This morning, I was reading a user interface book that referenced the WELL, the Bay Area-based online community. Although I was active on Bay Area computer bulletin boards as early as 1993 (I've been online in one way or another since 1990, when I was 13), I was never able to find a way to go on the WELL. But seeing the Wikipedia article on the WELL made me recall a book that really transformed my life, and introduced me to the Internet as I know it: Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia.
I'm unsure if time has been especially kind to Rushkoff's book, but, for me, this book was a pretty wild ride, and introduced me to a number of tech ideas that truly shaped my writing and my thinking as I began the long road towards the work I do now on the social web. I think Cyberia introduced me to a number of concepts, including virtual reality, the potential of the Internet, hacking, hardcore eco-activism and the academic study of hallucinogens. Since I was never a huge fan of the cyberpunk fiction of William Gisbon or Neal Stephenson, Cyberia served as my introduction to these areas.
I happened upon the book about six months after it came out, in late '94, when I was a senior in high school. I seem to recall borrowing it from my friend Mary, someone who, like me, was then experimenting with a number of the substances mentioned in the book. I found Rushkoff's participatory style totally invigorating, and I think, in retrospect, the book may have had a lot to do with me pursuing journalism very seriously from the time I was 18 until I was 22.
It's funny, I barely missed an introduction to this style of participatory journalism when I was younger. When I was about ten, in 1987, my dad (a one-time hippie turned Silicon Valley exec) handed me a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. I was probably too young to understand it at the time, and I recall dumping it after about 10 pages. I still have yet to finish that book, probably to my detriment.
There were even a few things that I didn't know about Cyberia, back then, like the fact that the book was actually written two years earlier, in 1992, and withheld until 1994, because the publisher thought e-mail and the Internet weren't "mainstream" enough.
As I read reviews of the book, 14 years after it came out, many of them reflect back on the book as being too doe-eyed or tuning into a zeitgeist that didn't even exist (the nexus of druggy utopian idealism and the Internet), but I think that so few writers were covering these subject areas with any kind of coherence in the early Wired Magazine era ('93-'95) that we need to be a little charitable in our look backwards at Cyberia.
In recent years, Rushkoff, now 47 (he was likely 31 when he wrote Cyberia) has penned a 22-issue DC Comics series, Testament, and a 2005 book, Get Back In The Box: How Being Great At What You Do Is Great For Business.
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Note: This post was written while listening to Billy Idol's Cyberpunk LP, to try to evoke the whole 1993-1994 take on things. After a little thought, I think side one of Ride's Going Blank Again is a better representation of what Rushkoff was talking about in Cyberia. The Billy Idol record sounds a bit more like Jesus Jones (or something), in hindsight, and comes across as rather dated.
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