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Cyberia is a book by Douglas Rushkoff, published in 1994. The book discusses many different ideas revolving around technology, drugs and subcultures. Rushkoff takes a Tom Wolfe Electric Kool Aid Acid Test style (or roman à clef), as he actively becomes a part of the people and culture that he is writing about. The books goes with Rushkoff as he discusses topics ranging from online culture, the concept of a global brain as put forth in Gaia theory, and Neoshamanism.




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rx
 rx      29.09.2008 - 15:35:52 , level: 1, UP   NEW
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/cyberia/

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rx
 rx      28.09.2008 - 18:54:56 , level: 2, UP   SIRôTKA
CHAPTER 4
Interfacing with the Technosphere

The evolution of computer and networking technology can be seen as a progression
toward more user-friendly interfaces that encourage hypertext-style participation of both the
computer illiterate and those who wish to interact more intimately in Cyberia than can be
experienced by typing on a keyboard. DOS-style printed commands were replaced by the
Macintosh interface in the late 1970s. Instead of typing instructions to the computer, users
were encouraged to click and drag icons representing files across their screens and put them
wherever they wanted, using the now-famous mouse. But this has all changed again with the
development of virtual reality, the computer interface that promises to bring us into the
matrix--mind, body, and soul.
VR, as it's called, replaces the computer screen with a set of 3-D, motion-sensitive
goggles, the speaker with a set of 3-D headphones, and the mouse with a glove or tracking
ball. The user gains the ability to move through a real or fictional space without using
commands, text, or symbols. You put on the goggles, and you see a building, for example.
You walk'' with your hand toward the doorway, open the door, and you're inside. As you do
all this, you see the door approaching in complete perspective. Once you open the door, you
see the inside of the building. As you turn your head to the left, you see what's to the left. As
you look up, you see the ceiling. As you look to the right, let's say, you see a painting on the
wall. It's a picture of a forest. You walk to the painting, but you don't stop. You go into the
painting. Then you're in the forest. You look up, see the sun through the trees, and hear the
wind rustle through the leaves. Behind you, you hear a bird chirping.
Marc de Groot (the Global Village ham radio interface) was responsible for that
behind you'' part. His work involved the creation of 3-D sound that imitates the way the
body detects whether a sound is coming from above, below, in front, or behind. To him, VR
is a milestone in human development.
Virtual reality is a way of mass-producing direct experience. You put on the goggles
and you have this world around you. In the beginning, there were animals, who had nothing
but their experience. Then man came along, who processes reality in metaphors. We have
symbology. One thing stands for another. Verbal noises stand for experience, and we can
share experience by passing this symbology back and forth. Then the Gutenberg Press
happened, which was the opportunity to mass-produce symbology for the first time, and that
marked a real change. And virtual reality is a real milestone too, because we're now able for
the first time to mass-produce the direct experience. We've come full circle.''
Comparisons with the Renaissance abound in discussions of VR. Just as the 3-D
holograph serves as our cultural and scientific equivalent of the Renaissance's perspective
painting, virtual reality stands as a 1990s computer equivalent of the original literacy
movement. Like the printing press did nearly five hundred years ago, VR promises pop
cultural access to information and experience previously reserved for experts.
De Groot's boss at VPL, Jaron Lanier, paints an even rosier picture of VR and its
impact on humanity at large. In his speaking tours around the world, the dredlocked inventor
explains how the VR interface is so transparent that it will make the computer disappear. Try
to remember the world before computers. Try to remember the world of dreaming, when you
dreamed and it was so. Remember the fluidity that we experienced before computers. Then
you'll be able to grasp VR.'' But the promise of virtual reality and its current level of
development are two very different things. Most reports either glow about future possibilities
or rag on the crudeness of today's gear. Lanier has sworn off speaking to the media for
precisely that reason.
There's two levels of virtual reality. One is the ideas, and the other is the actual gear.
The gear is early, all right? But these people from Time magazine came in last week and said,
`Well, this stuff's really overblown,' and my answer's like, `Who's overblowing it?'--you
know? It reminds me of an interview with Paul McCartney in the sixties where some guy
from the BBC asked him if he did any illegal activities, and he answered, `Well, actually,
yes.' And the reporter asked `Don't you think that's horrible to be spreading such things to the
youth of the country?' and he said, `I'm not doing that. You're doing that.' ''
But the press and the public can't resist. The promise of VR is beyond imagination.
Sure, it makes it possible to simulate the targeting and blow-up of an Iraqi power plant, but
as a gateway to Cyberia itself, well ... the possibilities are endless. Imagine, for example, a
classroom of students with a teacher, occurring in real time. The students are from twelve
different countries, each plugged in to a VR system, all modemed to the teacher's house. They
sit around a virtual classroom, see one another and the teacher. The teacher explains that
today's topic is the Colosseum in ancient Rome. She holds up a map of ancient Rome and
says, Let's go.'' The students fly over the skyline of the ancient city, following their teacher.
"Stay together now,'' she says, pointing out the Colosseum and explaining why it was
positioned across town from the Forum. The class lands at the main archway to the
Colosseum. Let's go inside ...'' You get the idea.
More amazing to VR enthusiasts is the technology's ability to provide access to places
the human body can't go, granting new perspectives on old problems much in the way that
systems math provides planners with new outlooks on currents that don't follow the
discovered patterns.
Warren Robinett, manager of the Head-Mounted Display Project at the University of
North Carolina, explains how the strength of VR is that it allows the user to experience the
inside of a cell, an anthill, or the shape of a galaxy:
Virtual reality will prove to be a more compelling fantasy world than Nintendo, but
even so, the real power of the head-mounted display is that it can help you perceive the real
world in ways that were previously impossible. To see the invisible, to travel at the speed of
light, to shrink yourself into microscopic worlds, to relive experiences--these are the powers
that the head-mounted display offers you. Though it sounds like science fiction today,
tomorrow it will seem as commonplace as talking on the telephone.''
One of these still fictional interface ideas is called wireheading.'' This is a new branch
of computer technology where designers envision creating hardware that wires the computer
directly to the brain. The user literally plugs wires into his own head, or has a microchip and
transmitter surgically implanted inside the skull. Most realistic visions of wireheading involve
as-yet univented biological engineering techniques where brain cells would be coaxed to link
themselves to computer chips, or where organic matter would be grafted onto computer chips
which could then be attached to a person's nerve endings. This "wetware,'' as science fiction
writers call it, would provide a direct, physical interface between a human nervous system on
one side, and computer hardware on the other. The computer technology for such an interface
is here; the understanding of the human nervous system is not.
Although Jaron Lanier's company is working on nerve chip'' that would communicate
directly with the brain, he's still convinced that the five senses provide the best avenues for
interface.
There's no difference between the brain and the sense organs. The body is a
continuity. Perception begins in the retina. Mind and body are one. You have this situation
where millions of years of evolution have created this creature. What is this creature aside
from the way it interfaces with the rest of creation? And how do you interface? Through the
sense organs! So the sense organs are almost a better defining point than any other spot in the
creature. They're central to identity and define our mode of being. We're visual, tactile, audio
creatures. The whole notion of bypassing the senses is sort of like throwing away the actual
treasure.''
Still, the philosophical implications of a world beyond the five senses are irresistible,
and have drawn into the ring many worthy contenders to compete for the title of VR
spokesperson. The most vibrant is probably Timothy Leary, whose ride on the crest of the VR
wave has brought him back on the scene with the zeal of John the Baptist preparing the way
for Christ, or a Harvard psychology professor preparing the intelligentsia for LSD.
Just as the fish donned skin to walk the earth, and man donned a space suit to walk
in space, we'll now don cyber suits to walk in Cyberia. In ten years most of our daily
operations, occupational, educational, and recreational, will transpire in Cyberia. Each of us
will be linked in thrilling cyber exchanges with many others whom we may never meet in
person. Fact-to-face interactions will be reserved for special, intimate, precious,
sacramentalized events.''
Leary sees VR as an empowerment of the individual against the brainwashing forces
of industrial slavedriving and imperialist expansion:
By the year 2000, the I.C. (inner city) kid will slip on the EyePhone, don a
form-fitting computer suit, and start inhabiting electronic environments either self-designed or
pulled up from menus. At 9:00 a.m. she and her friend in Tokyo will meet in an electronic
simulation of Malibu Beach for a flirtatious moment. At 9:30 a.m. she will meet her biology
teacher in an electronic simulation of the heart for a hands-on `you are there' tutorial trip
down the circulatory system. At 10:00 a.m. she'll be walking around medieval Verona with
members of her English literature seminar to act out a scene from Romeo and Juliet. At 11:00
A.M. she'll walk onto an electronic tennis court for a couple of sets with her pal in Managua.
At noon, she'll take off her cyberwear and enjoy a sensual, tasty lunch with her family in
their nonelectronic kitchen.''
What was that part about Malibu Beach--the flirtatious moment? Sex, in VR? Lanier
readily admits that VR can provide a reality built for two: It's usually kind of shocking how
harmonious it is, this exposure of a collective energy between people. And so a similar thing
would happen in a virtual world, where there's a bunch of people in it, and they're all making
changes at once. These collective changes will emerge, which might be sort of like the
Jungian level of virtual reality.'' Users will literally "see'' what the other means. Lanier's trick
answer to the question of sex is, I think everything in virtual reality is sexual. It's eroticizing
every moment, because it's all, like, creative.'' But that answer doesn't satisfy true cyber
fetishists. If a cyber suit with full tactile stimulation is possible, then so should be cyber sex!
A conversation about teledildonics, as it's been called, gets VR enthusiasts quite heated up.

