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Cyberia

Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Preface to the 1994 paperback edition

This book is not a survey of everything and everyone cyber" but rather a tour through some of the regions of this new, fledgling culture to which I was lucky enough to gain access. Looking back, it is surprising to see how many of these then-absurd notions have become accepted truths, and disheartening to see how many of the most optimistic appraisals of our future are still very far from being realized.

Cyberia follows the lives and translates the experiences of the first few people who realized that our culture was about to take a leap into the unknown. Some of them have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and are now practically household names. Others have met with catastrophe. Still others have simply faded from view, their own contributions to the cyberian renaissance already completed.

What you have to remember as you read this book is that back in the 1980s, computers and everyone who got near them were decidedly uncool. So were science fiction, fantasy role-playing, and even – oddly, perhaps – psychedelic drugs. America had plummeted into the depths of conservative thinking, and in conservative times intellectuals don't fare well. Freaks fare even worse. And futurists aren't ever heard from.

The 1980s was a time for nostalgia and traditional values. It seemed to many that the non-conformist and highly individualistic - if somewhat ungrounded - thinking of the 1960s had been forever lost.

But in San Francisco, a few scattered ex-hippies, university students, musicians. , and other optimistic souls who felt particularly disenfranchised by the status quo began imagining an alternative possibility. Most of these people didn't know about one another. Some gathered in small groups; others worked alone. While one discovered the computer and invented virtual reality, another discovered the cognitive enhancement properties of herbs and began selling 'brain foods'. Kids in one town played fantasy role playing games, while kids in another began mixing and recording their own electronic music on cheap Casio instruments. A university class in Europe wrote programs that allowed people to share information on computers over telephone lines, while a math professor in Santa Cruz realized that non-linear math equations depict organic shapes.