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    Cover of Cyberia

    Cyberia

    Douglas Rushkoff · 1994

    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.

    Security & PrivacyPolitics & Society
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    4recommend
    10mentions
    9people
    2011–2022years
    40% recommend50% neutral10% critical

    Mentions per year

    2011201320152017201920212022

    What Hacker News says

    1. nonrandomstringFeb 2022
      FWIW Mandie, here's my list of modern pop tech critique, all topics that DV touches at least tangentially. Far more than 40 days and nights worth of reading

      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.

      thread
    2. NuzzerinoJun 2019
      Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia (1994) has some coverage on the idea of a true hacker and the "curious" personality archetype that matches it. It was more than 10 years ago that I read it and it resonated strongly with me, so perhaps it's worth a read if you like to understand more of the psychological roots.

      https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-Douglas-R...

      thread
    3. llamatabootNov 2018
      As a Midwestern raver in the 90s that was regularly in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis, I love this little history and philosophy piece.

      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.

      thread
    4. GHFigsJul 2011
      I found Doug Rushkoff's Cyberia to be an effective substitute for having properly witnessed that era. It has the advantage of not being a look back, but a look around. I get the sense, in flipping through it again now, that a historical look at the era would leave out so many things that seemed important at the time but didn't subsequently flourish beyond the fringe.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberia_(book)

      thread
    5. kristopolousNov 2022
      features in the trailer around 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8

      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.

      thread
    6. dredmorbiusDec 2021
      One of the authors (Andrew L. Shapiro) wrote the 1999 book The Control Revolution. It's something of a sibling to Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Shapiro was a student of Lessig's), though its focus is somewhat different.

      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.

      thread

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