
Cyberia is an eye-opening and up-to-the-minute portrait of America in the age of digital highways, all-night raves, cyberliterature, and psychedelic renaissance - by a young journalist with a fresh voice and a remarkable skill for mapping the terrain of the new world in which we have all, somehow, found ourselves. For over two years, Douglas Rushkoff lived among the players who are creating Cyberia and delivering it to the rest of us. Cyberia is his vivid report. Written in a language accessible to those who've never tested psychedelics or communicated over a computer modem, it is a journey into the thoughts and lives of people on the frontier of a great social experiment, people living - or surfing - on the very edge of culture. Cyberia's journey begins in Silicon-Valley, home of the computer - the humming heart of the electrically charged culture - and takes off with vivid profiles of a host of Cyberians at the "new edge" of computers, consciousness, and chaos theory. Rushkoff meets rave organizers, neopagans, virtual reality entrepreneurs, smart drug enthusiasts, underground computer hackers, psychedelic experimenters, and other pioneers who are foraging, both legally and illegally, into this dramatic new terrain. From mathematicians to self-taught punks, these are the minds behind innovations and ideas we now take for granted and those we can as yet barely imagine.
Shoshana Zuboff Big Other (surveillance capitalism)
Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality
Sophie Brickman Baby Unplugged
Cory Doctorow Radicalized
Mike Monteiro Ruined by Design
Nick Srnicek Platform Capitalism
Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the machine
Heather Burns Understanding Privacy
Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
Siva Vaidhyanathan Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us
Catherine Price How to Break Up With Your Phone
Thomas Kersting Disconnected: Protect Your Kids Against Device Dependency
Nicholas Kardaras Glow Kids
Zeynep Tufekci Twitter and Tear Gas
Lelia Green Technoculture
Douglas Rushkoff Team Human
Jaron Lanier Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media
Carissa Véliz Privacy is Power: Why You Should Take Back Control
Xiaowei Wang Blockchain Chicken Farm
Jenny Oddell How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Wendy Liu Abolish SIlicon Valley
Jonathan Taplin Move Fast and Break Things
Andrew L. Shapiro The Control Revolution
Lawrence Lessig Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
David Shenk Data Smog
Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia
Paulina Borsook Cyberselfish.
https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-Douglas-R...
I can't quite explain the feeling of the midwestern rave scene in the 90s, but it was very racially diverse, utopian, punk, looking somehow back and forward in time at the same time enmeshed in psychedelics and psychedelia but somehow also part of both machines and cultures far older than machines. A super important part of my history.
Cyberia by Rushkoff comes closest to capturing parts of it from an anthropology perspective I think.
You want that era? Here's two things to flip through
https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000
https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine
I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/
I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right.
That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.
The first part reads (intentionally) archingly technophillic. That's balanced by the following sections.
The number of currently-extant issues identified with piercing accuracy is ... large. I strongly recommend the book.
David Shenk's Data Smog is similarly pioneering and insightful.
Other signers are better known. Douglas Rushkoff's current project is his Team Human podcast, he's also known for his book Cyberia, both of which are strongly critical of tech trends since the late 1990s. Steven Johnson has written several books on technology. Paulina Borsook wrote Cyberselfish.