Loading Worlds
We're at Bryan Hughes's house, headquarters of the Renaissance Foundation, a group
dedicated to fostering the growth of the VR interface for artists and educators. Bryan has just
unpacked some crates from Chris Krauskopf at Intel, which include a computer, a VR system
designed by Eric Gullichsen called Sense8, and the prototype of a new kind of helmet-goggles
combination. As Bryan searches through the crates for an important piece of connective
hardware, the rest of us, who have been invited to try out the potentially consumer-grade VR,
muse on the possibilities of virtual sex.
Dan, an architecture student at Berkeley with a penchant for smart drugs,'' begins.
"They're working on something called `smart skin,' which is kind of a rubber for your whole
body that you slip into, and with gel and electrodes it can register all your body movements
and at the same time feed back to you any skin sensations it wants you to feel. If you pick up
a virtual cup, it will send back to you the feeling of the texture of the cup, the weight,
everything.''
So this skin could also imitate the feeling of ... ?'' I venture.
A girl,'' answers Harding, a graphic designer who makes hand-outs, T-shirts, and
flyers for many of the acid house clubs in the Bay Area. "It would go like this: you either
screw your computer, or screw someone else by modem. If you do your computer, you just
call some girl out of its memory. Your cyber suit'll take you there. If you do it the phone-sex
way, the girl--or guy or anything out there, actually--there could be a guy who's virtual
identity is a girl or a spider even--''
You could look like--be anyone you wanted--'' Dan chimes in. "And then--''
Harding nods. Every command you give the computer as a movement of your body is
translated onto her suit as a touch or whatever, then back to your suit for the way her body
feels, the way she reacts, and so on.''
But she can make her skin feel like whatever she wants to. She can program in fur,
and that's what she'll feel like to you.''
My head is spinning. The possibilities are endless in a sexual designer reality.... But
then I begin to worry about those possibilities. And--could there be such a thing as virtual
rape? Virtual muggings or murder through tapped phone lines?... These scenarios recede into
the distant future as Bryan comes back into the room. The chrome connector he has been
searching for is missing, so we'll have to make do with masking tape.
We each take turns trying on the new VR helmet. Using the latest sonar technology, it
senses the head position of the operator through a triangular bar fitted with tiny microphones.
The triangle must be mounted on a pole several feet above the helmet-wearing user--a great
idea except the little piece that connects the triangle thing to the pole is missing. But Bryan's
masking tape holds the many-thousand dollar strip of hardware safely, and I venture into the
electronic realm.
The demo tour is an office. No virtual sex. No virtual landscape. But it looks 3-D
enough. Bryan hands me the joystick that is used in this system instead of VPL's more
expensive glove controller. Bryan's manner is caring, almost motherly. He's introduced
thousands to VR at conventions with Tim Leary across the country and even in Japan, yet it's
as if he's still sensitive to the fact that this is my first time.'' It seems more like a video game
than anything else, and I flash on Craig Neidorf wandering through mazes, looking for
magical objects. Then Bryan realizes that I haven't moved, and gently coaxes me to push
forward on the joystick. My body jolts as I fly toward the desk in front of me. Bryan watches
my progress through a TV monitor next to the computer, which displays a two-dimensional
version of what I'm seeing.
That's right,'' he encourages, "it only needs a little push.'' I ease back on the virtual
throttle and guide myself around the room. You can move your head,'' he suggests with calm
reassurance. As I turn my head, the world whizzes by in a blur, but quickly settles down.
"The frame rate is still slow on this machine.'' That's what accounts for the strobelike effect
as I swivel my head too quickly. The computer needs to create a new picture every time I
move, and the illusion of continuity--essentially the art of animation--is dependent on flashing
by as many pictures per second as possible. I manage to work my way around the desk and
study a painting on the wall. Remembering what I've been told about VR, I walk into the
painting. Nothing happens. Everything turns blue.
He walked into the painting,'' remarks one of the peanut gallery watching my
progress. "Push reset.''
That's not one of the ones you can walk into,'' Bryan tells me as he punches some
commands into the computer. "Let's try a different world.''
'LOADING WORLD 1203.WLD'
blinks on the screen as the hard drive grinds a new set of pictures into the RAM of
the machine.
Now I'm in an art gallery, and the paintings do work. I rush toward a picture of stars
and galaxies, but I overshoot it. I go straight up into the air (there is no ceiling here), and I'm
flying above the museum now, looking at the floor below me. With Bryan's guidance, I'm
back on the ground. Why don't you go into the torus,'' he suggests. "It's neat in there.'' A
torus is a three-dimensional shape from systems math, the model for many different chaos
attractors. Into the doughnut-shaped VR object I go.
Even the jaded VR veterans gather around to see what the torus looks like from inside,
I steer through the cosmic shape, which is textured in what looks like a galactic geometry of
clouds and light. As I float, I feel my body making the movements, too. The illusion is
working, and an almost out-of-body sensation takes over. I dive then spiral up. The stars
swirl. I've got it now and this world is mine. I glide forward and up, starting a loop de loop
when--
Blue.
Shit.'' Bryan punches in some commands but it's no use. There's a glitch in the
program somewhere.
But while it lasted, the VR experience was like getting a glimpse of another
world--one which might not be too unlike our own. The illusion of VR worked better the
more I could control my movement. As scientists have observed, the more dexterity a person
experiences in a virtual world, the sharper he will experience the focus of the pictures. The
same computer image looks clearer when you can move your head to see different parts.
There is no real reason for this phenomenon. Lanier offers one explanation:
In order to see, you have to move your head. Your head is not a passive camera
mount, like a tripod or something holding your eyes up. Your head is like a spy submarine:
it's always bobbing and looking around, performing a million little experiments a second,
lining things up in the environment. Creating your world. That level of interactivity is
essential to the most basic seeing. As you turn on the head-tracking feature in the
Head-Mounted Display [the feature that allows you to effect where you're looking] there's a
subjective increase in the resolution of the display. A very clear demonstration of the power
of interactivity in the lowest level of perception.''
And a very clear demonstration of the relationship of human perception to the outside
world, casting further doubt on the existence of any objective physical reality. In Cyberia at
least, reality is directly dependent on our ability to actively participate in its creation.
Designer reality must be interactive rather than passive. The user must be part of the iterative
equation. Just as Craig Neidorf was most fascinated by the parts of his Adventure video game
that were not in the instructions, cyberians need to see themselves as the source of their own
experience.

