Cyberia

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:

''I really don't remember how he got in; I was sitting there while he typed. But to see these other systems were out there was sort of interesting. I saw things like shopping malls – there were heating computers you could actually call up and look at what their temperature settings were. There were several of these linked together. One company ran the thermostat for a set of different subscribers, so if it was projected to be 82 degrees outside, they'd adjust it to a certain setting. So, back when we were thirteen or so, we talked about how it might be neat to change the settings one day, and make it too hot or too cold. But we never did.''

But they could have, and that's what matters. They gained access. In Cyberia, this is funhouse exploration. Neidorf sees it as ''like when you're eight and you know your brother and his friends have a little tree house or clubhouse somewhere down in the woods, and you and your friends go and check it out even though you know your brother would basically kill you if he found you in there.'' Most of these kids get into hacking the same way as children of previous generations daringly wandered through the hidden corridors of their school basements or took apart their parents' TV sets. But with computers they hit the jackpot: There's a whole world there – a whole new reality, which they can enter and even change. Cyberia. Each new opening leads to the discovery of an entirely new world, each connected to countless other new worlds. You don't just get in somewhere, look around, find out it's a dead end, and leave. Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were fascinated by a few winding caves; cyberkids have broken through to an infinitely more complex and rewarding network. Each new screen takes them into a new company, institution, city, government, or nation. They can pop out almost anywhere. It's an endless ride.

As well as being one of the most valuable techniques for navigating cyberspace, hacking the vast computer net is the first and most important metaphor in Cyberia. For the first time, there is a technical arena in which to manifest the cyberian impulses, which range from pure sport to spiritual ecstasy and from redesigning reality to downright subversion.

Crashing the System

David Troup gained his fame in the computer underground for a program he wrote called The Bodyguard, which helps hackers maintain their chain of connections through a long series of systems breaches. Through another ingeniously exploited communications system glitch, we spoke as he relaxed on his living room couch in Minnesota. From the sound of his voice I knew he was using a speaker phone, and I heard several of his friends milling about the room, popping open beers, and muttering in agreement with Troup, their local hero.

''The fun of hacking lies in the puzzle solving. Finding out what lies around that next corner, around the next menu or password. Finding out just how twisted you can get. Popping out of a computer-based network into a phone-based network and back again. Mapping networks that go worldwide. We watched a system in Milwaukee grow from just two systems into a huge network. We went with them. By the end, we probably had a more detailed map of their network than they did. ''

The Bodyguard has become an indispensable part of the hacker's daytrip survival kit. ''It's kind of a worm [a tunnelling computer virus] that hacks along with you. Say I'm cruising through fifteen Unixes [computers that run Unix software] to get at some engineering firm. Every time I go onto a Unix, I will upload my Bodyguard program. What it does is watch me and watch the system. It's got the names of the system operators. If a system operator [''sysop,'' the watchdog for illegal penetrants] or somebody else who has the ability to check the system logs on [enters the network through his own computer], the Bodyguard will flash an error flag [warning! danger!] and terminate you at that point. It also will send you a number corresponding to the next place down the hierarchy of machines that you've penetrated. You'll have your last connection previous to the one where you got canned. It will then reconnect you to where you were, without using the system that knocked you off. It'll recreate the network for you. It takes about four or five minutes. It's nice because when you're deep in a group of systems, you can't watch everything. Your Bodyguard gets you off as soon as a sysop signs on, before he even knows you're there. Even if they just log in, you hit the road. No need to take any chances.''

While the true hacker ethic is not to destroy anything, most young people who find themselves in a position where it' possible to inflict damage find it hard to resist doing so. As Troup explains, ''Most kids will do the most destructive thing they know how to do. There's nothing in there that they need, or want, or even understand how to use. Everybody's crashed a system now or then.''

Someone at Troup's end coughs in disagreement and paranoia. David corrects himself. No need to admit he's ever done anything illegal, now, is there? ''I'd say 90 percent of everybody. Everybody's got that urge, you know? `God, I've got full system control – I could just do a recursive rm [a repeated cycle to begin removing things] and kiss this system goodbye.' More likely, someone will create a small bug like putting a space before everyone's password [making it impossible for anyone to log on] and see how long it takes the system operator to figure it out.'' The passwords will appear correct when the system operator lists them – except that each one will have a tiny space before it. When the sysop matches the user's password with the one that the computer says the user should have, the operator won't notice the extra space before the computer's version.

This is the ''phony phone call'' to the nth power. Instead of pranking one person on the other end, the hacker incapacitates a big company run by "nasty suits.'' Hard to resist, especially when it's a company known to keep tabs on us. The events that frightened Troup out of hacking for a while concerned just such a company. ''TRW is the Holy Grail target for hackers. They're into everything, which is why everyone wants to get into them. They claimed to be impenetrable, which is half the reason why everyone wants to get in. The more you look into it, the more security holes they have. They aren't so bad.'' One of Troup's friends in the background chortles with pride. "It's difficult, because you have to cover your tracks, but it's not impossible. Just time-consuming,'' Troup explains.

''I remember TRW used to have those commercials that just said `TRW, making the world a better tomorrow.' That's all they did. They were getting us used to seeing them. Because they were into everything. They sent Tiger Teams [specialized computer commando squads who establish security protocol in a system] into every system the government has, either to improve the system's security or to build it in the first place. They have back doors into everything they've ever worked on. They can assume control over anything they want to. They're big. They're bad. And they've got more power than they should have, which is why we were after them. They had Tiger Teams into airport security, aerospace security. And the government gets software from TRW, upgrades from TRW [also, potentially, with back doors].

''When we got all the way up to the keyhole satellite, we said `That's enough.' We have really good resources. We have people that can pose as nonpeople – they have Social Security numbers, tax IDs, everything. But we all got kind of spooked by all this. We had a continuation of our plan mapped out, but we decided not to go through with it. We ditched all the TRW stuff we had. I gave it to a friend who buried it underwater somewhere along the Atlantic shelf. If I tell him to get it back, he will, but if I tell him to get it back using a slightly different phrase, he will disappear ... for obvious reasons.''

Most purposeful hacking is far less romantic, and done simply to gain access to systems for their computing power. If someone is working on a complex program or set of computations, it's more convenient to use some corporation's huge system to carry out the procedure in a few minutes or hours than to tie up one's own tiny personal computer for days. The skill comes in getting the work done before the sysop discovers the intrusion. As one hacker explains to me through an encrypted electronic mail message, ''They might be on to you, but you're not done with them yet – you're still working on the thing for some company or another. But if you've got access to, say, twenty or thirty Unix systems, you can pop in and out of as many as you like, and change the order of them. You'll always appear to be coming from a different location. They'll be shooting in the dark. You're untraceable.''

This hacker takes pride in popping in and out of systems the way a surfer raves about ducking the whitewater and gliding through the tube. But, just as a surfer might compete for cash, prizes, or beer endorsements, many young hackers who begin with Cyberia in their hearts are quickly tempted by employers who can profit from their skill. The most dangerous authoritarian response to young cyberian hackers may not be from the law but from those hoping to exploit their talents.

With a hacker I'll call Pete, a seventeen-year-old engineering student at Columbia University, I set up a real-time computer conference call in which several other hackers from around the country could share some of their stories about a field called ''industrial hacking.'' Because most of the participants believe they have several taps on their telephone lines, they send their first responses through as a series of strange glyphs on the screen. After Pete establishes the cryptography protocol and deciphers the incoming messages, they look like this (the names are mine):

#1: The Purist

Industrial hacking is darkside hacking. Company A hires you to slow down, destroy, screw up, or steal from company B's R&D division [research and development]. For example, we could set up all their math wrong on their cadcams [computer aided design programs] so that when they look at it on the computer it seems fine, but when they try to put the thing together, it comes out all wrong. If all the parts of an airplane engine are machined 1mm off, it's just not going to work.

#2: The Prankster

There was a guy in Florida who worked on a cadcam system which used pirated software. He was smart, so he figured out how to use it without any manuals. He worked there for about a year and a half but was fired unfairly. He came to us get them shut down. We said ''Sure, no problem.'' Cadcam software companies send out lots of demos. We got ahold of some cadcam demos, and wrote a simple assembly program so that when the person puts the disk in and types the "install'' or ''demo'' command, it wipes out the whole hard disk. So we wrapped it up in its package, sent it out to a friend in Texas or wherever the software company was really from, and had him send it to the targeted company with a legit postmark and everything. Sure enough, someone put the demo in, and the company had to end up buying over $20,000 worth of software. They couldn't say anything because the software we wiped out was illegal anyway.

