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

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 color 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