"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

Douglas Rushkoff

Cyberia

Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Preface to the 1994 paperback edition

A lot has happened in the year or so since I wrote this book. More than usually
happens in a year. Thanks to technologies like the computer, the modem, interactive media,
and the Internet, we no longer depend on printed matter or word of mouth to explore the
latest rages, innovations, or discoveries. By the time a story hits the newstands, most insiders
consider it old news" and are already hard at work on the next flurry of culture-bending
inventions and activities.
Cyberia is about a very special moment in our recent history -- a moment when
anything seemed possible. When an entire subculture -- like a kid at a rave trying virtual
reality for the first time -- saw the wild potentials of marrying the latest computer
technologies with the most intimately held dreams and the most ancient spiritual truths. It is a
moment that predates America Online, twenty million Internet subscribers, Wired magazine,
Bill Clinton, and the Information Superhighway. But it is a moment that foresaw a whole lot
more.
This book is not a survey of everything and everyone cyber" but rather a tour through
some of the regions of this new, fledgling culture to which I was lucky enough to gain
access. Looking back, it is surprising to see how many of these then-absurd notions have
become accepted truths, and disheartening to see how many of the most optimistic appraisals
of our future are still very far from being realized.
Cyberia follows the lives and translates the experiences of the first few people who
realized that our culture was about to take a leap into the unknown. Some of them have
succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and are now practically household names. Others
have met with catastrophe. Still others have simply faded from view, their own contributions
to the cyberian renaissance already completed.
The people in this book, and thousands of others like them around the world,
understand the implications of our technologies on our culture, thought systems, spiritual
beliefs, and even our biological evolution. They still stand as the most optimistic and
forward-thinking appraisers of our civilization's fate. As we draw ever nearer to the
consensually hallucinatory reality for which these cyberians drew the blueprints, their
impressions of life on the edge become even more relevant for the rest of us. And they make
more sense.

Douglas Rushkoff
New York City, 1994

Introduction
Surfing the Learning Curve of Sisyphus

On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of feeling like an immigrant in a
place where your children are natives--where you're always going to be behind the
8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can learn it. It's what I
call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be