The Purist

That's nothing. That's a personal vendetta. Industrial hacking is big business. Most corporations have in-house computer consultants who do this sort of thing. But as a freelancer you can get hired as a regular consultant by one of these firms – say McDonnell Douglas – get into a vice president's office, and show them the specs of some Lockheed project, like a new advanced tactical fighter which he has not seen, and say, ''There's more where this came from.'' You can get thousands, even millions of dollars for this kind of thing.

#3: The Theorist

During the big corporate takeover craze, companies that were about to be taken over began to notice more and more things begin to go wrong. Then payroll would get screwed up, their electronic mail messages aren't going through, their phone system keeps dying every now and then in the middle of the day. This is part of the takeover effort.

Someone on the board of directors may have some buddy from college who works in the computer industry who he might hire to do an odd job now and again.

The Purist

I like industrial hacking for the idea of doing it. I started about a year or so ago. And William Gibson brought romance into it with Neuromancer. It's so doable.

#4: The Pro

We get hired by people moving up in the political systems, drug cartels, and of course corporations. We even work for foreign companies. If Toyota hired us to hit Ford, we'd hit Ford a little bit, but then turn around and knock the hell out of Toyota. We'd rather pick on them than us.

Most industrial hackers do two hacks at once. They get information on the company they're getting paid to hit, but they're also hacking into the company that's paying them, so that if they get betrayed or stabbed in the back they've got their butts covered. So it's a lot of work. The payoffs are substantial, but it's a ton of work.

In a real takeover, 50% of the hacking is physical. A bunch of you have to go and get jobs at the company. You need to get the information but you don't want to let them on to what you're doing. The wargames-style automatic dialer will get discovered scanning. They know what that is; they've had that happen to them many times before.

I remember a job that I did on a local TV station. I went in posing as a student working on a project for a communications class. I got a tour with an engineer, and I had a notebook and busily wrote down everything he said. The guy took me back where the computers were. Now in almost every computer department in the United States, written on a piece of masking tape on the phone jack or the modem itself is the phone number of that modem. It saves me the time and trouble of scanning 10,000 numbers. I'm already writing notes, so I just write in the number, go home, wait a week or so, and then call them up (you don't call them right away, stupid). Your local telephone company won't notice you and the company you're attacking won't notice you. You try to be like a stealth bomber. You sneak up on them slowly, then you knock the hell out of them. You take the military approach. You do signals intelligence, human intelligence; you've got your special ops soldier who takes a tour or gets a job there. Then he can even take a tour as an employee – then he's trusted for some reason – just because he works there, which is the biggest crock of shit.

DISCONNECT

Someone got paranoid then, or someone's line voltage changed enough to suggest a tap, and our conversation had been automatically terminated.

Pete stores the exchange on disk, then escorts me out onto the fire escape of his apartment for a toke and a talk. He can see I'm a little shaken up.

''That's not really hacking,'' he says, handing me the joint. I thank him with a nod but opt for a Camel Light. "That's cracking. Hacking is surfing. You don't do it for a reason. You just do it.'' We watch a bum below us on the street rip a piece of cardboard off an empty refrigerator box and drag it away – presumably it will be his home for tonight.

''That guy is hacking in a way,'' I offer. "Social hacking.''

''That's bullshit. He's doing it for a reason. He stole that cardboard because he needs shelter. There's nothing wrong with that, but he's not having such a good time, either.''

''So what's real hacking? What's it about?''

Pete takes a deep toke off his joint and smiles. ''It's tapping in to the global brain. Information becomes a texture ... almost an experience. You don't do it to get knowledge. You just ride the data. It's surfing, and they're all trying to get you out of the water. But it's like being a environmental camper at the same time: You leave everything just like you found it. Not a trace of your presence. It's like you were never there.''

Strains of Grateful Dead music come from inside the apartment. No one's in there. Pete has his radio connected to a timer. It's eleven o'clock Monday night in New York, time for David Gans's radio show, The Dead Hour. Pete stumbles into the apartment and begins scrounging for a cassette. I offer him one of my blank interview tapes.

''It's low bias but it'll do,'' he says, grabbing the tape from me and shoving it into a makeshift cassette machine that looks like a relic from Hogan's Heroes. "Don't let the case fool you. I reconditioned the whole thing myself. It's got selenium heads, the whole nine yards.'' Satisfied that the machine is recording properly, he asks, ''You into the Dead?''

''Sure am.'' I can't let this slip by. "I've noticed lots of computer folks are into the Dead ... and the whole subculture.'' I hate to get to the subject of psychedelics too early. However, Pete doesn't require the subtlety.

''Most of the hackers I know take acid.'' Pete searches through his desk drawers. "It makes you better at it.'' I watch him as he moves around the room. ''Look at this.'' He shows me a ticket to a Grateful Dead show. In the middle of the ticket is a colour reproduction of a fractal.

''Now, you might ask, what's a computer-generated image like that doing on a Dead ticket, huh?''

Chapter 2 Operating from Total Oblivion

The fractal is the emblem of Cyberia. Based on the principles of chaos math, it's an icon, a metaphor, a fashion statement, and a working tool all at the same time. It's at once a highly technical computer-mathematics achievement and a psychedelic vision, so even as an image it bridges the gap between these two seemingly distant, or rather ''discontinuous,'' corners of Cyberia. Once these two camps are connected, the real space defined by "Cyberia'' emerges.

Fractals were discovered in the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot, who was searching for ways to help us cope, mathematically, with a reality that is not as smooth and predictable as our textbooks describe it. Conventional math, Mandelbrot complained, treats mountains like cones and clouds like spheres. Reality is much ''rougher'' than these ideal forms. No real-world surface can accurately be described as a "plane,'' because no surface is absolutely two-dimensional. Everything has nooks and crannies; nothing is completely smooth and continuous. Mandelbrot's fractals – equations which grant objects a fractional dimensionality – are revolutionary in that they accept the fact that reality is not a neat, ordered place. Now, inconsistencies ranging from random interference on phone lines to computer research departments filled with Grateful Deadheads all begin to make perfect sense.

Mandelbrot's main insight was to recognize that chaos has an order to it. If you look at a natural coastline from an airplane, you will notice certain kinds of mile-long nooks and crannies. If you land on the beach, you will see these same shapes reflected in the rock formations, on the surface of the rocks themselves, and even in the particles making up the rocks. This self-similarity is what brings a sense of order into an otherwise randomly rough and strange terrain. Fractals are equations that model the irregular but stunningly self-similar world in which we have found ourselves.

But these discontinuous equations work differently from traditional math equations, and challenge many of our assumptions about the way our reality works. Fractals are circular equations: After you get an answer, you plug it back into the original equation again and again, countless times. This is why computers have been so helpful in working with these equations. The properties of these circular equations are stunningly different from those of traditional linear equations. The tiniest error made early on can amplify into a tremendous mistake once the equation has been ''iterated'' thousands of times. Think of a wristwatch that loses one second per hour. After a few days, the watch is only a minute or so off. But after weeks or months of iterating that error, the watch will be completely incorrect. A tiny change anywhere in a fractal will lead to tremendous changes in the overall system. The force causing the change need not be very powerful. Tremendous effects can be wrought by the gentlest of "feedbacks.''

Feedback makes that loud screeching sound whenever a microphone is brought close to its own speaker. Tiny noises are fed back and iterated through the amplification system thousands of times, amplified again and again until they are huge, annoying blasts of sound. Feedback and iteration are the principles behind the now-famous saying, ''When a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it can cause a thunderstorm in New York.'' A tiny action feeds back into a giant system. When it has iterated fully, the feedback causes noticeable changes. The idea has even reached the stock market, where savvy investors look to unlikely remote feedbacks for indications of which way the entire market might move once those tiny influences are fully iterated. Without the computer, though, and its ability to iterate equations, and then to draw them as pictures on a screen, the discovery of fractals would never have been possible.

Mandelbrot was at IBM, trying to find a pattern underlying the random, intermittent noise on their telephone lines, which had been causing problems for their computer modems. The fact that the transmission glitches didn't seem to follow many real pattern would have rendered a classical mathematician defenceless. But Mandelbrot, looking at the chaotic distribution of random signals, decided to search for signs of self-similarity – that is, like the coastline of beach, would the tiny bursts between bursts of interference look anything like the large ones? Of course they did. Inside each burst of interference were moments of clear reception. Inside each of those moments of clear reception were other bursts of interference and so on. Even more importantly, the pattern of their intermittency was similar on each level.

