman I know found himself logging on every night to engage in a conversation about Jungian archetypes. It lasted for four weeks before he even realized the person with whom he was conversing was a 16-year-oid boy from Tokyo.

It felt as though we were wiring up a global brain. Visionaries of the period, like Ted Nelson, invented words like 'hypertext', and told us how the Internet could be used as a library for everything ever written. A musician named Jaron Lanier invented a bizarre interactive space he called 'virtual reality', in which people would be able to, in his words, "really see what the other means" Starry-eyed authors like me wrote optimistic books like this one - announcing the new global renaissance.

The Internet was no longer a government research project. It was alive. Out of control and delightfully chaotic. What's more, it promoted an agenda all its own.

People who participated online were forever changed. It was as if using a computer mouse and keyboard to access other human beings on the other side of the monitor changed our relationship to media and the power it held. The tube was no longer a place that only a corporate conglomerate could access. It was Rupert Murdoch, Dan Rather, and Heather Locklear's turf no more. The Internet was 'our' space. A portal to Cyberia.

Out there, the do-it-yourself mentality dominated. We called it 'cyberpunk.' Why watch packaged programming on TV when you can make your own online? And once you're doing it online, other sorts of vision-quests seem entirely more within your reach. Who needs corporate content when you can 'be' the content? This was a whole new world we could design ourselves, on our own terms. It felt like a revolution.

That's why it fostered such a deep sense of community. New users were gently escorted around the Internet by more seasoned veterans, and shown where and how to participate. An experienced user would delight in setting up a newbie's Internet connection for him. It was considered an honour to rush out into the night to fix a fellow user's technical problem. To be an Internet user was to be an Internet advocate.

It's also why almost everything to do with the Internet was free. Software was designed by people who wanted to make the Internet a better place. Hackers stayed up late making new programs, and then distributed them free of charge to anyone who cared to use them.

All the programs we use today are actually based on this shareware and freeware. Internet Explorer and Netscape are just fat versions of a program created at the University of Illinois. Streaming media is really just dolled up version of CUSeeMe, a program developed at Cornell. The Internet was built for love, not profit.

And that was the problem, for business, anyway. As more and more people got online, they spent less and less time watching TV Studies showed a direct correlation between time spent on the Internet and time not spent consuming television programs and commercials. Something had to be done.

Thus began the long march to turn the Internet into a profitable enterprise. It started with content. Dozens, then hundreds of online magazines sprang up. But since the Internet had always been free, no one wanted to pay a subscription charge for content. It just wasn't something one did online. So most of the magazines went out of business.

The others, well, they invented the next great Internet catastrophe: the banner ad. Web publishers figured they could sell a little strip on top of each web page to an advertiser, who'd use it as a billboard for commercials. But everyone hated them. They got in the way. It was like scuba diving with someone putting bumper stickers over your mask. And the better we got at ignoring banner ads, the more distractingly busy they grew and the more, time-consuming they were to download. They only taught us to resent whichever advertiser was inhibiting our movement.

So advertising gave way to e-commerce. The Internet would be turned into a direct marketing platform. An interactive mail-order catalogue! This little scheme seemed to hold more promise. So much promise, in fact, that Wall Street investors took notice. Not that many of these e-commerce businesses actually made money. But they looked like someday they could.

Besides, Wall Street cares less about actual revenues than the ability to create the perception that there might be revenues at some point in the future. That's why it's called speculation. Others might call it a pyramid scheme. Here's how it works: Someone writes a business plan for a new land of e-commerce company. That person finds 'angel investors' -very in-the-know people who give him money to write a bigger business plan and hire a CEO. Then comes the 'first round' and 'second round', where other, slightly less in-the-know people invest a few million more. Then come the institutional investors, who underwrite the now-infamous IPO. After that, at the very bottom of the pyramid, come retail investors. That's you and me. We're supposed to log into an E-trading site and invest our money, just around the time that those investors at the top are executing what's called an 'exit strategy' That's another way of saying carpet bag.

So what's all that got to do with the Internet, you ask? Or Cyberia itself? Exactly. The Internet and cyber culture were merely the sexy words, the come-hithers, the bright ideas at the top of the pyramid. Sure, there were and are still plenty of entrepreneurs creating vibrant, successful online businesses - look at Yahoo, Amazon, and EBay. But the Internet wasn't born to support the kind of global economic boom that venture capitalists were envisioning. And by turning the Internet's principle use from socializing towards monetanzing, business went against the Internet's very functionality and against the core ethos of Cyberia.

