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 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.
Our technologies do give us the benefit of instant access to the experiences of all who went before us and the ability to predict much of what lies ahead. We may indeed be approaching one of those rare moments on the spiral staircase of human history when we can see all the way up and all the way down at the same time. If this is the case, and the cyberians are correct, then perhaps the only thing we must do now - before we slip even further into the chaos attractor at the end of time - is learn to cope with the change.
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 dating enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully. Cyberians are not just actively exploring the next dimension; they are working to create it.
As the would-be colonizers of Cyberia, they have developed new ways of speaking, creating, working, living, and loving. They rebel against obsolete systems of language, thought, and government and may be at the forefront of a significant new social movement. Their impact is not limited to Silicon Valley, college campuses, or the pages of science fiction. They are changing our world, and they are doing so with a particular vision.
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 behoves 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 prokaryotes 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
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 travelled 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: