 Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace HarperSanFrancisco, 1994 The complete text of Cyberia is now available online!
Download the MS Word Version of Cyberia as a zip file. Although the book is currently out of print in English, it is available through Powell's Books. They have many used copies available. Use the search term "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." 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." |