People doing what comes naturally online, like typing messages to one another, don't generate revenue. The object of the game, for Internet business, was to get people's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Less collaboration, more consumption. Sites were designed to be 'sticky' so people wouldn't leave. Couldn't leave. And 'information architecture' turned into the science of getting people to click on the 'buy' button. The only time we're supposed to take our hands off the keyboard is to enter our credit card number (if it's not already on a cookie, somewhere deep on our hard drive).

By 1999, a person logging on for the first time was encountering something very different from the Cyberia I've described in this book. Browsers and search engines alike were designed to keep users either buying products or consuming commercial content. Most of those helpful hackers were now vested employees of dot.com companies. And most visions of the electronic future had dollar signs before them.

But the real Internet was hiding underneath this investment charade the whole time. It was a little harder to find, perhaps, and no one in the mainstream press was writing about it, anymore, but plenty of people were still sharing stories, emailing relatives, organizing raves, finding new communities, and educating themselves. The spirit of the Internet was dormant, maybe, but very much alive.

This is why those business schemes were doomed to fail. The behaviour control being implemented by more nefarious online merchants, the mercenary tactics of former hackers, and the commercial priorities of the Internet's investors were a blatant contradiction of Cyberia's true nature. Sure, the Internet could support some business guests, the way a tree can support some mushrooms at its base and a few squirrels in its branches. But businesses attacked the Internet like a set of chainsaws. Or, better, a parasitic fungus. It needed to be rejected.

The inevitable collapse of the dot.com pyramid was not some sort of regular business cycle. And it most certainly was not the collapse of anything having to do with the Internet. No, what we just witnessed was the Internet fending off an attack. It's no different than when the government abandoned the Internet in the 1980s. Instead of talking about defence contracts, the scientists online began talking about science fiction stories. The Internet never does what it's 'supposed' to do, It has a mind, and life, of its own. That's because we're alive, too.

Now that the Internet's role in business has faded into the background, the many great applications that real people and organizations have developed to make all of our lives better are taking centre stage. They are compelling, and surpass even some of our wildest dreams for what the Internet might someday achieve. The ideas, information, and applications now launching on web sites around the world capitalize on the transparency, usability, and accessibility that the Internet was born to deliver.

It's not that the original Internet community went into some sort of remission. No, not all. Although the mainstream news media was busy covering the latest corporate mega-mergers, the Internet's actual participants were continuing to develop and extend their favourite forums for interaction.

In this book, I compare the early Internet to the Wild West - an anarchic realm where a lone hacker could topple any empire. That spirit is not gone. Any group or individual, however disenfranchised, can serve as the trigger point for an extraordinarily widespread phenomenon.

Media viruses like 'all your base' and irreverent Flash or QuickTime video parodies of commercials like Budweiser's 'wassup' campaign are launched from the bedrooms of teenagers, and distributed by email to millions of office cubicles, eventually finding their way to the evening news.

Thousands upon thousands of hackers around the world still represent a great threat to major software companies, the DVD industry, and any corporation whose interests rely on closed source computer code or encrypted files. No sooner is a new closed standard released than it is decoded by lone hacker or, better, a team of hackers working in tandem from remote and untraceable locations. The 'crack' is then published on countless mirror sites, making its dissemination inevitable and unsquashable.

Activists of all stripes have seized upon the Internet for its ability to cultivate relationships across vast distances and promote new kinds of alliances between formerly unaffiliated groups. No, in spite of the many efforts to direct its chaotic, organismic energy towards the monolithic agenda of Wall Street, the Internet can't help but empower the real people whose spirit it embodies.

Moreover a networked culture has the means to resist the kinds of fundamentalism threatening to stunt human evolution in its tracks. The Internet teaches us to see the value of diversity and plurality. All the opinions of all the people matter. Fundamentalism teaches that there is only one path, one story, and one author.

For Cyberia is a collective enterprise. A team sport. Instead of living by decree, we delight in writing the human story, together. It is social, collaborative, occasionally scary and usually fun. I like to think the moment of history - inadequately, inaccurately, but enthusiastically described on these pages - marked a genuine step forward in our ability to engage meaningfully and playfully with one another, for real.

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

"Are we in the bowl yet?" the boy asks, feeling the first effects of the drug.

"I think so," answers his friend, also a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley, who punches a few keys on his computer, releasing a brilliant paisley landscape onto the monitor. "We're over the event horizon. Now it's just a matter of time."

The questioner panics. "So we're in it, then? We're in the attractor?"

"Are you talking about the acid, the computer, or the universe?"

A pause. The swirling computer-generated pictures are reflected in the boys' eyes. "All of 'em, I guess."

"I grok." agrees the operator.

Two college students at three in the morning, tripping on the drug Ecstasy as they create fractal images on a computer in their dorm room. Their topic of conversation? The end of our dimension, of course.

