Cyberia

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.

For example, many computer programs and data libraries are structured as webs, a format that has come to be known as 'hypertext'. To learn about a painter, a computer user might start with a certain museum. From the list of painters, he may select a particular portrait. Then he may ask for biographical information about the subject of the portrait, which may reveal a family tree. He may follow the family tree up through the present, then branch off into data about immigration policies to the United States, the development of New York real estate, or even a grocery district on the Lower East Side. In a hypertext video game, a player might be a detective searching a room. In the room is a chest of drawers. Select a drawer. The drawer opens, inside is a note. Point to the note, and text appears. Read the note, see a name. Select the name, see a picture. One item in the picture is a car. Select the car. go for a ride through the neighborhood. See an interesting house, go inside...

But an acid trip, a new cyberpunk novel, a quick-cut MTV video, or a night at a 'house music' dub can provide the same hypertext-style experience. The rules of linear reality no longer apply. Even the hardened law-followers of physics and math have found that numbers and particles have ceased to behave with the predictability of linear equations. Instead, they jump around in a discontinuous fashion, disappearing, reappearing, suddenly gaining and losing energy. Our reality, scientists are concluding, can no longer be explained by the simple, physical, time-based rules of law and order. Everything is connected, somehow, but not in the way we thought. There is another, greater, less obvious, invisible territory, of which the physical reality we've grown to 'know' and love is only one aspect.

We need a new word to express this boundless territory. The kids in this book call it Cyberia.

Cyberia is the place a businessperson goes when involved in a phone conversation, the place a shamanic warrior goes when travelling out of body, the place an 'acid house' dancer goes when experiencing the bliss of a techno-acid trance. Cyberia is the place alluded to by the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of every science, and the wildest speculations of every imagination. Now, however, unlike any other time in history, Cyberia is thought to be within our reach. The technological strides of our postmodern culture, coupled with the rebirth of ancient spiritual ideas, have convinced a growing number of people that Cyberia is the dimensional plane in which humanity will soon find itself.

We may in fact be at the brink of a renaissance of unprecedented magnitude, heralded by the 1960s, potentiated by the computer and other new technologies, mapped by chaos math and quantum physics, fuelled by psychedelic drugs and brain foods, and manifesting right now in popular culture as new music, fiction, art, entertainment, games, philosophy, religion, sex, and lifestyle. These changes are being implemented and enjoyed by a group of young people we'll call the cyberians, who are characterized primarily by a faith in their ability to consciously rechoose their own reality - to design their experience of life.

Theoretical mathematicians and physicists were the first to predict this designer reality. Their ability to observe phenomena, they now believe, is inextricably linked to the phenomena themselves. Having lost faith in the notion of a material explanation for existence, these scientists have begun to look at the ways reality conforms to their expectations, mirroring back to them a world changed by the very act of observation. As they rely more and more on the computer, their suspicions are further confirmed: This is not a world reducible to neat equations and pat answers, but an infinitely complex series of interdependencies, where the tiniest change in a remote place can have systemwide repercussions. When computers crunch data from real-world observations, they do not produce simple, linear graphs of an orderly existence but instead churn out phase maps and diagrams whose spiralling intricacy resembles that of an ancient mosaic, a coral reef, or a psychedelic hallucination. When the entire procession of historical, biological, and cosmological events is reanalyzed in the light of modern mathematical discoveries like the fractal and feedback loops, it points toward this era - the turn of the century - as man's leap out of history altogether and into the timeless dimension of Cyberia.

Inklings of what this dimension may be like come to us through the experience of computer hackers and psychedelic tripsters, who think of themselves not as opposite ends of the spectrum of human activity but as a synergistic congregation of creative thinkers bringing the tools of high technology and advanced spirituality into the living rooms of the general public. Psychedelics can provide a shamanic experience for any adventurous consumer. This experience leads users to treat the accepted reality as an arbitrary one, and to envision the possibilities of a world unfettered by obsolete thought systems, institutions, and neuroses. Meanwhile, the cybernetic experience empowers children of all ages to explore a new, digital landscape. Using only a personal computer and a modem, anyone can now access the datasphere (a web of telecommunications and computer networks stretching around the world and into outer space). New computer interface technologies such as virtual reality promise to make Cyberia a place where we can take not only our minds but our bodies along for the ride.

Cyberians interpret the development of the datasphere as the hardwiring of a global brain. This is to be the final stage in the development of 'Gaia' the living being that is the Earth, for which humans serve as the neurons. As computer programmers and psychedelic warriors together realize that "all is one", a common belief emerges that the evolution of humanity has been a wilful progression toward the construction of Cyberia, the next dimensional home for consciousness.

These spiritual implications of these technological and conceptual advances are not to be reckoned with in church, but rather on the dance floor, which, like the Mayan temple, serves as a shamanic common ground where participants from all corners of Cyberia may come together to celebrate the heightening of the human experience and resonate, in bliss, with the accelerating of time.

The cyberian experience finds its expression in new kinds of arts and entertainment that rely less on structure and linear progression than on textural experience and moment-to-moment awareness. Role-playing games, for example, have no beginning or end, but instead celebrate the inventiveness of their players, who wind their way through complex fantasies together, testing strategies that they may later use in their own lives, which have in turn begun to resemble the wild adventures of their game characters. Similarly, the art and literature of Cyberia have abandoned the clean lines and smooth surfaces of Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey in favour of the grimy, posturban realism of Batman, Neuromancer, and Bladerunner, in which computers do not simplify human issues but expose and even amplify the obvious faults in our systems of logic and social engineering.

Not surprisingly, the reaction of traditionalists to this expression has been harsh and marked by panic. Cyberians question the very reality on which the ideas of control and manipulation are based; and as computer-networking technology gets into the hands of more cyberians, the hypnotic spell of years of television and its intense public relations is broken. The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to reexamine previously accepted policies and prejudices. Using media "viruses" politically inclined cyberians launch into the datasphere, at lightning speed, potent ideas that openly challenge hypocritical and illogical social structures, thus rendering them powerless.

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