Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace
Douglas Rushkoff | 2002-04-02 00:00:00 | Clinamen Press Ltd. | 272 | Culture
This is an ideas-led, exuberant documentary about the converging strands of a new era, the empowerments of cyber-technology, and the precipitation of new ways of life. Originally written in 1994, it outlines the strands of the cyber subculture as it was emerging-- the favored drugs, the influential individuals, the hackers and their motivations, the science chaos and the complexity of fractuals. This book will endure as a reminder of how modern cyberculture came about--a note to the future form an individual perceptive enough to grasp the profound effects of the cyber revolution.
Reviews
Under the guise of being a "theory" and "lifestyle" view of the communities arising around cyberspace, this book bats around the usual suspects - chaos theory, new cultures, modern life - and then degrades into a comparison between computer use and drugs. I will not deny the role drugs, specifically marijuana and LSD, have in computers, but to claim cyberspace requires much talk about drugs because it is a similar experience (seeing pretty images and designs in front of your face, even if they're not "there" in real life) is a bit of a stretch. Because the author spends his time discussing drugs, hippies, alternative lifestyles and other tangentially-related dreck, he fails to honestly explore hacker culture or even those who are advancing the concepts of cyberspace as something other than a consensual hallucination. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone except a researcher, as with the exception of a few pop quotes from famous computer and drug users, it's contentless and a moderately tedious read.
Reviews
In 1994, Doug Rushkoff set out to write an embedded, analytic travelogue linking a series of countercultural trends dealing with emerging networks and internet technologies. Instead of conducting technopunditry from the sidelines, Rushkoff got into the fray and followed around ravers, hackers,performance artists and writers whose philosophies emerged around a new surge of technoutopianism; linked inextricably with paganism, spirituality, and Eastern Philosphy. His aproach echoes the Tom Wolfe school subjective reporting, learning the lexicon of the object of study, trying to speak the language and reveal something about its psychology. What results is some snappy, breakneck prose colored philosophically and poetically by chaos mathematics and cyberpunk literature. This makes this book eminently fun, readable, and exciting. It also makes much of its proposed social and political uses for technology widely inaccurate. In a way, ten years removed, Cyberia should be appreciated now more than ever. We know better. And all of the wide-eyed fantasizing about decentralized spirituality and some wonderful fin de siecle millenial rapture spurned on by virtual reality are no longer dangerous or deluding, they can be seen in context, as thought waves that are spilled out of more optimistic time periods with exponential technological growth. The connect the dots game that Rushkoff plays is pretty astute, as well: the hippy connection, the second wave optimism that the 90s proposed to reconcile the "defeat" of the 60s, the fulmination of rave culture around these ideas that arrived in Berkely. A good book to read this book against would be Escape Velocity by Mark Dery, which is a little more "down to Earth", covers some similar material, and contains a counterpoint to Cyberia. Rushkoff himself has distanced himself widely from the rhetoric used in this book, but even this does not discredit this as a seminal text when looking at the viewpoints of subcultures built around technology.
Reviews
Rushkoff takes the reader on an elegant tour de force of the vast realm called "cyberia." With an uncanny ability to infuse humor and insights into his subject matter, he never lets the reader down.

The pulse of his books is reminiscent of the feeling you get at clubs when things are happening at a fast clip and a heated beat. The intelligence and forward-thinking Rushkoff offer make him unique and well worth the read.

Bravo!
Reviews
I found this book truly intriguing. The bits about the rave culture were a little off, and in the cases of his ecstasy coverage, very far off, but in general, it hits very close to the mark. I and many others that I associate with touch on the Technoshamanic view of the world. Rushkoff does an exceedingly good job demonstrating the relationships between psychadelics and innovation in areas like silicon valley and chaos theory mathematics. Read for yourself, judge for yourself.
Reviews
I read lots of these books. I have read most of Neal Stephenson's, Bruce Sterling's, and William Gibson's novels. This is a good book if you have interests in this area. The people who gave bad reviews are just not smart enough to understand the book's content, if they even finished reading it.

Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download