Get Virtual with Tim!
Friday. Tim Leary's coming to town to do a VR lecture, and the Renaissance
Foundation is throwing him a party in cooperation with Mondo 2000 magazine--the voice of
cyber culture. It's downstairs at Big Heart City, a club south of Market Street in the new
warehouse/artist district of San Francisco, masterminded by Mark Renney, cyber culture's
interface to the city's politicians and investors. Entrance with or without an invite is five
dollars--no exceptions, no guest list. Cheap enough to justify making everyone pay, which
actually brings in a greater profit than charging fifteen dollars to outsiders, who at event like
this are outnumbered by insiders. Once past the gatekeepers, early guests mill about the large
basement bar, exchanging business cards and E-mail addresses, or watching Earth Girl, a
colorfully dressed cyber hippy, set up her Smart Drugs Bar, which features an assortment of
drinks made from neuroenhancers dissolved into fruit juice.
Tim arrives with R. U. Sirius, the famously trollish editor of Mondo 2000, and is
immediately swamped by inventors, enthusiastic heads, and a cluster of well-proportioned
college girls. Everyone either wants something from Tim or has something for Tim. Leary's
eyes dart about, looking for someone or something to act as a buffer zone. R. U., having
vanished into the crowd, is already doing some sort of media interview. Tim recognizes me
from a few parties in LA, smiles, and shakes my hand. You're, umm--''
Doug Rushkoff.'' Leary pulls me to his side, manages to process the entire crowd of
givers and takers--with my and a few others' help--in about ten minutes. A guy from NASA
has developed 3-D slides of fractal pictures. Leary peaks through the prototype viewfinder,
says "Wow!'' then hands it to me. This is Doug Rushkoff, he's writing a book. What do you
think, Doug?'' Then he's on to the next one. An interview for Japanese TV? "Sure. Call me at
the hotel. Bryan's got the number.'' Never been down to Intel--it's the greatest company in
the world. E-mail me some details!'' Tim is "on,'' but on edge, too. He's mastered the art of
interfacing without engaging, then moving on without insulting, but it seems that this
frequency of interactions per minute is taking a heavy toll on him. He spews superlatives
( That's the best 3-D I've ever seen!''), knowing that overkill will keep the suitors satisfied
longer. He reminds me of the bartender at an understaffed wedding reception, who gives the
guests extrastrong drinks so they won't come back for more so soon.
As a new onslaught of admirers appears, between the heads of the ones just processed,
Bryan Hughes's gentle arm finds Tim's shoulder. The system's ready. Why don't you come
try it?''
In the next room, Bryan has set up his VR gear. Tim is escorted past a long line of
people patiently waiting for their first exposure to cyberspace, and he's fitted into the gear.
Next to him and the computer stands a giant video projection of the image Tim is seeing
through his goggles. I can't tell if he's blown away or just selling the product--or simply
enjoying the fact that as long as he's plugged in he doesn't have to field any more of the
givers and takers. As he navigates through the VR demo, the crowd oohs and ahhs his every
decision. Let's get virtual with Tim! Tim nears the torus. People cheer. Tim goes into the
torus. People scream. Tim screams. Tim dances and writhes like he's having an orgasm.
This is sick,'' says Troy, one of my connections to the hacker underworld in the Bay
Area, whom I had interviewed that afternoon. "We're going now. ...'' Troy had offered to let
me come along with him and his friends on a real-life crack'' if I changed the names, burned
the phone numbers, etc., to protect their anonymity.

Needles and PINs
Troy had me checked out that afternoon through the various networks, and I guess I
came up clean enough, or dirty enough to pass the test. Troy and I hop into his van, where
his friends await us. Simon and Jack, a cracker and a videographer respectively, are students
at a liberal arts college in the city. (Troy had dropped out of college the second week and
spent his education loan on army surplus computer equipment.)
Troy puts the key in the ignition but doesn't crank the engine. They want you to
smoke a joint first.''
I really don't smoke pot anymore,'' I confess.
It proves you're not a cop,'' says Jack, whose scraggly beard and muscular build
suddenly trigger visions of myself being hacked or even cracked to death. I take the roach
from Simon, the youngest of the trio, who is clad in an avocado green polyester jumpsuit.
With the first buzz of California sensemilla, I try to decide if his garb is an affectation for the
occasion or legitimate new edge nerdiness. Then the van takes off out of the alley behind the
club, and I switch on my pocket cassette recorder as the sounds of Tim Leary and Big Heart
City fade in the night.
I'm stoned by the time we get to the bank. It's on a very nice street in Marin County.
Bank machines in better neighborhoods don't have cameras in them,'' Jack tells me as we
pull up.
Simon has gone over the scheme twice, but he won't let me tape his voice; and I'm too
buzzed to remember what he's saying. (Plus, he's speaking about twice the rate of normal
human beings--due in part to the speed he injected into his thigh.) What he's got in his hands
now is a black plastic box about the size of two decks of cards with a slit going through it.
Inside this box is the magnetic head from a tape deck, recalibrated somehow to read the
digital information on the back of bank cards. Simon affixes some double-stick black tape to
one side of the box, then slides open the panel door of the van and goes to the ATM
machine. Troy explains to me how the thing works:
Simon's putting our card reader just over the slot where you normally put your card
in. It's got a RAM chip that'll record the ID numbers of the cards as they're inserted. It's thin
enough that the person's card will still hit the regular slot and get sucked into the machine.''
Won't people notice the thing?'' I ask.
People don't notice shit, anymore,'' says Jack, who is busy with his video equipment.
"They're all hypnotized.''
How do you get their PIN number?'' I inquire.
Watch.'' Jack chuckles as he mounts a 300mm lens to his Ikegami camera. He patches
some wires as Simon hops back into the van. "I'll need your seat.''
I switch places with Jack, who mounts his camera on a tiny tripod, then places it on
the passenger seat of the van. Troy joins me in the back, and Jack takes the driver seat.
Switch on the set,'' orders Jack, as he plugs something into the cigarette lighter. A
Sony monitor bleeps on, and Jack focuses in on the keypad of the ATM machine. Suddenly,
it all makes sense.
It's a full forty minutes until the arrival of the first victim at the machine--a young
woman in an Alpha Romeo. When she gets to the machine, all we can see in the monitor is
her hair.
Shit!'' blurts Simon. "Move the van! Quick!''
We'll get the next one,'' Troy reassures calmly.
After a twenty-minute readjustment of our camera angle, during which at least a dozen
potential PIN donors'' use the ATM, we're at last in a position to see the keypad, around the
operators' hair, shoulders, and elbows. Of course, this means no one will show up for at least
half an hour. The pot has worn off and we're all hungry.
A police car cruises by. Instinctively, we all duck. The camera sits conspicuously on
the passenger seat. The cop doesn't even slow down.
A stream of ATM patrons finally passes through, and Troy dutifully records the PIN
numbers of each. I don't think any of us likes having to actually see the victims. If they were
merely magnetic files in a hacked system, it would be less uncomfortable. I mention this to
Troy, and Simon tells me to shut up. We remain in silence until the flow of bankers thenin to
trickle, and finally dies away completely. It is about 1:00 a.m. As Simon retrieves his
hardware from the ATM, Troy finally acknowledges my question.
This way we know who to take from and who not to. Like that Mexican couple. We
won't do their account. They wouldn't even understand the withdrawal on their statement and
they'd probably be scared to say anything about it to the bank. And a couple of hundred
bucks makes a real difference to them. The guys in the Porsche? Fuck `em.''
We're back at Simon's by about two o'clock. He downloads his card reader's RAM
chip into the PC. Numbers flash on the screen as Simon and Jack cross-reference PIN
numbers with each card. Once they have a complete list, Simon pulls out a white plastic
machine called a securotech'' or "magnelock'' or something like that. A Lake Tahoe hotel that
went out of business last year sold it to a surplus electronic supply house, along with several
hundred plastic cards with magnetic strips that were used as keys to the hotel's rooms. By
punching numbers on the keypad of the machine, Simon can write'' the appropriate numbers
to the cards.
Troy shows me a printout of information they got off a bulletin board last month; it
details which number means what: a certain three numbers refer to the depositor's home bank,
branch, account number, etc. Within two hours, we're sitting around a stack of counterfeit
bank cards and a list of PIN numbers. Something compels me to break Troy's self-satisfied
grin.
Which one belongs to the Mexican couple?''
The fourth one,'' he says with a smirk. "We won't use it.''
I thought it was the fifth one,'' I say in the most ingenuous tone I've got. "Couldn't it
be the fifth one?''
Fine,'' Suddenly Troy grabs the fourth and fifth cards from the stack and throws them
across the room. "Happy?''
I hold my replies to myself. These guys could be dangerous.
But no more dangerous or daring than exploits of Cyberia's many other denizens, with
whom we all, by choice or necessity, are becoming much more intimate. We have just peered
through the first window into Cyberia--the computer monitors, digital goggles, and automatic
teller screens that provide instant access to the technosphere. But, as we'll soon see, Cyberia
is made up of much more than information networks. It can also be accessed personally,
socially, artistically, and, perhaps easiest of all, chemically.

