Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace by Douglas Rushkoff (PDF)

Description

Now in paperback with a new introduction by the author, “a dizzying and dangerous guided tour through ‘cyberspace,’ an unfolding terrain of digital information . . . redefining reality.”–Publishers Weekly. Rushkoff profiles the thinkers, technologies, sciences, and philosophies that are moving our society into the 21st Century.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From the Publisher In paperback with a new introduction by the author! “A provocative and wide-ranging survey . . . of the interface between the longings of youth and the wild potentials of computer technology.”–Kirkus Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The first part of the book is deep and insightful and addresses some identity problems with the internet that we still deal with today.Section 2 is narcotics, bad math, and psuedoscience. As is part 3 but now there’s raves. Then there’s part 4 but now you get early 90s house music.First section is solid, really well done journalism. The rest reads like a rambling drunk burner.

⭐Utterly fascinating glimpse into a bygone time of High Strangeness the likes of which our world sorely needs again.

⭐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.

⭐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!

⭐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.

⭐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.

⭐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.

⭐Wow this has dated badly. Thought it might be interesting to revisit, but no…

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