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

webs, a format that has come to be known as hypertext.'' To learn about a painter, a
computer user might start with a certain museum. From the list of painters, he may select a
particular portrait. Then he may ask for biographical information about the subject of the
portrait, which may reveal a family tree. He may follow the family tree up through the
present, then branch off into data about immigration policies to the United States, the
development of New York real estate, or even a grocery district on the Lower East Side. In a
hypertext video game, a player might be a detective searching a room. In the room is a chest
of drawers. Select a drawer. The drawer opens, inside is a note. Point to the note, and text
appears. Read the note, see a name. Select the name, see a picture. One item in the picture is
a car. Select the car, go for a ride through the neighborhood. See an interesting house, go
inside...
Maybe this isn't all that startling. It has taken several decades for these technologies
take root, and many of us are used to the way they work. But the people I met at my first
rave in early 1990's San Francisco claimed they could experience this same boundless,
hypertext universe without the use of a computer at all. For them, cyberspace can be accessed
through drugs, dance, spiritual techniques, chaos math, and pagan rituals. They move into a
state of consciousness where, as if logged onto a computer, the limitations of time, distance,
and the body are perceived as meaningless. People believe that they move through these
regions as they might move through computer programs or video games--unlimited by the
rules of a linear, physical reality. Moreover, they say that our reality itself, aided by
technology, is about to make a wholesale leap into this new, hypertextual dimension.
By handing me that damned rave promotional flyer, a San Franciscan teenager made it
impossible for me to ignore that a growing number of quite intelligent, if optimistic, people
are preparing themselves and the rest of us for the wildest possible implications of our new
technologies. The more time I spent with these people, the less wild these implications
seemed to me. Everywhere I turned, the conclusions were the same. Quantum physicists at the
best institutions agree that the tiniest particles making up matter itself have ceased to behave
with the predictability of linear equations. Instead, they jump around in a discontinuous
fashion, disappearing, reappearing, suddenly gaining and losing energy. Mathematicians,
likewise, have decided that the smooth, geometric model of reality they have used since
Euclid first drew a triangle on papyrus is obsolete. Instead, using computers, they churn out
psychedelic paisley patterns which they claim more accurately reflect the nature of existence.
And who appears to be taking all this in first? The kids dancing to electronic music at
underground clubs. And the conclusion they have all seemed to reach is that reality itself is
up for grabs. It can be dreamt up.
Now this all may be difficult to take seriously; it was for me--at first. But we only
need to turn to the arbiters of reality--mainstream scientists--to find this confirmed. The
ability to observe phenomena, they now believe, is inextricably linked to the phenomena
themselves. Having lost faith in the notion of a material explanation for existence, these
quantum physicists and systems mathematicians have begun to look at the ways reality
conforms to their expectations, mirroring back to them a world changed by the very act of
observation. As they rely more and more on the computer, their suspicions are further
confirmed: This is not a world reducible to neat equations and pat answers, but an infinitely
complex series of interdependencies, where the tiniest change in a remote place can have
systemwide repercussions.
When computers crunch data from real-world observations, they do not produce
simple, linear graphs of an orderly existence but instead churn out phase maps and diagrams
whose spiraling intricacy resembles that of an ancient mosaic, a coral reef, or a psychedelic
hallucination. When the entire procession of historical, biological, and cosmological events is
reanalyzed in the light of modern mathematical discoveries like the fractal and feedback