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rx
 rx      28.09.2008 - 18:53:22 , level: 2, UP   SIRôTKA
CHAPTER 3
The Global Electronic Village

Persecution of psychedelics users has fostered the development of a cyberian computer
subculture. De Groot is a model citizen of the cyber community and dedicates his time,
money, and equipment to fostering the Global Electronic Village.'' One system he developed,
which takes up almost half his apartment, is an interface between a ham radio and a
computer.
He eats an ice cream from the shop downstairs as he explains how his intention in
building the interface was to provide ham radio operators with access to the electronic mail
services of UNIX systems to other sites on the Internet. My terminal is up twenty-four hours
a day. It was never done before, it was fun to do, it gave me the ability to learn about
electronic mail, and it provided a service.'' No profit? "You could make money off of it, I
suppose, but my specific concern was to advance the state of the radio art.''
It's hard to keep in mind that young men like de Groot are not just exploring the
datasphere but actively creating the networks that make it up. This is not just a hobby or
weekend pastime; this is the construction of the future.
De Groot views technology as a way to spread the notion of interconnectedness. We
don't have the same distance between us anymore. Camcorders have changed everything.
Whenever something happens in the world, chances are that someone's around with a
camcorder to tape it. We're all neighbors in a little village, as it were.'' Even de Groot's more
professional endeavors have been geared toward making computers more accessible to the
community at large. The success of the cyberian paradigm is dependent on regular people
learning to work with the technologies developed by vanguard, countercultural entrepreneurs
and designers.
If you don't adhere to the new paradigm then you're not going to survive.'' De Groot
puts down his ice cream spoon to make the point. "It's sink or swim. People who refuse to
get involved with computers now are hurting themselves, not anybody else. In a very loose
sense, they are at a disadvantage survival-wise. Their ability to have a good-quality life will
be lessened by their reluctance to get with the program.''
Getting with the program is just a modem away. This simple device literally plugs a
user in to cyberspace. Cyberspace, or the datasphere, consists of all the computers that are
attached to phone lines or to one another directly. If a computer by itself can be likened to a
cassette deck, having a modem turns it into a two-way radio. After the first computer nets
between university and military research facilities went up, scientists and other official
subscribers began to post'' their most recent findings to databases accessible to everyone on
the system. Now, if someone at, say, Stanford discovers a new way to make a fission reactor,
scientists and developers around the world instantly know of the find. They also have a way
of posting their responses to the development for everyone to see, or the option of sending a
message through electronic mail, or "E-mail,'' which can be read only by the intended
recipient. So, for example, a doctor at Princeton sees the posting from Stanford. A list of
responses and commentary appears after the Stanford announcement, to which the Princeton
doctor adds his questions about the validity of the experiment. Meanwhile, he E-mails his
friends at a big corporation that Stanford's experiment was carried out by a lunatic and that
the corporation should cease funding that work.
The idea of networking through the computer quickly spread. Numerous public
bulletins boards sprang up, as well as information services like Compuserve and Prodigy.
Information services are large networks of databanks that a user can call through the modem
and access everything from stock market reports and Macintosh products updates to back
issues of newspapers and Books in Print. Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, an early but
unprecentedly user-friendly way of moving through files, has been working for the past
decade or so on the ultimate database, a project aptly named Xanadu.'' His hope is to
compile a database of--literally--everything, and all of the necessary software to protect
copyrights, make royalty payments, and myriad other legal functions. Whether or not a
storehouse like Xanadu is even possible, the fact that someone is trying, and being supported
by large, Silicon Valley businesses like Autodesk, a pioneer in user-interface and cyberspace
technology, legitimizes the outlook that one day all data will be accessible from any
node--any single computer--in the matrix. The implications for the legal community are an
endless mire of property, privacy, and information issues, usually boiling down to one of the
key conflicts between pre- and postcyberian mentality: Can data be owned, or is it free for
all? Our ability to process data develops faster than our ability to define its fair use.
The best place to watch people argue about these issues is on public bulletin boards
like the Whole Earth `Lectronic Link. In the late 1970s, public and private bulletin board
services sprang up as a way for computer users to share information and software over phone
lines. Some were like clubs for young hackers called kødz kidz, who used BBSs to share
anything from Unix source code to free software to recently cracked phone numbers of
corporate modems. Other BBSs catered to specialized users' groups, like Macintosh users,
IBM users, software designers, and even educators. Eventually, broad-based bulletin board
services, including the WELL, opened their phone lines for members to discuss issues, create
E-mail addresses, share information, make announcements, and network personally, creatively,
and professionally.
The WELL serves as a cyber-village hall. As John Barlow explains, In this silent
world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a
thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not
what either they or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and
discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules.''
The discussions on the WELL are organized into conferences. These conferences are
broken down into topics, which themselves are made up of individual responses. For example,
there's a conference called EFF, which is dedicated to discussing issues related to Electronic
Frontiers Foundation, a group that is attempting to develop legal frameworks for
cyberactivities. If you browse the topics on the EFF conference, you will see a list of the
conversations now going on. (Now is a tricky word. It's not that users are continuously
plugged in to the conference and having a real-time discussion. Conversations occur over a
period of days, weeks, or months.) They might be about Copyright and Electronic Mail,'' or
"Sentencing of Hackers,'' or even Virtual Sex!''
Once you pick a topic in which to participate, you read an opening statement that
describes the topic or issues being discussed. It may be as simple as, I just read The
Turbulent Mirror by Briggs and Peat. Is anyone interested in discussing the implications of
chaos math on Western philosophy?'' or, "I'm thinking of buying a hydroponic system for
growing sensemilla. Any advice?'' Other interested participants then enter their responses, one
after the other, which are numbered in the order entered. Conversations can drift into related
or unrelated areas or even lead to the creation of new topics. All participants are required to
list themselves by name and user identification (userid) so that someone may E-mail a
response directly to them rather than post it on the topic for everyone to see. The only rule on
the WELL is, you own your own words,'' which means that anything someone posts onto the
WELL remains his own property, so to speak, and that no one may exploit another user's
words without permission.
But the WELL is not a dry, computery place. Once on the WELL, there's a tangible
feeling of being plugged in'' to a cyber community. One develops a cyber personality
unencumbered by his looks and background and defined entirely by his entries to topics. The
references he makes to literature, the media, religion, his friends, his lifestyle, and his
priorities create who he is in cyberspace. One can remain on the sidelines watching others
make comments, or one can dive in and participate.

Cyberspace as Chaos
The danger of participation is that there are hundreds or even thousands of potentially
critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be challenged, a lie will be uncovered,
plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth serum. Violations of cyber morality or
village ethics are immediately brought to light and passed through the circuits of the entire
datasphere at lightning speed. A store with a bad returns policy that cheats a WELL user has
its indiscretions broadcast globally within minutes. Information about crooked politicians,
drug conspiracies, or other news stories that might be censored from sponsored media outlets
finds an audience in cyberspace.
The cyber community has been made possible by the advent of the personal computer
and the telecommunications network. Other major contributors include television and the
satellite system as well as the appearance of consumer-grade video equipment, which has
made it more than likely for police indiscretions to occur within shooting range of a
camcorder. The cyber revolution has made the world a smaller place. Just as a company
called TRW can expose anyone's economic history, links like the WELL, UseNet, or even
CNN can expose TRW, too. Access to cyberspace--formerly reserved for the military or
advanced scientific research--now alters the context in which many individuals relate to the
world.
Members of the Global Village see themselves as part of a fractal event. The virtual
community even incorporates and promotes many of the principles of chaos mathematics on
social and political levels. A tiny, remote voice criticizing the ethics of a police action or the
validity of an experimental result gets heard and iterated throughout the net.
Ultimately, the personal computer and its associated technologies may be our best
access points to Cyberia. They even serve as a metaphor for cyberians who have nothing to
do with computers but who look to the net as a model for human interaction. It allows for
communication without the limitations of time or space, personality or body, religion or
nationality. The vast computer-communications network is a fractal approach to human
consciousness. It provides the means for complex and immediate feedback and iteration, and
is even self-similar in its construction, with giant networks mirroring BBSs, mirroring users'
own systems, circuit boards, and components that themselves mirror each participant's own
neural biocircuitry. In further self-similarity, the monitors on some of these computers depict
complex fractal patterns mirroring the psychedelics-induced hallucinations of their designers,
and graphing--for the first time--representations of existence as a chaotic system of feedback
and iteration.
The datasphere is a hardwiring of the planet itself, providing ways of distributing and
iterating information throughout the net. To join in, one needs only to link up. Or is it really
that easy?

