This is why those business schemes were doomed to fail. The behaviour control being implemented by more nefarious online merchants, the mercenary tactics of former hackers, and the commercial priorities of the Internet's investors were a blatant contradiction of Cyberia's true nature. Sure, the Internet could support some business guests, the way a tree can support some mushrooms at its base and a few squirrels in its branches. But businesses attacked the Internet like a set of chainsaws. Or, better, a parasitic fungus. It needed to be rejected.
The inevitable collapse of the dot.com pyramid was not some sort of regular business cycle. And it most certainly was not the collapse of anything having to do with the Internet. No, what we just witnessed was the Internet fending off an attack. It's no different than when the government abandoned the Internet in the 1980s. Instead of talking about defence contracts, the scientists online began talking about science fiction stories. The Internet never does what it's 'supposed' to do, It has a mind, and life, of its own. That's because we're alive, too.
Now that the Internet's role in business has faded into the background, the many great applications that real people and organizations have developed to make all of our lives better are taking centre stage. They are compelling, and surpass even some of our wildest dreams for what the Internet might someday achieve. The ideas, information, and applications now launching on web sites around the world capitalize on the transparency, usability, and accessibility that the Internet was born to deliver.
It's not that the original Internet community went into some sort of remission. No, not all. Although the mainstream news media was busy covering the latest corporate mega-mergers, the Internet's actual participants were continuing to develop and extend their favourite forums for interaction.
In this book, I compare the early Internet to the Wild West - an anarchic realm where a lone hacker could topple any empire. That spirit is not gone. Any group or individual, however disenfranchised, can serve as the trigger point for an extraordinarily widespread phenomenon.
Media viruses like 'all your base' and irreverent Flash or QuickTime video parodies of commercials like Budweiser's 'wassup' campaign are launched from the bedrooms of teenagers, and distributed by email to millions of office cubicles, eventually finding their way to the evening news.
Thousands upon thousands of hackers around the world still represent a great threat to major software companies, the DVD industry, and any corporation whose interests rely on closed source computer code or encrypted files. No sooner is a new closed standard released than it is decoded by lone hacker or, better, a team of hackers working in tandem from remote and untraceable locations. The 'crack' is then published on countless mirror sites, making its dissemination inevitable and unsquashable.
Activists of all stripes have seized upon the Internet for its ability to cultivate relationships across vast distances and promote new kinds of alliances between formerly unaffiliated groups. No, in spite of the many efforts to direct its chaotic, organismic energy towards the monolithic agenda of Wall Street, the Internet can't help but empower the real people whose spirit it embodies.
Moreover a networked culture has the means to resist the kinds of fundamentalism threatening to stunt human evolution in its tracks. The Internet teaches us to see the value of diversity and plurality. All the opinions of all the people matter. Fundamentalism teaches that there is only one path, one story, and one author.
For Cyberia is a collective enterprise. A team sport. Instead of living by decree, we delight in writing the human story, together. It is social, collaborative, occasionally scary and usually fun. I like to think the moment of history - inadequately, inaccurately, but enthusiastically described on these pages - marked a genuine step forward in our ability to engage meaningfully and playfully with one another, for real.
The people in this book, and thousands of others like them around the world, understand the implications of our technologies on our culture, thought systems, spiritual beliefs, and even our biological evolution. They still stand as the most optimistic and forward-thinking appraisers of our civilization's fate. As we draw ever nearer to the consensually hallucinatory reality for which these cyberians drew the blueprints, their impressions of life on the edge become even more relevant for the rest of us. And they make more sense.
Douglas Rushkoff
New York City, 1994
Introduction
Surfing the Learning Curve of Sisyphus
"Are we in the bowl yet?" the boy asks, feeling the first effects of the drug.
"I think so," answers his friend, also a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley, who punches a few keys on his computer, releasing a brilliant paisley landscape onto the monitor. "We're over the event horizon. Now it's just a matter of time."
The questioner panics. "So we're in it, then? We're in the attractor?"
"Are you talking about the acid, the computer, or the universe?"
A pause. The swirling computer-generated pictures are reflected in the boys' eyes. "All of 'em, I guess."
"I grok." agrees the operator.
Two college students at three in the morning, tripping on the drug Ecstasy as they create fractal images on a computer in their dorm room. Their topic of conversation? The end of our dimension, of course.
Having turned the concepts of a new math called chaos theory into a working model for reality, the boys experience their existence as a field of interdependent equations. Humanity floats through this field, and can get pulled into one equation or another, just as a planet or solar system can get sucked into a black hole. These equations - called chaos attractors - are like bowls. Once we pass over the lip of the bowl - the event horizon - there's no way to go but inside. We're sucked off the plane of reality as we know it. and down into another one. Everything changes.
The boys don't just think this, they feel it - and in many ways at once: their consciousness is being drawn into an intense psychedelic trip, their computer picture is about to shift into a new multidimensional representation of an equation, and their world is changing around them faster than they can articulate or even imagine. And these are the people who grok this turf. Welcome to Cyberia.
Time seems to be speeding up. New ideas and technologies have accelerated our culture into an almost unrecognizable reality, and those on the frontier tell us that this is only the beginning. The many different ways in which our culture is changing can be understood as part of a single renaissance. Inspired by the computer, chaos math, chemicals, and creativity, this renaissance has been interpreted by many as an evolutionary leap for humanity into another dimension. Whether or not this is true, those who can comprehend, or 'grok;, the nature of this shift will be better prepared to survive the twenty-first century.
The easiest access to this hyperdimensional realm is through technology. Now that PCs are linked through networks that cover the globe and beyond, many people spend real time out there in 'cyberspace' - the territory of digital information. This apparently boundless universe of data breaks all the rules of physical reality. People can interact regardless of time and location. They can fax 'paper' over phone lines, conduct twenty-party video-telephone conversations with participants in different countries, and even 'touch' one another from thousands of miles away through new technologies such as virtual reality. All this and more can happen in cyberspace.
Cyberspace has also gained a metaphorical value for many other kinds of experiences. Drugs, dance, spiritual techniques, chaos math, and pagan rituals all bring people into similar regions of consciousness, where the limitations of time, distance, and the body are meaningless. People move through these regions as they might move through computer programs or video games - unlimited by the rules of a linear, physical reality.