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

is broken as people learn to deconstruct and recombine the images intended to persuade them.
The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to reexamine previously accepted
policies and prejudices.
Using media viruses,'' politically inclined cyberians launch into the datasphere, at
lightning speed, potent ideas that openly challenge hypocritical and illogical social structures,
thus rendering them powerless.
A new scientific paradigm, a new leap in technology, and a new class of drug created
the conditions for what many believe is the renaissance we are observing today. Parallels
certainly abound between our era and renaissances of the past: the computer and the printing
press, LSD and caffeine, the holograph and perspective painting, the wheel and the spaceship,
agriculture and the datasphere. But cyberians see this era as more than just a rebirth of
classical ideas. They believe the age upon us now might take the form of categorical
upscaling of the human experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional turf.
The people who believe all this, so far, are on the outermost fringes of popular culture.
But, as we witnessed in the 1960s, the beliefs of fringe cultures can trickle up through our
youth into the mainstream. In fact, we may soon conclude that the single most important
contribution of the 1960s and the psychedelic era to popular culture is the notion that we have
chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian counterculture of the 1990s, armed
with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped
realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully.
This book is meant to provide a guided tour through that vision: Cyberia. It is an
opportunity to take part in, or at least catch up with, a movement that could be reshaping
reality. The cyberian explorers we will meet in the next chapters have been depicted with all
their human optimism, brilliance, and frailty. Like the first pioneers of any new world, they
suffer from the same fears, frustrations, and failures as those who stay behind and watch from
the safety of familiarity. These are not media personalities but human beings, developing their
own coping mechanisms for survival on the edges of reality.
Whether or not we are destined for a wholesale leap into the next dimension, there are
many people who believe that history as we know it is coming to a close. It is more than
likely that the aesthetics, inventions, and attitudes of the cyberians will become as difficult to
ignore as the automatic teller machine and MTV. We all must cope, in one way or another,
with the passage of time. It behooves us to grok Cyberia.

Most people think it's far out if we get virtual reality up and running. This is much
more profound than that. This is the real thing. We're going to find out what "being''
is. It's a philosophical journey and the vehicles are not simply cultural but biology
itself. We're closing distance with the most profound event that a planetary ecology
can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the chrysalis of matter. And it's never
happened before--I mean the dinosaurs didn't do this, nor did the procaryotes
emerging. No. This takes a billion years of forward moving evolution to get to the
place where information can detach itself from the material matrix and then look back
on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension.
--Terence McKenna, author, botanist, and psychedelic explorer

PART 1
Computers: Revenge of the Nerds

Chapter 1
Navigating the Datastream