Arbitrating Anarchy
David Gans, host of The Grateful Dead Hour (the national radio program that our
Columbia University hacker taped a few nights ago) is having a strange week. The proposal
he's writing for his fourth Grateful Dead book is late, he still has to go into the studio to
record his radio show, his band rehearsal didn't get out until close to dawn, and something
odd is occurring on the WELL this morning. Gans generally spends at least several hours a
day sitting in his Oakland studio apartment, logged onto the WELL. A charter member of the
original WELL bulletin board, he's since become host of dozens of conferences and topics
ranging from the Grateful Dead to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. In any given week,
he's got to help guide hundreds or even thousands of computer interchanges. But this week
there are even more considerations. An annoying new presence has made itself known on the
WELL: a user calling himself Stink.''
Stink showed up late one night in the Grateful Dead conference, insisting to all the
Deadheads that Jerry Garcia stinks.'' In the name of decorum and tolerance, the Deadheads
decided among themselves to ignore the prankster. "Maybe he'll get bored and go away,''
Gans repeatedly suggested. WELLbeings enjoy thinking of the WELL as a loving, anarchic
open house, and resort to blocking someone out completely only if he's truly dangerous.
Stealing passwords or credit card numbers, for example, is a much more excommunicable
deed than merely annoying people with nasty comments.
But today David Gans's electronic mailbox is filled with messages from angry female
WELLbeings. Stink has begun doing sends''--immediate E-mail messages that appear on the
recipient's screen with a "beep,'' interrupting whatever she is doing. People usually use sends
when they notice that a good friend has logged on and want to experience a brief, live''
interchange. No one "sends'' a stranger. But, according to Gans's E-mail, females logged on to
the WELL are receiving messages like Wanna dance?'' or "Your place or mine?'' on their
screens, and have gotten a bit irked. Anonymous phone calls can leave a girl feeling chilly, at
the very least. This is somehow an even greater violation of privacy. From reading the girl's
postings, he knows her name, the topics she enjoys, how she feels about issues; if he's a
hacker, who knows how much more he knows?
David realizes that giving Stink the silent treatment isn't working. But what to do? He
takes it to the WELL staff, who, after discussing the problem with several other distressed
topic hosts, decide to put Stink into a problem shell.'' Whenever he tries to log on to the
WELL, he'll receive a message to call the main office and talk to a staff member. Until he
does so, he is locked out of the system.
Stink tries to log on and receives the message, but he doesn't call in. Days pass. The
issue seems dead. But topics about Stink and the implications of his mischievous presence
begin to spring up all over the WELL. Many applaud the banishment of Stink, while others
warn that this is the beginning of censorship. How,'' someone asks, "can we call ourselves an
open, virtual community if we lock out those who don't communicate the way we like? Think
of how many of us could have been kicked off the WELL by the same logic?'' What are we,
Carebears?'' another retorts. "This guy was sick!''
David lets the arguments continue, defending the WELL staff's decision-making
process where he can, stressing how many painful hours were spent deliberating on this issue.
Meanwhile, though, he begins to do some research of his own and notices that Stink's last
name--not a common one--is the same as another user of the WELL called Bennett. David
takes a gamble and E-mails Bennett, who tells him that he's seen Stink's postings but that
there's no relation.
But the next day, there's a new, startling addition to a special confession'' conference:
Bennett admits that he is Stink. Stink's WELL account had been opened by Bennett's brother
but never used. Bennett reopened the account and began using it as a joke, to vent his "alter
ego.'' Free of his regular identity, he could be whoever he wanted and act however he dared
with no personal repercussions. What had begun as a kind of thought experiment or acting
exercise had soon gotten out of hand. The alter ego went out of control. Bennett, it turns out,
was a mild-mannered member of conferences like Christianity, and in his regular persona had
even consoled a fellow WELLbeing after her husband died. Bennett is not a hacker-kid; he
has a wife and children, a job, a religion, a social conscience, and a fairly quiet disposition.
He begs for the forgiveness of other WELLbeings and says he confessed because he felt so
guilty lying to David Gans about what had happened. He wants to remain a member of the
cyber community and eventually regain the trust of WELLbeings.
Some WELLbeings believe Bennett and forgive him. Others do not. He just confessed
because he knows you were on to him, David. Good work.'' Some suggest a suspension, or
even a community service sentence: "Isn't there some administrative stuff he can do at the
WELL office as penance?''
But most people just wonder out loud about the strange cyber experience of this
schizoid WELLbeing, and what it means for the Global Village at large. Was Bennett like
this all the time and Stink merely a suppressed personality, or did Cyberia affect his psyche
adversely, creating Stink where he didn't exist before? How vulnerable are the rest of us when
one goes off his virtual rocker? Do the psychology and neurosis of everyday real-life human
interactions need to follow us into cyberspace, or is there a way to leave them behind? Just
how intimate can we get through our computers, and at what cost?

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 rx      28.09.2008 - 18:53:03 , level: 2, UP   SIRôTKA
CHAPTER 2
Operating from Total Oblivion

The fractal is the emblem of Cyberia. Based on the principles of chaos math, it's an
icon, a metaphor, a fashion statement, and a working tool all at the same time. It's at once a
highly technical computer-mathematics achievement and a psychedelic vision, so even as an
image it bridges the gap between these two seemingly distant, or rather discontinuous,''
corners of Cyberia. Once these two camps are connected, the real space defined by "Cyberia''
emerges.
Fractals were discovered in the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot, who was searching for
ways to help us cope, mathematically, with a reality that is not as smooth and predictable as
our textbooks describe it. Conventional math, Mandelbrot complained, treats mountains like
cones and clouds like spheres. Reality is much rougher'' than these ideal forms. No
real-world surface can accurately be described as a "plane,'' because no surface is absolutely
two-dimensional. Everything has nooks and crannies; nothing is completely smooth and
continuous. Mandelbrot's fractals--equations which grant objects a fractional
dimensionality--are revolutionary in that they accept the fact that reality is not a neat, ordered
place. Now, inconsistencies ranging from random interference on phone lines to computer
research departments filled with Grateful Deadheads all begin to make perfect sense.
Mandelbrot's main insight was to recognize that chaos has an order to it. If you look
at a natural coastline from an airplane, you will notice certain kinds of mile-long nooks and
crannies. If you land on the beach, you will see these same shapes reflected in the rock
formations, on the surface of the rocks themselves, and even in the particles making up the
rocks. This self-similarity is what brings a sense of order into an otherwise randomly rough
and strange terrain. Fractals are equations that model the irregular but stunningly self-similar
world in which we have found ourselves.
But these discontinuous equations work differently from traditional math equations,
and challenge many of our assumptions about the way our reality works. Fractals are circular
equations: After you get an answer, you plug it back into the original equation again and
again, countless times. This is why computers have been so helpful in working with these
equations. The properties of these circular equations are stunningly different from those of
traditional linear equations. The tiniest error made early on can amplify into a tremendous
mistake once the equation has been iterated'' thousands of times. Think of a wristwatch that
loses one second per hour. After a few days, the watch is only a minute or so off. But after
weeks or months of iterating that error, the watch will be completely incorrect. A tiny change
anywhere in a fractal will lead to tremendous changes in the overall system. The force
causing the change need not be very powerful. Tremendous effects can be wrought by the
gentlest of "feedbacks.''
Feedback makes that loud screeching sound whenever a microphone is brought close
to its own speaker. Tiny noises are fed back and iterated through the amplification system
thousands of times, amplified again and again until they are huge, annoying blasts of sound.
Feedback and iteration are the principles behind the now-famous saying, When a butterfly
flaps its wings in China, it can cause a thunderstorm in New York.'' A tiny action feeds back
into a giant system. When it has iterated fully, the feedback causes noticeable changes. The
idea has even reached the stock market, where savvy investors look to unlikely remote
feedbacks for indications of which way the entire market might move once those tiny
influences are fully iterated. Without the computer, though, and its ability to iterate equations,
and then to draw them as pictures on a screen, the discovery of fractals would never have
been possible.
Mandelbrot was at IBM, trying to find a pattern underlying the random, intermittent
noise on their telephone lines, which had been causing problems for their computer modems.
The fact that the transmission glitches didn't seem to follow many real pattern would have
rendered a classical mathematician defenseless. But Mandelbrot, looking at the chaotic
distribution of random signals, decided to search for signs of self-similarity--that is, like the
coastline of beach, would the tiny bursts between bursts of interference look anything like the
large ones? Of course they did. Inside each burst of interference were moments of clear
reception. Inside each of those moments of clear reception were other bursts of interference
and so on. Even more importantly, the pattern of their intermittency was similar on each
level.
This same phenomenon--self-similarity--can be observed in many systems that were
previously believed to be totally irregular and unexplainable, ranging from the weather and
the economy to the course of human history. For example, each tiny daily fluctuation in the
weather mirrors the climatic record of the history of the planet. Each major renaissance in
history is itself made up of smaller renaissance events, whose locations in time mirror the
overall pattern of renaissances throughout history. Every chaotic system appears to be
adhering to an underlying order of self-similarity.
This means that our world is entirely or interdependent than we have previously
understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every
other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability
to redesign reality at large. Mandelbrot had begun to map the landscape of Cyberia.

