Cyberia
Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace
Preface to the 1994 paperback edition
A lot has happened in the year or so since I wrote this book. More than usually happens in a year. Thanks to technologies like the computer, the modem, interactive media, and the Internet, we no longer depend on printed matter or word of mouth to explore the latest rages, innovations, or discoveries. By the time a story hits the newsstands, most insiders consider it ''old news" and are already hard at work on the next flurry of culture-bending inventions and activities.
Cyberia is about a very special moment in our recent history - a moment when anything seemed possible. When an entire subculture – like a kid at a rave trying virtual reality for the first time - saw the wild potentials of marrying the latest computer technologies with the most intimately held dreams and the most ancient spiritual truths. It is a moment that predates America Online, twenty million Internet subscribers, Wired magazine, Bill Clinton, and the Information Superhighway. But it is a moment that foresaw a whole lot more.
This book is not a survey of everything and everyone cyber" but rather a tour through some of the regions of this new, fledgling culture to which I was lucky enough to gain access. Looking back, it is surprising to see how many of these then-absurd notions have become accepted truths, and disheartening to see how many of the most optimistic appraisals of our future are still very far from being realized.
Cyberia follows the lives and translates the experiences of the first few people who realized that our culture was about to take a leap into the unknown. Some of them have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and are now practically household names. Others have met with catastrophe. Still others have simply faded from view, their own contributions to the cyberian renaissance already completed.
What you have to remember as you read this book is that back in the 1980s, computers and everyone who got near them were decidedly uncool. So were science fiction, fantasy role-playing, and even – oddly, perhaps – psychedelic drugs. America had plummeted into the depths of conservative thinking, and in conservative times intellectuals don't fare well. Freaks fare even worse. And futurists aren't ever heard from. The 1980s was a time for nostalgia and traditional values. It seemed to many that the non-conformist and highly individualistic - if somewhat ungrounded - thinking of the 1960s had been forever lost.
But in San Francisco, a few scattered ex-hippies, university students, musicians., and other optimistic souls who felt particularly disenfranchised by the status quo began imagining an alternative possibility. Most of these people didn't know about one another. Some gathered in small groups; others worked alone. While one discovered the computer and invented virtual reality, another discovered the cognitive enhancement properties of herbs and began selling 'brain foods'. Kids in one town played fantasy role playing games, while kids in another began mixing and recording their own electronic music on cheap Casio instruments. A university class in Europe wrote programs that allowed people to share information on computers over telephone lines, while a math professor in Santa Cruz realized that non-linear math equations depict organic shapes.
The only thing that qualified me to write all this down was the fact that I happened to know people in each of these different areas - and realized that they didn't know about one another. They were doing very different things, of course, but it seemed to me they were all somehow related.
As you'll see, they were all groping towards the same thing: a sense of authorship over reality itself. Technology empowered these many uniquely different fringe and counterculture members to build, project, or just simply record their visions. For example, computers allowed scientists to model strange attractors; Xerox machines allowed teenagers to publish subversive magazines; online bulletin boards let underground psychopharmacologists share recipes for new psychedelics. In each case and many more, these low-cost and highly accessible technologies gave people a chance to realize their dreams on a level unimaginable to them before. And the people who felt the greatest need to take advantage of this opportunity were those who felt their needs were not being addressed by a mainstream culture that resisted anything new.
Cyberia appeared to be a way to crack open our civilization's closed-mindedness, and to allow for a millennial transition that offered something a lot better than apocalypse: consciously driven evolution.
Although many saw the computer as simply a great metaphor for the brain. Cyberians considered these terminals and their many networks to be extensions of the human mind. It was as if human beings - the many neurons of a planetary brain - were somehow hardwiring themselves together. Likewise, the people on these pages saw drugs less as a form of entertainment than a method of entramment: preparation and practice for the stresses of shepherding humanity to its next evolutionary level. Add to this the ideas about spirituality and rebirth trickling down to youth culture from the New Age movement, and you begin to smell renaissance.
Lofty thoughts, for sure - but that's precisely the point. Cyberia marks a moment where many people in many places saw these possibilities as very real. In a sense, they were right. And though Cyberia has not turned out to be quite as radical a departure from reality as its proponents imagined, the world isn't the same as it was ten years ago, either.
This was never meant as a book about the Internet. Still, that didn't stop its first publisher from cancelling Cyberia before it was to be published back in 1993, for fear that, "the Internet might be over by then". They compared the phenomena described in this book to the 'citizen's band' fad of the mid-1970s - a short-lived communications craze surrounding the use of trucker's two-way radios.
Of course the Internet craze went on quite a bit longer than my first publishers had anticipated. But it's far from over. No, not even the collapse of the speculative market frenzy surrounding the 'dot.com era' can challenge the essential drive for a more networked global culture.
Maybe this kind of optimism requires us to look at the Internet as less of an investment opportunity than a new kind of life form. That's the way we all used to see it in ancient times, anyway. Back in the 2400-baud, ascii-text era of ten long years ago, the Internet had nothing to do with the NASDAQ index. Until 1992, you had to sign an agreement promising not to conduct any business online just to get access to the Internet! Imagine that. It was a business-free zone.
How could such rules have ever been put in place? Because the Internet began as a public project. It was created to allow scientists at universities and government facilities to share research and computing resources. Everyone from the Pentagon to AI Gore saw the value of universally accessible information-sharing network, and invested all sorts of federal funds in building a backbone capable of connecting computers around the world.
What they didn't realize was that they were doing a whole lot more than connecting computers to one another. They were connecting people to one another, too. Before long, all those scientists who were supposed to be exchanging research or comparing data were exchanging stories about their families and comparing notes on the latest Star Trek movies. People from around the world were playing games, socializing, and crossing cultural boundaries that had never been crossed before. Since no one was using it to discuss military technology anymore, the government abandoned the network, and turned it over to the public as best they could.
The Internet's unexpected social side-effect turned out to be its incontrovertible main feature. Its other functions fall by the wayside. The Internet's ability to network human beings is its very life's blood. It fosters communication, collaboration, sharing, helpfulness, and community. Then word got out.