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

comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at
confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not everybody feels that way. That's
not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's based on the ability of
people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion as a way of life,
concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't control anything. At best
it's a matter of surfing the whitewater.
--John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and cofounder of the Electronic
Frontiers Foundation

The kid who handed me the brightly colored flyer must have figured I was younger or
at least more open-minded than I really am. Or maybe he had me pegged from the beginning.
Sure, I had done a little experimenting" in college and had gotten my world view a bit
expanded, but I was hardly ready to immerse myself in a subculture as odd, or as influential,
as this one turned out to be.
The fractal-enhanced map-point" leaflet announced a giant, illegal party -- a rave,"
where thousands of celebrants would take psychedelics, dance to the blips of
computer-generated music, and discuss the ways in which reality itself would soon conform to
their own hallucinatory projections. No big deal. Bohemians have talked this way for years,
even centuries. Problem is, after a few months in their midst, I started believing them.
A respected Princeton mathematician gets turned on to LSD, takes a several-year
sabbatical in the caves of the Himalayas during which he trips his brains out, then returns to
the university and dedicates himself to finding equations to map the shapes in his psychedelic
visions. The formulas he develops have better success at mapping the weather and even the
stock market than any have before.
Three kids in San Francisco with a video camera and a broken hotel magnetic key
encoder successfully fool a bank cash machine into giving them other people's money.
A new computer conferencing system immerses people so totally in their virtual
community" that an alterego takes over a man's willpower, and he finds himself out of
control, randomly propositioning women who happen to be online."
A science fiction writer, after witnessing the spectacle of a child in hypnotic symbiosis
with a video arcade game, invents a fictional reality called Cyberspace -- a consensual
hallucination" accessed through the computer, where one's thoughts manifest totally, and
reality itself conforms to the wave patterns.
Then, in a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy, the science fictional concept of a reality that
can be consciously designed begins to emerge as a held belief--and not just by kids dancing
at all night festivals. A confluence of scientists, computer programmers, authors, musicians,
journalists, artists, activists and even politicians have adopted a new paradigm. And they want
to make this your paradigm, too.
The battle for your reality begins on the fields of digital interaction. Our growing
dependence on computers and electronic media for information, money, and communication
has made us easy targets, if unwilling subjects, in one of the most bizarre social experiments
of the century. We are being asked to spend an increasing amount of our time on a very new
sort of turf----the territory of digital information. While we are getting used to it by now, this
region is very different from the reality we have grown to know and love. It is a boundless
universe in which people can interact regardless of time and location. We can fax paper''
over phone lines, conduct twenty-party video-telephone conversations with participants in
different countries, and even "touch'' one another from thousands of miles away through new
technologies such as virtual reality, where the world itself opens to you just as you dream it
up.
For example, many of these computer programs and data libraries are structured as