It Is the Mind of God
The terrace of the Applied Sciences Building overlooks what students at University of
California at Santa Cruz call Elf Land''--a dense section of woods where psychedelically
enhanced humans meet interdimensional beings. Back in the corridor of the building, posters
of computer-generated fractal images depicting the "arithmetic limits of iterative nonlinear
equations'' line the walls. The pictures nearest the terrace look like the ferns on the floor of
the forest. The ones farther back look more like the arrangements of the trees above them.
Posters still farther seem like aerial maps of the forest, seen from above.
The mathematician residing in this self-similar niche of academia and psychedelia is
Ralph Abraham, who broke through to Cyberia on his own, and in a very different manner.
He abandoned Princeton University in favor of U.C. Santa Cruz in 1968, during what he calls
the apex of the counterculture.'' It was while taking psychedelics in huge barn "be-ins'' with
his newfound friends that Abraham became familiar with what people were calling the
emotional reality'' of numbers, and this led him to the hills and caves of the Far East where
he spent several years meditating and hallucinating. On returning to the university and his
computer, he embarked with renewed vigor into hyperspace to churn out the equations that
explain his hallucinations and our existence.
While it seems so unlikely to the modern mind that psychedelics could contribute to
real progress in mathematics and science, cyberians, for the most part, take this connection
for granted. In the sixties,'' Abraham explains, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math
experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss
between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a
purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be creative in mathematics, you
have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally
unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And
mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness.
What's going on now is at least as big a thing as the invention of the wheel.''
The brief kiss'' Abraham witnessed was the marriage of two powerful intellectual
communities, both of which had touched Cyberia--one theoretically and the other
experientially. And as cyberian mathematicians like Abraham tripped out further, they saw
how this kiss was itself a fractal event, marking a point in human history from which the
underlying shape or order of existence--the very "roughness'' of reality--could be inferred.
They had conceived and birthed their own renaissance.
Abraham has since dedicated himself to the implications of this rebirth. He sees the
most important, seemingly sudden, and non sequitur events in human history--of which the
kiss above is one--as part of an overall fractal curve. It's happened before. The Renaissance
was one. Christianity is one. The troubadors in the south of France; agriculture; the new
concept of time that came along with the Old Testament--they are all actually revivals. But
they are more than revivals. It's sort of a spiral model where there's a quantum leap to a new
level of organization and complexity.''
Today, Abraham is in his Santa Cruz office, wearing a sweatshirt, drawstring pants,
and Birkenstocks. He does not sport a slide rule or pocket protector. He is Cyberia's Village
Mathematician, and his words are reassuring to those who are living in a world that has
already taken this quantum leap. Just as the fractal enabled Mandelbrot to comfort IBM
executives about the ultimately orderly nature of their line interference, Abraham uses fractals
to show how this uncharted island in history on which we have found ourselves fits into a
larger picture.
There is this fractal structure of discontinuity. If you look at the biggest
discontinuities in human history, you will see they all seem to have very similar structures,
suggesting a mathematical model behind the evolution of civilization.''
Abraham argues that cyberian interest in the pagan, psychedelic, spiritual, and tribal is
not in the least contradictory to the advances in computer technology and mathematics.
Historically, he points out, renaissance periods have always involved a resurgence of archaic
elements along with the invention of new technologies and mathematical systems. The success
of Cyberia, according to the bearded technosage, will depend on our ability to put these
disparate elements together. We have emphasized integration and synthesis, trying to put
everything together in one understanding, using mathematical models only as one tool. We
are also open to various pagan elements like astrology, telepathy, the paranormal, and so on.
We're an interesting network.''
For younger cyberians, Abraham's network provides an invaluable template by which
they can direct their own activities. As Ralph would say, he groks'' their experience; he
understands how these kids feel responsible for reshaping not only their own reality but the
course of human history.
We have to consciously interact with the creation of the future in order for it to be
other than it was.'' In past renaissances, each creative birth, each intimation of what we can
call "fractal reality,'' was buried by a tremendous counterrevolutionary force. What happened
with the Renaissance? Within 200 or 250 years, it was dead again.'' Society refused to cope
with Cyberia then. But the invention of the computer coupled with the undeniable usefulness
and profound beauty of the fractal has made today's renaissance impossible to resist.

Valley of the Nerds
Two men are staring into a computer screen at Apple's research and development
branch. While the first, a computer nerd straight out of Central Casting, mans the keyboard,
beside him sits the other, John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, psychedelics explorer,
and Wyoming rancher. They watch the colorful paisley patterns representing fractal equations
swirl like the aftervisions of a psychedelic hallucination. Tiny Martian colonies forming on an
eerie continental coastline. The computer operator magnifies one tiny piece of the pattern, and
the detail expands to occupy the entire screen. Dancing microorganisms cling to a blue coral
reef. The new patterns reflect the shape of the original picture. He zooms in again and the
shapes are seen again and again. A supernova explodes into weather system, then spirals back
down to the pods on the leaf of a fern plant. The two men witness the creation and recreation
of universes.
Barlow scratches his whiskers and tips his cowboy hat. It's like looking at the mind
of God.''
The nerd corrects him: It is the mind of God.''
And as the latest kiss between the worlds of science and spirituality continues, the
fractal finds its way into the new American psychedelic folklore--as evidenced by that
fractal-enhanced Grateful Dead ticket.
It's the morning after a Dead show, in fact, when the young man who designed that
famous concert ticket unveils his latest invention for a small group of friends gathered at his
Palo Alto home. Dan Kottke, who was one of the original Apple engineers, left the company
and sold off his stock to launch his career as an independent computer graphic designer. He
has just finished the prototype for his first effort: a small light-up LED device that flashes
words and pictures. He plugs it in and the group watches it go through its paces. It's not as
trippy as a fractal, but it's pretty mesmerizing all the same. So is Kottke, who approaches the
psychedelic-spiritual search with the same patience and discipline he'd use to assemble an
intricate circuit board.
When I was a freshman in college,'' he carefully removes the wires from the back of
his invention, "I would take psychedelics and sit by myself for a whole day. What I arrived at
was that cosmic consciousness was a completely normal thing that one day everyone would
arrive at, if they would just sit and think clearly.''
Kottke, like many of the brilliant people at his home today, sees Cyberia as a logical
result of psychedelics and rationality. That's how I became friends with Steve Jobbs. We
used to take psychedelics together and talk about Buddhist philosophy. I had no idea he was
connected with Woz [Steve Wozniak] or selling blue boxes [telephone dialers that allow you
to make free calls] at the time. We just talked about transcendentalism and Buddhism and
listened to Bob Dylan. It must have been his alter ego.''
Until Jobbs and Wozniak created the Apple personal computer, cyberian computer
exploration was limited to the clunky and essentially unusable Altair brand. It appealed to
the soldering iron kinds of hackers,'' explains Dan, "but not the spiritual kind.'' So the very
invention of the personal computer, then, was in some ways psychedelics-influenced. Maybe
that's why they called it Apple: the fruit of forbidden knowledge brought down to the hands
of the consumer through the garage of a Reid College acid head? In any case, the Apple gave
computing power and any associated spiritual insights to the public and, most important, to
their children.
It's easy to understand why kids are better at learning to use computers than adults.
Just like in the immigrant family who comes to America, it is the children who learn the new
language first and best. When mainframe computers appeared in high schools around the
country, it was the students, not the administrators, who became the systems operators. This
set into a motion a revenge of the nerds'' on a scale we haven't yet fully comprehended. But
when the computer industry was born and looking desperately for skilled programmers and
developers, these kids were too young to be hired. The companies turned instead to the acid
heads.
When your brain is forming,'' explains Kottke, using his long fingers to draw pictures
in the oriental rug, "it makes axons that are long, linear things, feeling their way to some part
of the brain very far away to get connected. Your consciousness develops the same way. The
middle teen years are about making connections between things in your mind like computers
and psychedelics and fractals and music.'' Everyone is staring at the impression Dan's fingers
have left in the rug, relating the pattern he's drawn to the design of the colorful weave
underneath.
Kottke's soft voice grounds the group in reality once again. But this kind of thinking
is very easily discouraged. The quelling of creativity is like a virus that gets passed down
generation to generation. Psychedelics can break that cycle.'' So, according to firsthanders like
Kottke, everything old becomes new again, and the psychedelics user's mind is rejuvenated to
its original ability to wander and wonder. The frames and systems of logic one has been using
to organize experience fall away. What better language to adopt than computer language,
which is also unfettered by prejudices, judgments and neuroses?
Consciousness is binary,'' poses Kottke, from a casual lotus position. "It's essentially
digital.'' At least this is the way computers think.'' When information is stored digitally rather
than in a picture, on a record, or even in a book of words, it is broken down into a series of
yes/no's or dot/dashes. Things must be spelled out explicitly. The computer functions purely
in duality but, unlike the human mind, has no interpretive grid.
One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience as it relates to the human
computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from Los Angeles who
archives Tim Leary's writing, is that it reformats the hard disk and clears out the ram.'' That
is, one's experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context and put into a new order. One
sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of thinking, parallel
cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies. Meanwhile, trivial cares of the
moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-wrenching crucible of
intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life without many of the cognitive
traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In other words, the tripper gains
the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the computer does.
Just like the great chaos mathematicians, great programmers must be able to come
from a point of total oblivion'' in order to fully grok cyber language, and in the mid-1970s
and early 1980s, psychedelics users were the only qualified, computer-literate people available
to rapidly growing companies trying to develop software and hardware before their
competitors. In the field of pure research, no one cares what an employee looks like or what
kinds of drugs he eats--it's creative output that matters. Steve Jobbs felt this way, which is
why his Macintosh project at Apple was staffed mostly by tie-dye---wearing young men.
Today, even executives at the more establishment-oriented computer companies have been
forced to include psychedelics-influenced developers in their ranks.
Chris Krauskopf, manager of the Human Interface Program at Intel, admits, Some of
the people here are very, very, very bright. They were bored in school, and as a result they
hung out, took drugs, and got into computers.'' Luckily for them, the drug tests that defense
contractors such as Intel are required to give their employees cannot detect psychedelics,
which are taken in microdoses. As for marijuana tests, well, it's gotten pretty easy to predict
when those are coming, and a phone call or two from personnel executives to the right people
in Research and Development can easily give, say, forty-eight hours' notice. ...
A high-level personnel executive from a major Southern California defense contractor
admits that the company's biggest problem now is that alternative culture members'' are
refusing to work for them. In a secret, off-the-record lunch talk, the rather elderly gentleman
said, between sips of Earl Grey, that the "long hairs we've hired have the ability to attack
computer problems from completely different angles. It would be interesting to take the plans
of a stealth bomber and trace back each innovation to the computer it was drawn on. I bet the
tie-dyes would win out over the pocket-protectors every time.'' According to him, the
company's biggest problem now is finding programmers willing to work for a defense
industry contractor. They're all against the idea of making weapons. We may not be able to
meet our production schedule--we may lose contracts--because we can't get enough of them to
work for us.''
Marc de Groot, a programmer and virtual-reality designer from San Francisco,
understands why companies in the defense industry might depend on cyberians. My question
to you is: Which is the less moral of the two propositions: doing drug testing on your
employees, or doing defense contracting in the first place? That's the real question: Why are a
bunch of acid heads working for a company that makes weapons?'' De Groot's two-bedroom
apartment in the hills is modestly appointed with furniture that looks like leftovers from his
college dorm room. Trouble is, de Groot didn't go to college. After three tries, he realized he
could learn more about computers by working for his university as a programmer than by
taking their classes, so he dropped out as a student and dropped back in as an employee.
I think that people who like to expand their minds with things like higher math and
computers and media are fundamentally the same people who would want to expand their
minds with anything available. But this is a very bad political climate for talking about all
this. You can't mix a thing like drugs with any intellectual endeavor and have it stay as
credible.'' Yet, de Groot's apartment--which has one small bedroom dedicated to life's
comforts and the rest filled with computer hardware--shows many signs of the alternative
culture he prefers to keep out of the public eye. Dan Kottke's fractal Grateful Dead ticket is
pinned to the wall next to the computer on which de Groot designed sound systems for VPL,
the leading "virtual reality'' interface design firm.
Psychedelics are a given in Silicon Valley. They are an institution as established as
Intel, Stanford, marriage, or religion. The infrastructure has accommodated them. Word of
which companies are cool'' and which are not spreads about as rapidly as Dead tickets. De
Groot finds his "user-friendly'' employment opportunities on the WELL, an acronym for
Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or on other bulletin board services (BBSs).
One of the articles that goes around on a regular basis is a list of all the companies
that do urine testing in the Silicon Valley. So you can look it up ahead of time and decide
that you don't want to apply. Computer programmers have set up this information service
because they know that a lot of their friends and they themselves use these drugs.''
De Groot pauses. He is careful not to implicate himself, but his emotions are running
high. And even more than that, people who don't use the drugs are outraged because of the
invasion of privacy. They just feel like it's an infringement on civil liberties. And I think
they're right. I have a friend who applied simultaneously at Sun Micro Systems and Xerox
Park, Palo Alto Research Center. And he found out--and he's someone who uses drugs--he
found out that Xerox Park was gonna do a urine test so he dried out and he went in and did
the urine test and passed and then they offered him the job, and he said, `I'm not taking the
job because you people do urine testing and I'm morally opposed to it,' and he went to work
for Sun. Sun does not do urine testing. They're very big on not doing it. I think it's great.''
Not surprisingly, Sun Micro Systems' computers run some of the most advanced
fractal graphics programs, and Intel--which is also quite Deadhead-friendly,'' is an industry
leader in experimental technologies like virtual reality. The companies that lead in the Valley
of the Nerds are the ones that recognize the popularity of psychedelics among their
employees. Still, although they have contributed to or perhaps even created the computer
revolution, psychedelics-using cyberians feel like a persecuted sect in an oppressive ancient
society that cannot see its own superstitious paranoia. As an engineer at a Microsoft research
facility complains, drug testing makes her feel like the "target victim of an ancient voodoo
spell.''
From the cyberian perspective, that's exactly what's going on; so computer
programmers must learn not to give any hair or bodily fluids to their employers. The
confiscated parts are being analyzed in scientific rituals'' that look into the employee's past
and determine whether she has engaged in her own rituals--like smoking pot--that have been
deemed heretical by the dominating religious body. In this case, that dominating body is the
defense industry, and the heretics are pot smokers and psychedelics users, who have
demonstrated a propensity to question the justifiability of the war machine.

