Cyberia

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.

The nerdiest among us found out first. Then came those of us whose friends were nerds. Then their friends, and so on. Someone would simply insist he had found something you needed to know about - the way a childhood friend lets you in on a secret door leading down to the basement under the Junior High School.

How many of you can remember that first time you watched him log on? How he turned the keyboard over to you and asked what you want to know, where you want to visit, or who you want to meet? That was the magic moment when you 'got it'. Internet fever. There was a whole new world out there, unlimited by the constraints of time and space, appearance and prejudice, gender and power.

It's no wonder so many people compared the 1990s Internet to the psychedelic 1960s. It seemed all we needed to do was get a person online and he or she would be changed forever. And people were. A 60-year-old Midwestern businessman I know found himself logging on every night to engage in a conversation about Jungian archetypes. It lasted for four weeks before he even realized the person with whom he was conversing was a 16-year-oid boy from Tokyo.

It felt as though we were wiring up a global brain. Visionaries of the period, like Ted Nelson, invented words like 'hypertext', and told us how the Internet could be used as a library for everything ever written. A musician named Jaron Lanier invented a bizarre interactive space he called 'virtual reality', in which people would be able to, in his words, "really see what the other means" Starry-eyed authors like me wrote optimistic books like this one - announcing the new global renaissance.

The Internet was no longer a government research project. It was alive. Out of control and delightfully chaotic. What's more, it promoted an agenda all its own.

People who participated online were forever changed. It was as if using a computer mouse and keyboard to access other human beings on the other side of the monitor changed our relationship to media and the power it held. The tube was no longer a place that only a corporate conglomerate could access. It was Rupert Murdoch, Dan Rather, and Heather Locklear's turf no more. The Internet was 'our' space. A portal to Cyberia.

Out there, the do-it-yourself mentality dominated. We called it 'cyberpunk.' Why watch packaged programming on TV when you can make your own online? And once you're doing it online, other sorts of vision-quests seem entirely more within your reach. Who needs corporate content when you can 'be' the content? This was a whole new world we could design ourselves, on our own terms. It felt like a revolution.

That's why it fostered such a deep sense of community. New users were gently escorted around the Internet by more seasoned veterans, and shown where and how to participate. An experienced user would delight in setting up a newbie's Internet connection for him. It was considered an honour to rush out into the night to fix a fellow user's technical problem. To be an Internet user was to be an Internet advocate.

It's also why almost everything to do with the Internet was free. Software was designed by people who wanted to make the Internet a better place. Hackers stayed up late making new programs, and then distributed them free of charge to anyone who cared to use them.

All the programs we use today are actually based on this shareware and freeware. Internet Explorer and Netscape are just fat versions of a program created at the University of Illinois. Streaming media is really just dolled up version of CUSeeMe, a program developed at Cornell. The Internet was built for love, not profit.

And that was the problem, for business, anyway. As more and more people got online, they spent less and less time watching TV Studies showed a direct correlation between time spent on the Internet and time not spent consuming television programs and commercials. Something had to be done.

Thus began the long march to turn the Internet into a profitable enterprise. It started with content. Dozens, then hundreds of online magazines sprang up. But since the Internet had always been free, no one wanted to pay a subscription charge for content. It just wasn't something one did online. So most of the magazines went out of business.

The others, well, they invented the next great Internet catastrophe: the banner ad. Web publishers figured they could sell a little strip on top of each web page to an advertiser, who'd use it as a billboard for commercials. But everyone hated them. They got in the way. It was like scuba diving with someone putting bumper stickers over your mask. And the better we got at ignoring banner ads, the more distractingly busy they grew and the more, time-consuming they were to download. They only taught us to resent whichever advertiser was inhibiting our movement.

So advertising gave way to e-commerce. The Internet would be turned into a direct marketing platform. An interactive mail-order catalogue! This little scheme seemed to hold more promise. So much promise, in fact, that Wall Street investors took notice. Not that many of these e-commerce businesses actually made money. But they looked like someday they could.

Besides, Wall Street cares less about actual revenues than the ability to create the perception that there might be revenues at some point in the future. That's why it's called speculation. Others might call it a pyramid scheme. Here's how it works: Someone writes a business plan for a new land of e-commerce company. That person finds 'angel investors' -very in-the-know people who give him money to write a bigger business plan and hire a CEO. Then comes the 'first round' and 'second round', where other, slightly less in-the-know people invest a few million more. Then come the institutional investors, who underwrite the now-infamous IPO. After that, at the very bottom of the pyramid, come retail investors. That's you and me. We're supposed to log into an E-trading site and invest our money, just around the time that those investors at the top are executing what's called an 'exit strategy' That's another way of saying carpet bag.

So what's all that got to do with the Internet, you ask? Or Cyberia itself? Exactly. The Internet and cyber culture were merely the sexy words, the come-hithers, the bright ideas at the top of the pyramid. Sure, there were and are still plenty of entrepreneurs creating vibrant, successful online businesses - look at Yahoo, Amazon, and EBay. But the Internet wasn't born to support the kind of global economic boom that venture capitalists were envisioning. And by turning the Internet's principle use from socializing towards monetanzing, business went against the Internet's very functionality and against the core ethos of Cyberia.

People doing what comes naturally online, like typing messages to one another, don't generate revenue. The object of the game, for Internet business, was to get people's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Less collaboration, more consumption. Sites were designed to be 'sticky' so people wouldn't leave. Couldn't leave. And 'information architecture' turned into the science of getting people to click on the 'buy' button. The only time we're supposed to take our hands off the keyboard is to enter our credit card number (if it's not already on a cookie, somewhere deep on our hard drive).

By 1999, a person logging on for the first time was encountering something very different from the Cyberia I've described in this book. Browsers and search engines alike were designed to keep users either buying products or consuming commercial content. Most of those helpful hackers were now vested employees of dot.com companies. And most visions of the electronic future had dollar signs before them.

But the real Internet was hiding underneath this investment charade the whole time. It was a little harder to find, perhaps, and no one in the mainstream press was writing about it, anymore, but plenty of people were still sharing stories, emailing relatives, organizing raves, finding new communities, and educating themselves. The spirit of the Internet was dormant, maybe, but very much alive.

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