Warfare in Cyberia is conducted on an entirely new battleground; it is a struggle not over territory or boundaries but over the very definitions of these terms. It's like a conflict between cartographers, who understand the ocean as a grid of longitude and latitude lines, and surfers, who understand it as a dance of chaotic waves. The resistance to renaissance comes out of the refusal to cope with or even believe in the possibility of a world free of precyberian materialism and its systems of logic, linearity, and duality. But, as cyberians argue, these systems could not have come into existence without dangerous patriarchal domination and the subversion of thousands of years of nondualistic spirituality and feminine, earth-based lifestyles.
Pieced together from the thoughts and works of philosophers like Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, the ancient history of renaissance and antirenaissance from the cyberian perspective goes something like this: People lived in tribes, hunting, gathering, following animal-herd migrations for ready food supplies, enjoying free sex, and worshipping the elements. As they followed the herds, these nomads also ate the psychedelic mushrooms that grew on the animals' dung, and this kept any ego or dominator tendencies in check. The moment when people settled down in agricultural communities was the moment when everything went wrong. Instead of enjoying the earth's natural bounty, people worked the soil for food – an act considered by extremists to represent the rape of Gaia and the taming of nature. Psychedelics fell out of the daily diet because people weren't wandering around anymore. They had time to sit around and invent things to make life easier, like the wheel, and so came the notions of periodicity and time.
Time was a particular problem, because if anything was certain to these people, it was the fact that after a certain amount of time, everybody dies. The only way to live on after death is through offspring – but ancient men did not know who their offspring were. Only women knew for sure which children were their own. In previous, psychedelics-influenced tribes, the idea of one's own personal children mattered less, because everyone identified with the tribe. Now, with developed egos, men became uncomfortable with free love; thus patriarchal domination was born. Men began to possess women so that they would know which children were their own. The ideas of ''property,'' "yours,'' ''mine,'' and a host of other dualities were created. In an attempt to deny the inevitability of death, a society of possessors was born, which developed into a race of conquerors and finally evolved into our own nation of consumers.
Others blame the invention of time for the past six thousand years of materialist thought. Fearing the unknown (and, most of all, death), ancient man created time as a way to gauge and control his unpredictable reality. Time provided a framework in which unpredictable events could appear less threatening within an overall ''order'' of things. Of course the measured increments were not the time itself (any more than the ticks of a watch say anything about the space between them when the real seconds go by), but they provided a kind of schedule by which man could move through life and decay toward death in an orderly fashion. Whenever man came upon something he did not understand, he put over it a grid, with which he could cope. The ocean and its seemingly random sets of waves is defined by a grid of lines, as are the heavens, the cities, and the rest of reality. The ultimate lines are the ones made into boxes to categorize and control human behavior. They are called laws, which religions and eventually governments emerged to write and enforce.
According to cyberian logic, the grids of reality are creations. They are not necessarily real. The Troubadours believed this. People burned at the stake as witches in the fourteenth century died for this. Scientists with revolutionary ideas must commit to this. Anyone who has taken a psychedelic drug experiences this. Fantasy gamers play with this. Hackers who crack the ''ice'' of well-protected computer networks prove this. Anyone who has adopted the cyberian vision lives this.
The refusal to recognize the lines drawn by ''dominator society'' is a worse threat to that society than is the act of consciously stepping over them. The exploitation of these lines and boxes for fun is like playing hopscotch on the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The appropriation of the strings of society's would-be puppeteers in order to tie their fingers and liberate the marionettes is a declaration of war.
Such a war is now being waged, and on many levels at once. The cyberian vision is a heretical negation of the rules by which Western society has chosen to organize itself. Those who depend on this organization for power vehemently protect the status quo by enforcing the laws. This is not a traditional battle between conservative and liberal ideologies, which are debates over where to put the lines and how thick to draw them. Today's renaissance has led to a war between those who see lines as real boundaries, and those who see them as monkey bars. They can be climbed on.
Cyberian warriors are dangerous to the ''line people'' because they can move in mysterious ways. Like ninjas, they can creep up walls and disappear out of sight because they don't have to follow the rules. Cyberian activities are invisible and render the time and money spent on prison bars and locks worthless. The inmates disappear through the vents.
As Marshall McLuhan and even George Orwell predicted, the forces in ''power'' have developed many networks with which they hope to control, manipulate, or at least capitalize on the behaviours and desires of the population. Television and the associated media have bred a generation of conditioned consumers eager to purchase whatever products are advertised. Further, to protect the sovereignty of capitalist nations and to promote the flow of cash, the defence and banking industries have erected communications networks that hardwire the globe together. Through satellites, computers, and telecommunications, a new infrastructure – the pathways of the datasphere – has superimposed itself over the existing grids like a metagrid, enforcing underlying materialism, cause and effect, duality and control.
But cyberians may yet prove that this hardwiring has been done a little too well. Rather than create an easy-to-monitor world, the end of the industrial era left us with an almost infinite series of electronic passages. The passages proved the perfect playground for the dendrites of expanding young consciousnesses, and the perfect back doors to the power centers of the modern world. A modem, a PC, and the intent to destabilize might prove a more serious threat to the established order than any military invasion. Nowhere is the fear of Cyberia more evident than in the legislation of computer laws and the investigation and prosecution of hackers, crackers, and data-ocean pirates.
Forging Electronic Frontiers
There are as many points of view about hacker ethics, responsibility, and prosecution as there are players. Just how close to digital anarchy we move depends as much on the way we perceive law and order in the datasphere as it does on what's actually going on. While many young people with modems and personal computers are innocently exploring networks as they would the secret passages in an interactive fantasy game, others are maliciously destroying every system they can get into. Still other computer users are breaking in to networks with purpose: to gain free telephone connections, to copy information and code, or to uncover corporate and governmental scandals. No single attitude toward computer hacking and cracking will suffice.