This same phenomenon – self-similarity – can be observed in many systems that were previously believed to be totally irregular and unexplainable, ranging from the weather and the economy to the course of human history. For example, each tiny daily fluctuation in the weather mirrors the climatic record of the history of the planet. Each major renaissance in history is itself made up of smaller renaissance events, whose locations in time mirror the overall pattern of renaissances throughout history. Every chaotic system appears to be adhering to an underlying order of self-similarity.

This means that our world is entirely more interdependent than we have previously understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability to redesign reality at large. Mandelbrot had begun to map the landscape of Cyberia.

It Is the Mind of God

The terrace of the Applied Sciences Building overlooks what students at University of California at Santa Cruz call ''Elf Land'' – a dense section of woods where psychedelically enhanced humans meet interdimensional beings. Back in the corridor of the building, posters of computer-generated fractal images depicting the "arithmetic limits of iterative nonlinear equations'' line the walls. The pictures nearest the terrace look like the ferns on the floor of the forest. The ones farther back look more like the arrangements of the trees above them. Posters still farther seem like aerial maps of the forest, seen from above.

The mathematician residing in this self-similar niche of academia and psychedelia is Ralph Abraham, who broke through to Cyberia on his own, and in a very different manner. He abandoned Princeton University in favor of U.C. Santa Cruz in 1968, during what he calls ''the apex of the counterculture.'' It was while taking psychedelics in huge barn "be-ins'' with his newfound friends that Abraham became familiar with what people were calling the ''emotional reality'' of numbers, and this led him to the hills and caves of the Far East where he spent several years meditating and hallucinating. On returning to the university and his computer, he embarked with renewed vigor into hyperspace to churn out the equations that explain his hallucinations and our existence.

While it seems so unlikely to the modern mind that psychedelics could contribute to real progress in mathematics and science, cyberians, for the most part, take this connection for granted. ''In the sixties,'' Abraham explains, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be creative in mathematics, you have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness. What's going on now is at least as big a thing as the invention of the wheel.''

The brief kiss Abraham witnessed was the marriage of two powerful intellectual communities, both of which had touched Cyberia – one theoretically and the other experientially. And as cyberian mathematicians like Abraham tripped out further, they saw how this kiss was itself a fractal event, marking a point in human history from which the underlying shape or order of existence – the very "roughness'' of reality – could be inferred. They had conceived and birthed their own renaissance.

Abraham has since dedicated himself to the implications of this rebirth. He sees the most important, seemingly sudden, and non sequitur events in human history – of which the kiss above is one – as part of an overall fractal curve. ''It's happened before. The Renaissance was one. Christianity is one. The troubadors in the south of France; agriculture; the new concept of time that came along with the Old Testament – they are all actually revivals. But they are more than revivals. It's sort of a spiral model where there's a quantum leap to a new level of organization and complexity.''

Today, Abraham is in his Santa Cruz office, wearing a sweatshirt, drawstring pants, and Birkenstocks. He does not sport a slide rule or pocket protector. He is Cyberia's Village Mathematician, and his words are reassuring to those who are living in a world that has already taken this quantum leap. Just as the fractal enabled Mandelbrot to comfort IBM executives about the ultimately orderly nature of their line interference, Abraham uses fractals to show how this uncharted island in history on which we have found ourselves fits into a larger picture.

''There is this fractal structure of discontinuity. If you look at the biggest discontinuities in human history, you will see they all seem to have very similar structures, suggesting a mathematical model behind the evolution of civilization.''

Abraham argues that cyberian interest in the pagan, psychedelic, spiritual, and tribal is not in the least contradictory to the advances in computer technology and mathematics. Historically, he points out, renaissance periods have always involved a resurgence of archaic elements along with the invention of new technologies and mathematical systems. The success of Cyberia, according to the bearded technosage, will depend on our ability to put these disparate elements together. ''We have emphasized integration and synthesis, trying to put everything together in one understanding, using mathematical models only as one tool. We are also open to various pagan elements like astrology, telepathy, the paranormal, and so on. We're an interesting network.''

For younger cyberians, Abraham's network provides an invaluable template by which they can direct their own activities. As Ralph would say, he ''groks'' their experience; he understands how these kids feel responsible for reshaping not only their own reality but the course of human history.

''We have to consciously interact with the creation of the future in order for it to be other than it was.'' In past renaissances, each creative birth, each intimation of what we can call "fractal reality,'' was buried by a tremendous counterrevolutionary force. ''What happened with the Renaissance? Within 200 or 250 years, it was dead again.'' Society refused to cope with Cyberia then. But the invention of the computer coupled with the undeniable usefulness and profound beauty of the fractal has made today's renaissance impossible to resist.

Valley of the Nerds

Two men are staring into a computer screen at Apple's research and development branch. While the first, a computer nerd straight out of Central Casting, mans the keyboard, beside him sits the other, John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, psychedelics explorer, and Wyoming rancher. They watch the colorful paisley patterns representing fractal equations swirl like the aftervisions of a psychedelic hallucination. Tiny Martian colonies forming on an eerie continental coastline. The computer operator magnifies one tiny piece of the pattern, and the detail expands to occupy the entire screen. Dancing microorganisms cling to a blue coral reef. The new patterns reflect the shape of the original picture. He zooms in again and the shapes are seen again and again. A supernova explodes into weather system, then spirals back down to the pods on the leaf of a fern plant. The two men witness the creation and recreation of universes.

Barlow scratches his whiskers and tips his cowboy hat. ''It's like looking at the mind of God.''

The nerd corrects him: ''It is the mind of God.''

And as the latest kiss between the worlds of science and spirituality continues, the fractal finds its way into the new American psychedelic folklore – as evidenced by that fractal-enhanced Grateful Dead ticket.

It's the morning after a Dead show, in fact, when the young man who designed that famous concert ticket unveils his latest invention for a small group of friends gathered at his Palo Alto home. Dan Kottke, who was one of the original Apple engineers, left the company and sold off his stock to launch his career as an independent computer graphic designer. He has just finished the prototype for his first effort: a small light-up LED device that flashes words and pictures. He plugs it in and the group watches it go through its paces. It's not as trippy as a fractal, but it's pretty mesmerizing all the same. So is Kottke, who approaches the psychedelic-spiritual search with the same patience and discipline he'd use to assemble an intricate circuit board.

''When I was a freshman in college,'' he carefully removes the wires from the back of his invention, "I would take psychedelics and sit by myself for a whole day. What I arrived at was that cosmic consciousness was a completely normal thing that one day everyone would arrive at, if they would just sit and think clearly.''

Kottke, like many of the brilliant people at his home today, sees Cyberia as a logical result of psychedelics and rationality. ''That's how I became friends with Steve Jobbs. We used to take psychedelics together and talk about Buddhist philosophy. I had no idea he was connected with Woz [Steve Wozniak] or selling blue boxes [telephone dialers that allow you to make free calls] at the time. We just talked about transcendentalism and Buddhism and listened to Bob Dylan. It must have been his alter ego.''

Until Jobbs and Wozniak created the Apple personal computer, cyberian computer exploration was limited to the clunky and essentially unusable Altair brand. ''It appealed to the soldering iron kinds of hackers,'' explains Dan, "but not the spiritual kind.'' So the very invention of the personal computer, then, was in some ways psychedelics-influenced. Maybe that's why they called it Apple: the fruit of forbidden knowledge brought down to the hands of the consumer through the garage of a Reid College acid head? In any case, the Apple gave computing power and any associated spiritual insights to the public and, most important, to their children.

It's easy to understand why kids are better at learning to use computers than adults. Just like in the immigrant family who comes to America, it is the children who learn the new language first and best. When mainframe computers appeared in high schools around the country, it was the students, not the administrators, who became the systems operators. This set into a motion a ''revenge of the nerds'' on a scale we haven't yet fully comprehended. But when the computer industry was born and looking desperately for skilled programmers and developers, these kids were too young to be hired. The companies turned instead to the acid heads.

''When your brain is forming,'' explains Kottke, using his long fingers to draw pictures in the oriental rug, "it makes axons that are long, linear things, feeling their way to some part of the brain very far away to get connected. Your consciousness develops the same way. The middle teen years are about making connections between things in your mind like computers and psychedelics and fractals and music.'' Everyone is staring at the impression Dan's fingers have left in the rug, relating the pattern he's drawn to the design of the colorful weave underneath.

Kottke's soft voice grounds the group in reality once again. ''But this kind of thinking is very easily discouraged. The quelling of creativity is like a virus that gets passed down generation to generation. Psychedelics can break that cycle.'' So, according to firsthanders like Kottke, everything old becomes new again, and the psychedelics user's mind is rejuvenated to its original ability to wander and wonder. The frames and systems of logic one has been using to organize experience fall away. What better language to adopt than computer language, which is also unfettered by prejudices, judgments and neuroses?

