Customer Reviews

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

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'Cyberia' (1994) was cyberculture theorist Douglas Rushkoff's first book, written in 1992 and delayed because the publishers felt that e-mail and the Internet were not likely to become significant.

'Cyberia' has its obvious flaws in retrospect - examples regarding the links between drug culture, hacking, the Internet, and computers that have since become well-known or overdone. Sometimes the tone is uncritical - probably because Rushkoff was so excited about the future potential of VR, the Internet etc. This book was written well before the Internet became the latest quarterly profit enhancer, well before the rise of Internet shopping malls and dubious e-mail chain letters. On its initial release, it made a significant impact, speeding up public acceptance of the Internet as a communications medium, and heralding the cultural 'future-shocks' regarding personal identity that will accompany it. Criticism is also prompted by a backlash against the author and his success.

'Cyberia' is best read as the author's first book, which succeeds in capturing the hope of a moment and sense of an underground movement that was pre-'Wired' magazine and pre E-commerce. There are some powerful sections such as a gonzo trip to the offices of 'Mondo 2000' and meetings with R.U. Sirius; Rushkoff checking out college colleagues entering Silicon Valley and being forced to take drug tests; and talks with Ralph Abraham, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna.

Read critically but thoughtfully.

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.

_Cyberia_ is a refreshingly complete account of what Leary called "Cyber Culture." Focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, this book explains the various means by which people travel to 'cyberia'. From all night raves, to paganism, to super potent hallucinogens - people attempt to adapt themselves for the future. Each section of the book is well balanced and covers its topic well. The book is still current, and the one flaw that comes to mind is that the rave section focused too much on house, ignoring other types of music. All in all, an excellent book.

Even though Rushkoff is apparently a foreigner to rave culture, I have to give him credit. Few people understand how techno/house, raves, drugs, chaos theory, and philosophy can blend together. As a math/philosophy/computer/music student, and curator of hillhaus.com, i have to give him credit for being able to write such an encompassing piece of literature all the while being a stranger to the culture. The tone of the book towards traditional capitalism and conservatives reminds me of Naked Lunch.

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.

After reading this book, I thought about technology and all that encompasses it in a completely different way. Simply excellent.

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!

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.

An embarassingly bad book, unleavened by its unintentional humour. Rushkoffs silly solipsism conflates online and rave cultures into one big happy, zappy, zeitgeist -- which is simplistic to say the least. What¹s worse, he wraps his first person report on technolibertarians and neo-shamans in a retro-psychedelic bow, adding what sounds to me like an uncritical endorsement of drug use. Avoid this book like the plague.