Having turned the concepts of a new math called chaos theory into a working model for reality, the boys experience their existence as a field of interdependent equations. Humanity floats through this field, and can get pulled into one equation or another, just as a planet or solar system can get sucked into a black hole. These equations - called chaos attractors - are like bowls. Once we pass over the lip of the bowl - the event horizon - there's no way to go but inside. We're sucked off the plane of reality as we know it. and down into another one. Everything changes.

The boys don't just think this, they feel it - and in many ways at once: their consciousness is being drawn into an intense psychedelic trip, their computer picture is about to shift into a new multidimensional representation of an equation, and their world is changing around them faster than they can articulate or even imagine. And these are the people who grok this turf. Welcome to Cyberia.

Time seems to be speeding up. New ideas and technologies have accelerated our culture into an almost unrecognizable reality, and those on the frontier tell us that this is only the beginning. The many different ways in which our culture is changing can be understood as part of a single renaissance. Inspired by the computer, chaos math, chemicals, and creativity, this renaissance has been interpreted by many as an evolutionary leap for humanity into another dimension. Whether or not this is true, those who can comprehend, or 'grok;, the nature of this shift will be better prepared to survive the twenty-first century.

The easiest access to this hyperdimensional realm is through technology. Now that PCs are linked through networks that cover the globe and beyond, many people spend real time out there in 'cyberspace' - the territory of digital information. This apparently boundless universe of data breaks all the rules of physical reality. People can interact regardless of time and location. They 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. All this and more can happen in cyberspace.

Cyberspace has also gained a metaphorical value for many other kinds of experiences. Drugs, dance, spiritual techniques, chaos math, and pagan rituals all bring people into similar regions of consciousness, where the limitations of time, distance, and the body are meaningless. People move through these regions as they might move through computer programs or video games - unlimited by the rules of a linear, physical reality.

For example, many 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...

But an acid trip, a new cyberpunk novel, a quick-cut MTV video, or a night at a 'house music' dub can provide the same hypertext-style experience. The rules of linear reality no longer apply. Even the hardened law-followers of physics and math have found that numbers and particles 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. Our reality, scientists are concluding, can no longer be explained by the simple, physical, time-based rules of law and order. Everything is connected, somehow, but not in the way we thought. There is another, greater, less obvious, invisible territory, of which the physical reality we've grown to 'know' and love is only one aspect.

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 travelling 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.

We may in fact be at the brink of a renaissance of unprecedented magnitude, heralded by the 1960s, potentiated by the computer and other new technologies, mapped by chaos math and quantum physics, fuelled by psychedelic drugs and brain foods, and manifesting right now in popular culture as new music, fiction, art, entertainment, games, philosophy, religion, sex, and lifestyle. These changes are being implemented and enjoyed by a group of young people we'll call the cyberians, who are characterized primarily by a faith in their ability to consciously rechoose their own reality - to design their experience of life.

Theoretical mathematicians and physicists were the first to predict this designer reality. Their 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 scientists 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 spiralling 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 the timeless dimension of Cyberia.

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 children of all ages to explore a new, digital landscape. Using only a personal computer and a modem, anyone can now access the datasphere (a web of telecommunications and computer networks stretching around the world and into outer space). New computer interface technologies such as virtual reality promise to make Cyberia a place where we can take not only our minds but our bodies along for the ride.

Cyberians 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 wilful progression toward the construction of Cyberia, the next dimensional home for consciousness.

These spiritual implications of these technological and conceptual advances are not to be reckoned with in church, but rather on the dance floor, which, like the Mayan temple, serves as a shamanic common ground where participants from all corners of Cyberia may come together to celebrate the heightening of the human experience and resonate, in bliss, with the accelerating of time.

The cyberian experience finds its expression in 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 favour 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, the hypnotic spell of years of television and its intense public relations is broken. 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 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.

Our technologies do give us the benefit of instant access to the experiences of all who went before us and the ability to predict much of what lies ahead. We may indeed be approaching one of those rare moments on the spiral staircase of human history when we can see all the way up and all the way down at the same time. If this is the case, and the cyberians are correct, then perhaps the only thing we must do now - before we slip even further into the chaos attractor at the end of time - is learn to cope with the change.

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 dating enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully. Cyberians are not just actively exploring the next dimension; they are working to create it.

As the would-be colonizers of Cyberia, they have developed new ways of speaking, creating, working, living, and loving. They rebel against obsolete systems of language, thought, and government and may be at the forefront of a significant new social movement. Their impact is not limited to Silicon Valley, college campuses, or the pages of science fiction. They are changing our world, and they are doing so with a particular vision.

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 behoves 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 prokaryotes 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 travelled 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 tree house 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.