''Consciousness is binary,'' poses Kottke, from a casual lotus position. "It's essentially digital.'' At least this is the way computers ''think.'' When information is stored digitally rather than in a picture, on a record, or even in a book of words, it is broken down into a series of yes/no's or dot/dashes. Things must be spelled out explicitly. The computer functions purely in duality but, unlike the human mind, has no interpretive grid.

One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience as it relates to the human computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from Los Angeles who archives Tim Leary's writing, is that it ''reformats the hard disk and clears out the ram.'' That is, one's experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context and put into a new order. One sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of thinking, parallel cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies. Meanwhile, trivial cares of the moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-wrenching crucible of intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life without many of the cognitive traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In other words, the tripper gains the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the computer does.

Just like the great chaos mathematicians, great programmers must be able to come from ''a point of total oblivion'' in order to fully grok cyber language, and in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, psychedelics users were the only qualified, computer-literate people available to rapidly growing companies trying to develop software and hardware before their competitors. In the field of pure research, no one cares what an employee looks like or what kinds of drugs he eats – it's creative output that matters. Steve Jobbs felt this way, which is why his Macintosh project at Apple was staffed mostly by tie-dye – wearing young men. Today, even executives at the more establishment-oriented computer companies have been forced to include psychedelics-influenced developers in their ranks.

Chris Krauskopf, manager of the Human Interface Program at Intel, admits, ''Some of the people here are very, very, very bright. They were bored in school, and as a result they hung out, took drugs, and got into computers.'' Luckily for them, the drug tests that defense contractors such as Intel are required to give their employees cannot detect psychedelics, which are taken in microdoses. As for marijuana tests, well, it's gotten pretty easy to predict when those are coming, and a phone call or two from personnel executives to the right people in Research and Development can easily give, say, forty-eight hours' notice. ...

A high-level personnel executive from a major Southern California defense contractor admits that the company's biggest problem now is that ''alternative culture members'' are refusing to work for them. In a secret, off-the-record lunch talk, the rather elderly gentleman said, between sips of Earl Grey, that the "long hairs we've hired have the ability to attack computer problems from completely different angles. It would be interesting to take the plans of a stealth bomber and trace back each innovation to the computer it was drawn on. I bet the tie-dyes would win out over the pocket-protectors every time.'' According to him, the company's biggest problem now is finding programmers willing to work for a defense industry contractor. ''They're all against the idea of making weapons. We may not be able to meet our production schedule – we may lose contracts – because we can't get enough of them to work for us.''

Marc de Groot, a programmer and virtual-reality designer from San Francisco, understands why companies in the defense industry might depend on cyberians. ''My question to you is: Which is the less moral of the two propositions: doing drug testing on your employees, or doing defense contracting in the first place? That's the real question: Why are a bunch of acid heads working for a company that makes weapons?'' De Groot's two-bedroom apartment in the hills is modestly appointed with furniture that looks like leftovers from his college dorm room. Trouble is, de Groot didn't go to college. After three tries, he realized he could learn more about computers by working for his university as a programmer than by taking their classes, so he dropped out as a student and dropped back in as an employee.

''I think that people who like to expand their minds with things like higher math and computers and media are fundamentally the same people who would want to expand their minds with anything available. But this is a very bad political climate for talking about all this. You can't mix a thing like drugs with any intellectual endeavor and have it stay as credible.'' Yet, de Groot's apartment – which has one small bedroom dedicated to life's comforts and the rest filled with computer hardware – shows many signs of the alternative culture he prefers to keep out of the public eye. Dan Kottke's fractal Grateful Dead ticket is pinned to the wall next to the computer on which de Groot designed sound systems for VPL, the leading "virtual reality'' interface design firm.

Psychedelics are a given in Silicon Valley. They are an institution as established as Intel, Stanford, marriage, or religion. The infrastructure has accommodated them. Word of which companies are ''cool'' and which are not spreads about as rapidly as Dead tickets. De Groot finds his "user-friendly'' employment opportunities on the WELL, an acronym for Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or on other bulletin board services (BBSs).

''One of the articles that goes around on a regular basis is a list of all the companies that do urine testing in the Silicon Valley. So you can look it up ahead of time and decide that you don't want to apply. Computer programmers have set up this information service because they know that a lot of their friends and they themselves use these drugs.''

De Groot pauses. He is careful not to implicate himself, but his emotions are running high. ''And even more than that, people who don't use the drugs are outraged because of the invasion of privacy. They just feel like it's an infringement on civil liberties. And I think they're right. I have a friend who applied simultaneously at Sun Micro Systems and Xerox Park, Palo Alto Research Center. And he found out – and he's someone who uses drugs – he found out that Xerox Park was gonna do a urine test so he dried out and he went in and did the urine test and passed and then they offered him the job, and he said, `I'm not taking the job because you people do urine testing and I'm morally opposed to it,' and he went to work for Sun. Sun does not do urine testing. They're very big on not doing it. I think it's great.''

Not surprisingly, Sun Micro Systems' computers run some of the most advanced fractal graphics programs, and Intel – which is also quite ''Deadhead-friendly,'' is an industry leader in experimental technologies like virtual reality. The companies that lead in the Valley of the Nerds are the ones that recognize the popularity of psychedelics among their employees. Still, although they have contributed to or perhaps even created the computer revolution, psychedelics-using cyberians feel like a persecuted sect in an oppressive ancient society that cannot see its own superstitious paranoia. As an engineer at a Microsoft research facility complains, drug testing makes her feel like the "target victim of an ancient voodoo spell.''

From the cyberian perspective, that's exactly what's going on; so computer programmers must learn not to give any hair or bodily fluids to their employers. The confiscated parts are being analyzed in scientific ''rituals'' that look into the employee's past and determine whether she has engaged in her own rituals – like smoking pot – that have been deemed heretical by the dominating religious body. In this case, that dominating body is the defence industry, and the heretics are pot smokers and psychedelics users, who have demonstrated a propensity to question the justifiability of the war machine.

Chapter 3 The Global Electronic Village

Persecution of psychedelics users has fostered the development of a cyberian computer subculture. De Groot is a model citizen of the cyber community and dedicates his time, money, and equipment to fostering the ''Global Electronic Village.'' One system he developed, which takes up almost half his apartment, is an interface between a ham radio and a computer.

He eats an ice cream from the shop downstairs as he explains how his intention in building the interface was to ''provide ham radio operators with access to the electronic mail services of UNIX systems to other sites on the Internet. My terminal is up twenty-four hours a day. It was never done before, it was fun to do, it gave me the ability to learn about electronic mail, and it provided a service.'' No profit? "You could make money off of it, I suppose, but my specific concern was to advance the state of the radio art.''

It's hard to keep in mind that young men like de Groot are not just exploring the datasphere but actively creating the networks that make it up. This is not just a hobby or weekend pastime; this is the construction of the future.

De Groot views technology as a way to spread the notion of interconnectedness. ''We don't have the same distance between us anymore. Camcorders have changed everything. Whenever something happens in the world, chances are that someone's around with a camcorder to tape it. We're all neighbors in a little village, as it were.'' Even de Groot's more professional endeavors have been geared toward making computers more accessible to the community at large. The success of the cyberian paradigm is dependent on regular people learning to work with the technologies developed by vanguard, countercultural entrepreneurs and designers.

''If you don't adhere to the new paradigm then you're not going to survive.'' De Groot puts down his ice cream spoon to make the point. "It's sink or swim. People who refuse to get involved with computers now are hurting themselves, not anybody else. In a very loose sense, they are at a disadvantage survival-wise. Their ability to have a good-quality life will be lessened by their reluctance to get with the program.''

Getting with the program is just a modem away. This simple device literally plugs a user in to cyberspace. Cyberspace, or the datasphere, consists of all the computers that are attached to phone lines or to one another directly. If a computer by itself can be likened to a cassette deck, having a modem turns it into a two-way radio. After the first computer nets between university and military research facilities went up, scientists and other official subscribers began to ''post'' their most recent findings to databases accessible to everyone on the system. Now, if someone at, say, Stanford discovers a new way to make a fission reactor, scientists and developers around the world instantly know of the find. They also have a way of posting their responses to the development for everyone to see, or the option of sending a message through electronic mail, or "E-mail,'' which can be read only by the intended recipient. So, for example, a doctor at Princeton sees the posting from Stanford. A list of responses and commentary appears after the Stanford announcement, to which the Princeton doctor adds his questions about the validity of the experiment. Meanwhile, he E-mails his friends at a big corporation that Stanford's experiment was carried out by a lunatic and that the corporation should cease funding that work.

