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

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.''