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 rx      28.09.2008 - 18:08:52 , level: 2, UP   SIRôTKA
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 traveled 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 treehouse 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.

Crashing the System
David Troup gained his fame in the computer underground for a program he wrote
called The Bodyguard, which helps hackers maintain their chain of connections through a
long series of systems breaches. Through another ingeniously exploited communications
system glitch, we spoke as he relaxed on his living room couch in Minnesota. From the sound
of his voice I knew he was using a speaker phone, and I heard several of his friends milling
about the room, popping open beers, and muttering in agreement with Troup, their local hero.
The fun of hacking lies in the puzzle solving. Finding out what lies around that next
corner, around the next menu or password. Finding out just how twisted you can get. Popping
out of a computer-based network into a phone-based network and back again. Mapping
networks that go worldwide. We watched a system in Milwaukee grow from just two systems
into a huge network. We went with them. By the end, we probably had a more detailed map
of their network than they did. ''
The Bodyguard has become an indispensable part of the hacker's daytrip survival kit.
It's kind of a worm [a tunneling computer virus] that hacks along with you. Say I'm cruising
through fifteen Unixes [computers that run Unix software] to get at some engineering firm.
Every time I go onto a Unix, I will upload my Bodyguard program. What it does is watch me
and watch the system. It's got the names of the system operators. If a system operator
[''sysop,'' the watchdog for illegal penetrants] or somebody else who has the ability to check
the system logs on [enters the network through his own computer], the Bodyguard will flash
an error flag [warning! danger!] and terminate you at that point. It also will send you a
number corresponding to the next place down the hierarchy of machines that you've
penetrated. You'll have your last connection previous to the one where you got canned. It will
then reconnect you to where you were, without using the system that knocked you off. It'll
recreate the network for you. It takes about four or five minutes. It's nice because when you're
deep in a group of systems, you can't watch everything. Your Bodyguard gets you off as soon
as a sysop signs on, before he even knows you're there. Even if they just log in, you hit the
road. No need to take any chances.''
While the true hacker ethic is not to destroy anything, most young people who find
themselves in a position where it' possible to inflict damage find it hard to resist doing so. As
Troup explains, Most kids will do the most destructive thing they know how to do. There's
nothing in there that they need, or want, or even understand how to use. Everybody's crashed
a system now or then.''
Someone at Troup's end coughs in disagreement and paranoia. David corrects himself.
No need to admit he's ever done anything illegal, now, is there? I'd say 90 percent of
everybody. Everybody's got that urge, you know? `God, I've got full system control--I could
just do a recursive rm [a repeated cycle to begin removing things] and kiss this system
goodbye.' More likely, someone will create a small bug like putting a space before everyone's
password [making it impossible for anyone to log on] and see how long it takes the system
operator to figure it out.'' The passwords will appear correct when the system operator lists
them--except that each one will have a tiny space before it. When the sysop matches the
user's password with the one that the computer says the user should have, the operator won't
notice the extra space before the computer's version.
This is the phony phone call'' to the nth power. Instead of pranking one person on the
other end, the hacker incapacitates a big company run by "nasty suits.'' Hard to resist,
especially when it's a company known to keep tabs on us. The events that frightened Troup
out of hacking for a while concerned just such a company. TRW is the Holy Grail target for
hackers. They're into everything, which is why everyone wants to get into them. They claimed
to be impenetrable, which is half the reason why everyone wants to get in. The more you
look into it, the more security holes they have. They aren't so bad.'' One of Troup's friends in
the background chortles with pride. "It's difficult, because you have to cover your tracks, but
it's not impossible. Just time-consuming,'' Troup explains.
I remember TRW used to have those commercials that just said `TRW, making the
world a better tomorrow.' That's all they did. They were getting us used to seeing them.
Because they were into everything. They sent Tiger Teams [specialized computer commando
squads who establish security protocol in a system] into every system the government has,
either to improve the system's security or to build it in the first place. They have back doors
into everything they've ever worked on. They can assume control over anything they want to.
They're big. They're bad. And they've got more power than they should have, which is why
we were after them. They had Tiger Teams into airport security, aerospace security. And the
government gets software from TRW, upgrades from TRW [also, potentially, with back
doors].
When we got all the way up to the keyhole satellite, we said `That's enough.' We
have really good resources. We have people that can pose as nonpeople--they have Social
Security numbers, tax IDs, everything. But we all got kind of spooked by all this. We had a
continuation of our plan mapped out, but we decided not to go through with it. We ditched all
the TRW stuff we had. I gave it to a friend who buried it underwater somewhere along the
Atlantic shelf. If I tell him to get it back, he will, but if I tell him to get it back using a
slightly different phrase, he will disappear ... for obvious reasons.''
Most purposeful hacking is far less romantic, and done simply to gain access to
systems for their computing power. If someone is working on a complex program or set of
computations, it's more convenient to use some corporation's huge system to carry out the
procedure in a few minutes or hours than to tie up one's own tiny personal computer for days.
The skill comes in getting the work done before the sysop discovers the intrusion. As one
hacker explains to me through an encrypted electronic mail message, They might be on to
you, but you're not done with them yet--you're still working on the thing for some company
or another. But if you've got access to, say, twenty or thirty Unix systems, you can pop in
and out of as many as you like, and change the order of them. You'll always appear to be
coming from a different location. They'll be shooting in the dark. You're untraceable.''
This hacker takes pride in popping in and out of systems the way a surfer raves about
ducking the whitewater and gliding through the tube. But, just as a surfer might compete for
cash, prizes, or beer endorsements, many young hackers who begin with Cyberia in their
hearts are quickly tempted by employers who can profit from their skill. The most dangerous
authoritarian response to young cyberian hackers may not be from the law but from those
hoping to exploit their talents.
With a hacker I'll call Pete, a seventeen-year-old engineering student at Columbia
University, I set up a real-time computer conference call in which several other hackers from
around the country could share some of their stories about a field called industrial hacking.''
Because most of the participants believe they have several taps on their telephone lines, they
send their first responses through as a series of strange glyphs on the screen. After Pete
establishes the cryptography protocol and deciphers the incoming messages, they look like
this (the names are mine):