The idea of networking through the computer quickly spread. Numerous public bulletins boards sprang up, as well as information services like Compuserve and Prodigy. Information services are large networks of databanks that a user can call through the modem and access everything from stock market reports and Macintosh products updates to back issues of newspapers and Books in Print. Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, an early but unprecentedly user-friendly way of moving through files, has been working for the past decade or so on the ultimate database, a project aptly named ''Xanadu.'' His hope is to compile a database of – literally – everything, and all of the necessary software to protect copyrights, make royalty payments, and myriad other legal functions. Whether or not a storehouse like Xanadu is even possible, the fact that someone is trying, and being supported by large, Silicon Valley businesses like Autodesk, a pioneer in user-interface and cyberspace technology, legitimizes the outlook that one day all data will be accessible from any node – any single computer – in the matrix. The implications for the legal community are an endless mire of property, privacy, and information issues, usually boiling down to one of the key conflicts between pre- and postcyberian mentality: Can data be owned, or is it free for all? Our ability to process data develops faster than our ability to define its fair use.

The best place to watch people argue about these issues is on public bulletin boards like the Whole Earth `Lectronic Link. In the late 1970s, public and private bulletin board services sprang up as a way for computer users to share information and software over phone lines. Some were like clubs for young hackers called kødz kidz, who used BBSs to share anything from Unix source code to free software to recently cracked phone numbers of corporate modems. Other BBSs catered to specialized users' groups, like Macintosh users, IBM users, software designers, and even educators. Eventually, broad-based bulletin board services, including the WELL, opened their phone lines for members to discuss issues, create E-mail addresses, share information, make announcements, and network personally, creatively, and professionally.

The WELL serves as a cyber-village hall. As John Barlow explains, ''In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not what either they or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules.''

The discussions on the WELL are organized into conferences. These conferences are broken down into topics, which themselves are made up of individual responses. For example, there's a conference called EFF, which is dedicated to discussing issues related to Electronic Frontiers Foundation, a group that is attempting to develop legal frameworks for cyberactivities. If you browse the topics on the EFF conference, you will see a list of the conversations now going on. (Now is a tricky word. It's not that users are continuously plugged in to the conference and having a real-time discussion. Conversations occur over a period of days, weeks, or months.) They might be about "Copyright and Electronic Mail", or "Sentencing of Hackers", or even ''Virtual Sex''!

Once you pick a topic in which to participate, you read an opening statement that describes the topic or issues being discussed. It may be as simple as "I just read The Turbulent Mirror by Briggs and Peat. Is anyone interested in discussing the implications of chaos math on Western philosophy?" or, "I'm thinking of buying a hydroponic system for growing sensemilla. Any advice?" Other interested participants then enter their responses, one after the other, which are numbered in the order entered. Conversations can drift into related or unrelated areas or even lead to the creation of new topics. All participants are required to list themselves by name and user identification (userid) so that someone may E-mail a response directly to them rather than post it on the topic for everyone to see. The only rule on the WELL is, ''you own your own words,'' which means that anything someone posts onto the WELL remains his own property, so to speak, and that no one may exploit another user's words without permission.

But the WELL is not a dry, computery place. Once on the WELL, there's a tangible feeling of being ''plugged in'' to a cyber community. One develops a cyber personality unencumbered by his looks and background and defined entirely by his entries to topics. The references he makes to literature, the media, religion, his friends, his lifestyle, and his priorities create who he is in cyberspace. One can remain on the sidelines watching others make comments, or one can dive in and participate.

Cyberspace as Chaos

The danger of participation is that there are hundreds or even thousands of potentially critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be challenged, a lie will be uncovered, plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth serum. Violations of cyber morality or village ethics are immediately brought to light and passed through the circuits of the entire datasphere at lightning speed. A store with a bad returns policy that cheats a WELL user has its indiscretions broadcast globally within minutes. Information about crooked politicians, drug conspiracies, or other news stories that might be censored from sponsored media outlets finds an audience in cyberspace.

The cyber community has been made possible by the advent of the personal computer and the telecommunications network. Other major contributors include television and the satellite system as well as the appearance of consumer-grade video equipment, which has made it more than likely for police indiscretions to occur within shooting range of a camcorder. The cyber revolution has made the world a smaller place. Just as a company called TRW can expose anyone's economic history, links like the WELL, UseNet, or even CNN can expose TRW, too. Access to cyberspace – formerly reserved for the military or advanced scientific research – now alters the context in which many individuals relate to the world.

Members of the Global Village see themselves as part of a fractal event. The virtual community even incorporates and promotes many of the principles of chaos mathematics on social and political levels. A tiny, remote voice criticizing the ethics of a police action or the validity of an experimental result gets heard and iterated throughout the net.

Ultimately, the personal computer and its associated technologies may be our best access points to Cyberia. They even serve as a metaphor for cyberians who have nothing to do with computers but who look to the net as a model for human interaction. It allows for communication without the limitations of time or space, personality or body, religion or nationality. The vast computer-communications network is a fractal approach to human consciousness. It provides the means for complex and immediate feedback and iteration, and is even self-similar in its construction, with giant networks mirroring BBSs, mirroring users' own systems, circuit boards, and components that themselves mirror each participant's own neural biocircuitry. In further self-similarity, the monitors on some of these computers depict complex fractal patterns mirroring the psychedelics-induced hallucinations of their designers, and graphing – for the first time – representations of existence as a chaotic system of feedback and iteration.

The datasphere is a hardwiring of the planet itself, providing ways of distributing and iterating information throughout the net. To join in, one needs only to link up. Or is it really that easy?

Arbitrating Anarchy

David Gans, host of The Grateful Dead Hour (the national radio program that our Columbia University hacker taped a few nights ago) is having a strange week. The proposal he's writing for his fourth Grateful Dead book is late, he still has to go into the studio to record his radio show, his band rehearsal didn't get out until close to dawn, and something odd is occurring on the WELL this morning. Gans generally spends at least several hours a day sitting in his Oakland studio apartment, logged onto the WELL. A charter member of the original WELL bulletin board, he's since become host of dozens of conferences and topics ranging from the Grateful Dead to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. In any given week, he's got to help guide hundreds or even thousands of computer interchanges. But this week there are even more considerations. An annoying new presence has made itself known on the WELL: a user calling himself ''Stink.''

Stink showed up late one night in the Grateful Dead conference, insisting to all the Deadheads that ''Jerry Garcia stinks.'' In the name of decorum and tolerance, the Deadheads decided among themselves to ignore the prankster. "Maybe he'll get bored and go away,'' Gans repeatedly suggested. WELLbeings enjoy thinking of the WELL as a loving, anarchic open house, and resort to blocking someone out completely only if he's truly dangerous. Stealing passwords or credit card numbers, for example, is a much more excommunicable deed than merely annoying people with nasty comments.

But today David Gans's electronic mailbox is filled with messages from angry female WELLbeings. Stink has begun doing ''sends'' – immediate E-mail messages that appear on the recipient's screen with a "beep,'' interrupting whatever she is doing. People usually use sends when they notice that a good friend has logged on and want to experience a brief, ''live'' interchange. No one "sends'' a stranger. But, according to Gans's E-mail, females logged on to the WELL are receiving messages like ''Wanna dance?'' or "Your place or mine?'' on their screens, and have gotten a bit irked. Anonymous phone calls can leave a girl feeling chilly, at the very least. This is somehow an even greater violation of privacy. From reading the girl's postings, he knows her name, the topics she enjoys, how she feels about issues; if he's a hacker, who knows how much more he knows?

David realizes that giving Stink the silent treatment isn't working. But what to do? He takes it to the WELL staff, who, after discussing the problem with several other distressed topic hosts, decide to put Stink into a ''problem shell.'' Whenever he tries to log on to the WELL, he'll receive a message to call the main office and talk to a staff member. Until he does so, he is locked out of the system.

Stink tries to log on and receives the message, but he doesn't call in. Days pass. The issue seems dead. But topics about Stink and the implications of his mischievous presence begin to spring up all over the WELL. Many applaud the banishment of Stink, while others warn that this is the beginning of censorship. ''How,'' someone asks, "can we call ourselves an open, virtual community if we lock out those who don't communicate the way we like? Think of how many of us could have been kicked off the WELL by the same logic?'' ''What are we, Carebears?'' another retorts. "This guy was sick!''

