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