#1: The Purist
Industrial hacking is darkside hacking. Company A hires you to slow down, destroy,
screw up, or steal from company B's R&D division [research and development]. For example,
we could set up all their math wrong on their cadcams [computer aided design programs] so
that when they look at it on the computer it seems fine, but when they try to put the thing
together, it comes out all wrong. If all the parts of an airplane engine are machined 1mm off,
it's just not going to work.

#2: The Prankster
There was a guy in Florida who worked on a cadcam system which used pirated
software. He was smart, so he figured out how to use it without any manuals. He worked
there for about a year and a half but was fired unfairly. He came to us get them shut down.
We said Sure, no problem.'' Cadcam software companies send out lots of demos. We got
ahold of some cadcam demos, and wrote a simple assembly program so that when the person
puts the disk in and types the "install'' or demo'' command, it wipes out the whole hard disk.
So we wrapped it up in its package, sent it out to a friend in Texas or wherever the software
company was really from, and had him send it to the targeted company with a legit postmark
and everything. Sure enough, someone put the demo in, and the company had to end up
buying over $20,000 worth of software. They couldn't say anything because the software we
wiped out was illegal anyway.

The Purist
That's nothing. That's a personal vendetta. Industrial hacking is big business. Most
corporations have in-house computer consultants who do this sort of thing. But as a freelancer
you can get hired as a regular consultant by one of these firms--say McDonnell Douglas--get
into a vice president's office, and show them the specs of some Lockheed project, like a new
advanced tactical fighter which he has not seen, and say, There's more where this came
from.'' You can get thousands, even millions of dollars for this kind of thing.

#3: The Theorist
During the big corporate takeover craze, companies that were about to be taken over
began to notice more and more things begin to go wrong. Then payroll would get screwed up,
their electronic mail messages aren't going through, their phone system keeps dying every
now and then in the middle of the day. This is part of the takeover effort.
Someone on the board of directors may have some buddy from college who works in
the computer industry who he might hire to do an odd job now and again.

The Purist
I like industrial hacking for the idea of doing it. I started about a year or so ago. And
William Gibson brought romance into it with Neuromancer. It's so do-able.

#4: The Pro
We get hired by people moving up in the political systems, drug cartels, and of course
corporations. We even work for foreign companies. If Toyota hired us to hit Ford, we'd hit
Ford a little bit, but then turn around and knock the hell out of Toyota. We'd rather pick on
them than us.
Most industrial hackers do two hacks at once. They get information on the company
they're getting paid to hit, but they're also hacking into the company that's paying them, so
that if they get betrayed or stabbed in the back they've got their butts covered. So it's a lot of
work. The payoffs are substantial, but it's a ton of work.
In a real takeover, 50% of the hacking is physical. A bunch of you have to go and get
jobs at the company. You need to get the information but you don't want to let them on to
what you're doing. The wargames-style automatic dialer will get discovered scanning. They
know what that is; they've had that happen to them many times before.
I remember a job that I did on a local TV station. I went in posing as a student
working on a project for a communications class. I got a tour with an engineer, and I had a
notebook and busily wrote down everything he said. The guy took me back where the
computers were. Now in almost every computer department in the United States, written on a
piece of masking tape on the phone jack or the modem itself is the phone number of that
modem. It saves me the time and trouble of scanning 10,000 numbers. I'm already writing
notes, so I just write in the number, go home, wait a week or so, and then call them up (you
don't call them right away, stupid). Your local telephone company won't notice you and the
company you're attacking won't notice you. You try to be like a stealth bomber. You sneak up
on them slowly, then you knock the hell out of them. You take the military approach. You do
signals intelligence, human intelligence; you've got your special ops soldier who takes a tour
or gets a job there. Then he can even take a tour as an employee--then he's trusted for some
reason--just because he works there, which is the biggest crock of shit.

DISCONNECT
Someone got paranoid then, or someone's line voltage changed enough to suggest a
tap, and our conversation had been automatically terminated.
Pete stores the exchange on disk, then escorts me out onto the fire escape of his
apartment for a toke and a talk. He can see I'm a little shaken up.
That's not really hacking,'' he says, handing me the joint. I thank him with a nod but
opt for a Camel Light. "That's cracking. Hacking is surfing. You don't do it for a reason. You
just do it.'' We watch a bum below us on the street rip a piece of cardboard off an empty
refrigerator box and drag it away--presumably it will be his home for tonight.
That guy is hacking in a way,'' I offer. "Social hacking.''
That's bullshit. He's doing it for a reason. He stole that cardboard because he needs
shelter. There's nothing wrong with that, but he's not having such a good time, either.''
So what's real hacking? What's it about?''
Pete takes a deep toke off his joint and smiles. It's tapping in to the global brain.
Information becomes a texture ... almost an experience. You don't do it to get knowledge.
You just ride the data. It's surfing, and they're all trying to get you out of the water. But it's
like being a environmental camper at the same time: You leave everything just like you found
it. Not a trace of your presence. It's like you were never there.''
Strains of Grateful Dead music come from inside the apartment. No one's in there.
Pete has his radio connected to a timer. It's eleven o'clock Monday night in New York, time
for David Gans's radio show, The Dead Hour. Pete stumbles into the apartment and begins
scrounging for a cassette. I offer him one of my blank interview tapes.
It's low bias but it'll do,'' he says, grabbing the tape from me and shoving it into a
makeshift cassette machine that looks like a relic from Hogan's Heroes. "Don't let the case
fool you. I reconditioned the whole thing myself. It's got selenium heads, the whole nine
yards.'' Satisfied that the machine is recording properly, he asks, You into the Dead?''
Sure am.'' I can't let this slip by. "I've noticed lots of computer folks are into the
Dead ... and the whole subculture.'' I hate to get to the subject of psychedelics too early.
However, Pete doesn't require the subtlety.
Most of the hackers I know take acid.'' Pete searches through his desk drawers. "It
makes you better at it.'' I watch him as he moves around the room. Look at this.'' He shows
me a ticket to a Grateful Dead show. In the middle of the ticket is a color reproduction of a
fractal.
Now, you might ask, what's a computer-generated image like that doing on a Dead
ticket, huh?''

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 rx      28.09.2008 - 18:07:44 , level: 2, UP   SIRôTKA
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

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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