David lets the arguments continue, defending the WELL staff's decision-making process where he can, stressing how many painful hours were spent deliberating on this issue. Meanwhile, though, he begins to do some research of his own and notices that Stink's last name – not a common one – is the same as another user of the WELL called Bennett. David takes a gamble and E-mails Bennett, who tells him that he's seen Stink's postings but that there's no relation.

But the next day, there's a new, startling addition to a special ''confession'' conference: Bennett admits that he is Stink. Stink's WELL account had been opened by Bennett's brother but never used. Bennett reopened the account and began using it as a joke, to vent his "alter ego.'' Free of his regular identity, he could be whoever he wanted and act however he dared with no personal repercussions. What had begun as a kind of thought experiment or acting exercise had soon gotten out of hand. The alter ego went out of control. Bennett, it turns out, was a mild-mannered member of conferences like Christianity, and in his regular persona had even consoled a fellow WELLbeing after her husband died. Bennett is not a hacker-kid; he has a wife and children, a job, a religion, a social conscience, and a fairly quiet disposition. He begs for the forgiveness of other WELLbeings and says he confessed because he felt so guilty lying to David Gans about what had happened. He wants to remain a member of the cyber community and eventually regain the trust of WELLbeings.

Some WELLbeings believe Bennett and forgive him. Others do not. ''He just confessed because he knows you were on to him, David. Good work.'' Some suggest a suspension, or even a community service sentence: "Isn't there some administrative stuff he can do at the WELL office as penance?''

But most people just wonder out loud about the strange cyber experience of this schizoid WELLbeing, and what it means for the Global Village at large. Was Bennett like this all the time and Stink merely a suppressed personality, or did Cyberia affect his psyche adversely, creating Stink where he didn't exist before? How vulnerable are the rest of us when one goes off his virtual rocker? Do the psychology and neurosis of everyday real-life human interactions need to follow us into cyberspace, or is there a way to leave them behind? Just how intimate can we get through our computers, and at what cost?

Chapter 4 Interfacing with the Technosphere

The evolution of computer and networking technology can be seen as a progression toward more user-friendly interfaces that encourage hypertext-style participation of both the computer illiterate and those who wish to interact more intimately in Cyberia than can be experienced by typing on a keyboard. DOS-style printed commands were replaced by the Macintosh interface in the late 1970s. Instead of typing instructions to the computer, users were encouraged to click and drag icons representing files across their screens and put them wherever they wanted, using the now-famous mouse. But this has all changed again with the development of virtual reality, the computer interface that promises to bring us into the matrix – mind, body, and soul.

VR, as it's called, replaces the computer screen with a set of 3-D, motion-sensitive goggles, the speaker with a set of 3-D headphones, and the mouse with a glove or tracking ball. The user gains the ability to move through a real or fictional space without using commands, text, or symbols. You put on the goggles, and you see a building, for example. You ''walk'' with your hand toward the doorway, open the door, and you're inside. As you do all this, you see the door approaching in complete perspective. Once you open the door, you see the inside of the building. As you turn your head to the left, you see what's to the left. As you look up, you see the ceiling. As you look to the right, let's say, you see a painting on the wall. It's a picture of a forest. You walk to the painting, but you don't stop. You go into the painting. Then you're in the forest. You look up, see the sun through the trees, and hear the wind rustle through the leaves. Behind you, you hear a bird chirping.

Marc de Groot (the Global Village ham radio interface) was responsible for that ''behind you'' part. His work involved the creation of 3-D sound that imitates the way the body detects whether a sound is coming from above, below, in front, or behind. To him, VR is a milestone in human development.

Virtual reality is a way of mass-producing direct experience. You put on the goggles and you have this world around you. In the beginning, there were animals, who had nothing but their experience. Then man came along, who processes reality in metaphors. We have symbology. One thing stands for another. Verbal noises stand for experience, and we can share experience by passing this symbology back and forth. Then the Gutenberg Press happened, which was the opportunity to mass-produce symbology for the first time, and that marked a real change. And virtual reality is a real milestone too, because we're now able for the first time to mass-produce the direct experience. We've come full circle.''

Comparisons with the Renaissance abound in discussions of VR. Just as the 3-D holograph serves as our cultural and scientific equivalent of the Renaissance's perspective painting, virtual reality stands as a 1990s computer equivalent of the original literacy movement. Like the printing press did nearly five hundred years ago, VR promises pop cultural access to information and experience previously reserved for experts.

De Groot's boss at VPL, Jaron Lanier, paints an even rosier picture of VR and its impact on humanity at large. In his speaking tours around the world, the dredlocked inventor explains how the VR interface is so transparent that it will make the computer disappear. ''Try to remember the world before computers. Try to remember the world of dreaming, when you dreamed and it was so. Remember the fluidity that we experienced before computers. Then you'll be able to grasp VR.'' But the promise of virtual reality and its current level of development are two very different things. Most reports either glow about future possibilities or rag on the crudeness of today's gear. Lanier has sworn off speaking to the media for precisely that reason.

''There's two levels of virtual reality. One is the ideas, and the other is the actual gear. The gear is early, all right? But these people from Time magazine came in last week and said, `Well, this stuff's really overblown,' and my answer's like, `Who's overblowing it?' – you know? It reminds me of an interview with Paul McCartney in the sixties where some guy from the BBC asked him if he did any illegal activities, and he answered, `Well, actually, yes.' And the reporter asked `Don't you think that's horrible to be spreading such things to the youth of the country?' and he said, `I'm not doing that. You're doing that.' ''

But the press and the public can't resist. The promise of VR is beyond imagination. Sure, it makes it possible to simulate the targeting and blow-up of an Iraqi power plant, but as a gateway to Cyberia itself, well ... the possibilities are endless. Imagine, for example, a classroom of students with a teacher, occurring in real time. The students are from twelve different countries, each plugged in to a VR system, all modemed to the teacher's house. They sit around a virtual classroom, see one another and the teacher. The teacher explains that today's topic is the Colosseum in ancient Rome. She holds up a map of ancient Rome and says, ''Let's go.'' The students fly over the skyline of the ancient city, following their teacher. "Stay together now,'' she says, pointing out the Colosseum and explaining why it was positioned across town from the Forum. The class lands at the main archway to the Colosseum. ''Let's go inside ...'' You get the idea.

More amazing to VR enthusiasts is the technology's ability to provide access to places the human body can't go, granting new perspectives on old problems much in the way that systems math provides planners with new outlooks on currents that don't follow the discovered patterns.

Warren Robinett, manager of the Head-Mounted Display Project at the University of North Carolina, explains how the strength of VR is that it allows the user to experience the inside of a cell, an anthill, or the shape of a galaxy:

''Virtual reality will prove to be a more compelling fantasy world than Nintendo, but even so, the real power of the head-mounted display is that it can help you perceive the real world in ways that were previously impossible. To see the invisible, to travel at the speed of light, to shrink yourself into microscopic worlds, to relive experiences – these are the powers that the head-mounted display offers you. Though it sounds like science fiction today, tomorrow it will seem as commonplace as talking on the telephone.''

One of these still fictional interface ideas is called ''wireheading.'' This is a new branch of computer technology where designers envision creating hardware that wires the computer directly to the brain. The user literally plugs wires into his own head, or has a microchip and transmitter surgically implanted inside the skull. Most realistic visions of wireheading involve as-yet univented biological engineering techniques where brain cells would be coaxed to link themselves to computer chips, or where organic matter would be grafted onto computer chips which could then be attached to a person's nerve endings. This "wetware,'' as science fiction writers call it, would provide a direct, physical interface between a human nervous system on one side, and computer hardware on the other. The computer technology for such an interface is here; the understanding of the human nervous system is not.

Although Jaron Lanier's company is working on ''nerve chip'' that would communicate directly with the brain, he's still convinced that the five senses provide the best avenues for interface.

There's no difference between the brain and the sense organs. The body is a continuity. Perception begins in the retina. Mind and body are one. You have this situation where millions of years of evolution have created this creature. What is this creature aside from the way it interfaces with the rest of creation? And how do you interface? Through the sense organs! So the sense organs are almost a better defining point than any other spot in the creature. They're central to identity and define our mode of being. We're visual, tactile, audio creatures. The whole notion of bypassing the senses is sort of like throwing away the actual treasure.''

Still, the philosophical implications of a world beyond the five senses are irresistible, and have drawn into the ring many worthy contenders to compete for the title of VR spokesperson. The most vibrant is probably Timothy Leary, whose ride on the crest of the VR wave has brought him back on the scene with the zeal of John the Baptist preparing the way for Christ, or a Harvard psychology professor preparing the intelligentsia for LSD.

''Just as the fish donned skin to walk the earth, and man donned a space suit to walk in space, we'll now don cyber suits to walk in Cyberia. In ten years most of our daily operations, occupational, educational, and recreational, will transpire in Cyberia. Each of us will be linked in thrilling cyber exchanges with many others whom we may never meet in person. Face-to-face interactions will be reserved for special, intimate, precious, sacramentalized events.''

Leary sees VR as an empowerment of the individual against the brainwashing forces of industrial slavedriving and imperialist expansion:

''By the year 2000, the I.C. (inner city) kid will slip on the EyePhone, don a form-fitting computer suit, and start inhabiting electronic environments either self-designed or pulled up from menus. At 9:00 a.m. she and her friend in Tokyo will meet in an electronic simulation of Malibu Beach for a flirtatious moment. At 9:30 a.m. she will meet her biology teacher in an electronic simulation of the heart for a hands-on `you are there' tutorial trip down the circulatory system. At 10:00 a.m. she'll be walking around medieval Verona with members of her English literature seminar to act out a scene from Romeo and Juliet. At 11:00 A.M. she'll walk onto an electronic tennis court for a couple of sets with her pal in Managua. At noon, she'll take off her cyberwear and enjoy a sensual, tasty lunch with her family in their nonelectronic kitchen.''

What was that part about Malibu Beach – the flirtatious moment? Sex, in VR? Lanier readily admits that VR can provide a reality built for two: ''It's usually kind of shocking how harmonious it is, this exposure of a collective energy between people. And so a similar thing would happen in a virtual world, where there's a bunch of people in it, and they're all making changes at once. These collective changes will emerge, which might be sort of like the Jungian level of virtual reality.'' Users will literally "see'' what the other means. Lanier's trick answer to the question of sex is, ''I think everything in virtual reality is sexual. It's eroticizing every moment, because it's all, like, creative.'' But that answer doesn't satisfy true cyber fetishists. If a cyber suit with full tactile stimulation is possible, then so should be cyber sex! A conversation about teledildonics, as it's been called, gets VR enthusiasts quite heated up.

Loading Worlds

We're at Bryan Hughes's house, headquarters of the Renaissance Foundation, a group dedicated to fostering the growth of the VR interface for artists and educators. Bryan has just unpacked some crates from Chris Krauskopf at Intel, which include a computer, a VR system designed by Eric Gullichsen called Sense8, and the prototype of a new kind of helmet-goggles combination. As Bryan searches through the crates for an important piece of connective hardware, the rest of us, who have been invited to try out the potentially consumer-grade VR, muse on the possibilities of virtual sex.

Dan, an architecture student at Berkeley with a penchant for ''smart drugs,'' begins. "They're working on something called `smart skin,' which is kind of a rubber for your whole body that you slip into, and with gel and electrodes it can register all your body movements and at the same time feed back to you any skin sensations it wants you to feel. If you pick up a virtual cup, it will send back to you the feeling of the texture of the cup, the weight, everything.''

''So this skin could also imitate the feeling of ... ?'' I venture.

''A girl,'' answers Harding, a graphic designer who makes hand-outs, T-shirts, and flyers for many of the acid house clubs in the Bay Area. "It would go like this: you either screw your computer, or screw someone else by modem. If you do your computer, you just call some girl out of its memory. Your cyber suit'll take you there. If you do it the phone-sex way, the girl – or guy or anything out there, actually – there could be a guy who's virtual identity is a girl or a spider even–''

''You could look like – be anyone you wanted–'' Dan chimes in. "And then–''

Harding nods. ''Every command you give the computer as a movement of your body is translated onto her suit as a touch or whatever, then back to your suit for the way her body feels, the way she reacts, and so on.''

''But she can make her skin feel like whatever she wants to. She can program in fur, and that's what she'll feel like to you.''

My head is spinning. The possibilities are endless in a sexual designer reality.... But then I begin to worry about those possibilities. And – could there be such a thing as virtual rape? Virtual muggings or murder through tapped phone lines?... These scenarios recede into the distant future as Bryan comes back into the room. The chrome connector he has been searching for is missing, so we'll have to make do with masking tape.

We each take turns trying on the new VR helmet. Using the latest sonar technology, it senses the head position of the operator through a triangular bar fitted with tiny microphones. The triangle must be mounted on a pole several feet above the helmet-wearing user – a great idea except the little piece that connects the triangle thing to the pole is missing. But Bryan's masking tape holds the many-thousand dollar strip of hardware safely, and I venture into the electronic realm.

The demo tour is an office. No virtual sex. No virtual landscape. But it looks 3-D enough. Bryan hands me the joystick that is used in this system instead of VPL's more expensive glove controller. Bryan's manner is caring, almost motherly. He's introduced thousands to VR at conventions with Tim Leary across the country and even in Japan, yet it's as if he's still sensitive to the fact that this is my ''first time.'' It seems more like a video game than anything else, and I flash on Craig Neidorf wandering through mazes, looking for magical objects. Then Bryan realizes that I haven't moved, and gently coaxes me to push forward on the joystick. My body jolts as I fly toward the desk in front of me. Bryan watches my progress through a TV monitor next to the computer, which displays a two-dimensional version of what I'm seeing.

''That's right,'' he encourages, "it only needs a little push.'' I ease back on the virtual throttle and guide myself around the room. ''You can move your head,'' he suggests with calm reassurance. As I turn my head, the world whizzes by in a blur, but quickly settles down. "The frame rate is still slow on this machine.'' That's what accounts for the strobelike effect as I swivel my head too quickly. The computer needs to create a new picture every time I move, and the illusion of continuity – essentially the art of animation – is dependent on flashing by as many pictures per second as possible. I manage to work my way around the desk and study a painting on the wall. Remembering what I've been told about VR, I walk into the painting. Nothing happens. Everything turns blue.

''He walked into the painting,'' remarks one of the peanut gallery watching my progress. "Push reset.''

''That's not one of the ones you can walk into,'' Bryan tells me as he punches some commands into the computer. "Let's try a different world.''

'LOADING WORLD 1203.WLD'

blinks on the screen as the hard drive grinds a new set of pictures into the RAM of the machine.

Now I'm in an art gallery, and the paintings do work. I rush toward a picture of stars and galaxies, but I overshoot it. I go straight up into the air (there is no ceiling here), and I'm flying above the museum now, looking at the floor below me. With Bryan's guidance, I'm back on the ground. ''Why don't you go into the torus,'' he suggests. "It's neat in there.'' A torus is a three-dimensional shape from systems math, the model for many different chaos attractors. Into the doughnut-shaped VR object I go.

Even the jaded VR veterans gather around to see what the torus looks like from inside, I steer through the cosmic shape, which is textured in what looks like a galactic geometry of clouds and light. As I float, I feel my body making the movements, too. The illusion is working, and an almost out-of-body sensation takes over. I dive then spiral up. The stars swirl. I've got it now and this world is mine. I glide forward and up, starting a loop de loop when–

Blue.

''Shit.'' Bryan punches in some commands but it's no use. There's a glitch in the program somewhere.

But while it lasted, the VR experience was like getting a glimpse of another world – one which might not be too unlike our own. The illusion of VR worked better the more I could control my movement. As scientists have observed, the more dexterity a person experiences in a virtual world, the sharper he will experience the focus of the pictures. The same computer image looks clearer when you can move your head to see different parts. There is no real reason for this phenomenon. Lanier offers one explanation:

''In order to see, you have to move your head. Your head is not a passive camera mount, like a tripod or something holding your eyes up. Your head is like a spy submarine: it's always bobbing and looking around, performing a million little experiments a second, lining things up in the environment. Creating your world. That level of interactivity is essential to the most basic seeing. As you turn on the head-tracking feature in the Head-Mounted Display [the feature that allows you to effect where you're looking] there's a subjective increase in the resolution of the display. A very clear demonstration of the power of interactivity in the lowest level of perception.''

And a very clear demonstration of the relationship of human perception to the outside world, casting further doubt on the existence of any objective physical reality. In Cyberia at least, reality is directly dependent on our ability to actively participate in its creation. Designer reality must be interactive rather than passive. The user must be part of the iterative equation. Just as Craig Neidorf was most fascinated by the parts of his Adventure video game that were not in the instructions, cyberians need to see themselves as the source of their own experience.

Get Virtual with Tim!

Friday. Tim Leary's coming to town to do a VR lecture, and the Renaissance Foundation is throwing him a party in cooperation with Mondo 2000 magazine – the voice of cyber culture. It's downstairs at Big Heart City, a club south of Market Street in the new warehouse/artist district of San Francisco, masterminded by Mark Renney, cyber culture's interface to the city's politicians and investors. Entrance with or without an invite is five dollars – no exceptions, no guest list. Cheap enough to justify making everyone pay, which actually brings in a greater profit than charging fifteen dollars to outsiders, who at event like this are outnumbered by insiders. Once past the gatekeepers, early guests mill about the large basement bar, exchanging business cards and E-mail addresses, or watching Earth Girl, a colorfully dressed cyber hippy, set up her Smart Drugs Bar, which features an assortment of drinks made from neuroenhancers dissolved into fruit juice.

Tim arrives with R. U. Sirius, the famously trollish editor of Mondo 2000, and is immediately swamped by inventors, enthusiastic heads, and a cluster of well-proportioned college girls. Everyone either wants something from Tim or has something for Tim. Leary's eyes dart about, looking for someone or something to act as a buffer zone. R. U., having vanished into the crowd, is already doing some sort of media interview. Tim recognizes me from a few parties in LA, smiles, and shakes my hand. ''You're, umm–''

''Doug Rushkoff.'' Leary pulls me to his side, manages to process the entire crowd of givers and takers – with my and a few others' help – in about ten minutes. A guy from NASA has developed 3-D slides of fractal pictures. Leary peaks through the prototype viewfinder, says "Wow!'' then hands it to me. ''This is Doug Rushkoff, he's writing a book. What do you think, Doug?'' Then he's on to the next one. An interview for Japanese TV? "Sure. Call me at the hotel. Bryan's got the number.'' ''Never been down to Intel – it's the greatest company in the world. E-mail me some details!'' Tim is "on,'' but on edge, too. He's mastered the art of interfacing without engaging, then moving on without insulting, but it seems that this frequency of interactions per minute is taking a heavy toll on him. He spews superlatives ( That's the best 3-D I've ever seen!''), knowing that overkill will keep the suitors satisfied longer. He reminds me of the bartender at an understaffed wedding reception, who gives the guests extrastrong drinks so they won't come back for more so soon.

As a new onslaught of admirers appears, between the heads of the ones just processed, Bryan Hughes's gentle arm finds Tim's shoulder. ''The system's ready. Why don't you come try it?''

In the next room, Bryan has set up his VR gear. Tim is escorted past a long line of people patiently waiting for their first exposure to cyberspace, and he's fitted into the gear. Next to him and the computer stands a giant video projection of the image Tim is seeing through his goggles. I can't tell if he's blown away or just selling the product – or simply enjoying the fact that as long as he's plugged in he doesn't have to field any more of the givers and takers. As he navigates through the VR demo, the crowd oohs and ahhs his every decision. Let's get virtual with Tim! Tim nears the torus. People cheer. Tim goes into the torus. People scream. Tim screams. Tim dances and writhes like he's having an orgasm.

''This is sick,'' says Troy, one of my connections to the hacker underworld in the Bay Area, whom I had interviewed that afternoon. "We're going now. ...'' Troy had offered to let me come along with him and his friends on a real-life ''crack'' if I changed the names, burned the phone numbers, etc., to protect their anonymity.

Needles and PINs

Troy had me checked out that afternoon through the various networks, and I guess I came up clean enough, or dirty enough to pass the test. Troy and I hop into his van, where his friends await us. Simon and Jack, a cracker and a videographer respectively, are students at a liberal arts college in the city. (Troy had dropped out of college the second week and spent his education loan on army surplus computer equipment.)

Troy puts the key in the ignition but doesn't crank the engine. ''They want you to smoke a joint first.''

I really don't smoke pot anymore,'' I confess.

It proves you're not a cop,'' says Jack, whose scraggly beard and muscular build suddenly trigger visions of myself being hacked or even cracked to death. I take the roach from Simon, the youngest of the trio, who is clad in an avocado green polyester jumpsuit. With the first buzz of California sensemilla, I try to decide if his garb is an affectation for the occasion or legitimate new edge nerdiness. Then the van takes off out of the alley behind the club, and I switch on my pocket cassette recorder as the sounds of Tim Leary and Big Heart City fade in the night.

I'm stoned by the time we get to the bank. It's on a very nice street in Marin County. ''Bank machines in better neighborhoods don't have cameras in them,'' Jack tells me as we pull up.

Simon has gone over the scheme twice, but he won't let me tape his voice; and I'm too buzzed to remember what he's saying. (Plus, he's speaking about twice the rate of normal human beings – due in part to the speed he injected into his thigh.) What he's got in his hands now is a black plastic box about the size of two decks of cards with a slit going through it. Inside this box is the magnetic head from a tape deck, recalibrated somehow to read the digital information on the back of bank cards. Simon affixes some double-stick black tape to one side of the box, then slides open the panel door of the van and goes to the ATM machine. Troy explains to me how the thing works:

Simon's putting our card reader just over the slot where you normally put your card in. It's got a RAM chip that'll record the ID numbers of the cards as they're inserted. It's thin enough that the person's card will still hit the regular slot and get sucked into the machine.''

Won't people notice the thing?'' I ask.

People don't notice shit, anymore,'' says Jack, who is busy with his video equipment. "They're all hypnotized.''

How do you get their PIN number?'' I inquire.

Watch.'' Jack chuckles as he mounts a 300mm lens to his Ikegami camera. He patches some wires as Simon hops back into the van. "I'll need your seat.''

I switch places with Jack, who mounts his camera on a tiny tripod, then places it on the passenger seat of the van. Troy joins me in the back, and Jack takes the driver seat.

Switch on the set,'' orders Jack, as he plugs something into the cigarette lighter. A Sony monitor bleeps on, and Jack focuses in on the keypad of the ATM machine. Suddenly, it all makes sense.

It's a full forty minutes until the arrival of the first victim at the machine – a young woman in an Alpha Romeo. When she gets to the machine, all we can see in the monitor is her hair.

Shit!'' blurts Simon. "Move the van! Quick!''

We'll get the next one,'' Troy reassures calmly.

After a twenty-minute readjustment of our camera angle, during which at least a dozen potential PIN ''donors'' use the ATM, we're at last in a position to see the keypad, around the operators' hair, shoulders, and elbows. Of course, this means no one will show up for at least half an hour. The pot has worn off and we're all hungry.

A police car cruises by. Instinctively, we all duck. The camera sits conspicuously on the passenger seat. The cop doesn't even slow down.

A stream of ATM patrons finally passes through, and Troy dutifully records the PIN numbers of each. I don't think any of us likes having to actually see the victims. If they were merely magnetic files in a hacked system, it would be less uncomfortable. I mention this to Troy, and Simon tells me to shut up. We remain in silence until the flow of bankers thins to trickle, and finally dies away completely. It is about 1:00 a.m. As Simon retrieves his hardware from the ATM, Troy finally acknowledges my question.

This way we know who to take from and who not to. Like that Mexican couple. We won't do their account. They wouldn't even understand the withdrawal on their statement and they'd probably be scared to say anything about it to the bank. And a couple of hundred bucks makes a real difference to them. The guys in the Porsche? Fuck `em.''

We're back at Simon's by about two o'clock. He downloads his card reader's RAM chip into the PC. Numbers flash on the screen as Simon and Jack cross-reference PIN numbers with each card. Once they have a complete list, Simon pulls out a white plastic machine called a ''securotech'' or "magnelock'' or something like that. A Lake Tahoe hotel that went out of business last year sold it to a surplus electronic supply house, along with several hundred plastic cards with magnetic strips that were used as keys to the hotel's rooms. By punching numbers on the keypad of the machine, Simon can ''write'' the appropriate numbers to the cards.

Troy shows me a printout of information they got off a bulletin board last month; it details which number means what: a certain three numbers refer to the depositor's home bank, branch, account number, etc. Within two hours, we're sitting around a stack of counterfeit bank cards and a list of PIN numbers. Something compels me to break Troy's self-satisfied grin.

Which one belongs to the Mexican couple?''

The fourth one,'' he says with a smirk. "We won't use it.''

I thought it was the fifth one,'' I say in the most ingenuous tone I've got. "Couldn't it be the fifth one?''

Fine,'' Suddenly Troy grabs the fourth and fifth cards from the stack and throws them across the room. "Happy?''

I hold my replies to myself. These guys could be dangerous.

But no more dangerous or daring than exploits of Cyberia's many other denizens, with whom we all, by choice or necessity, are becoming much more intimate. We have just peered through the first window into Cyberia – the computer monitors, digital goggles, and automatic teller screens that provide instant access to the technosphere. But, as we'll soon see, Cyberia is made up of much more than information networks. It can also be accessed personally, socially, artistically, and, perhaps easiest of all, chemically.