Voices In My Head MindVox: The Overture
Voices In My Head
MindVox: The Overture
Copyright (c) 1992, by Patrick Karel Kroupa (Lord Digital)
All Rights Reserved
"...just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners; saints"
--The Rolling Stones (Jane's Addiction cover(*1))
Prelude
-------
This article has its inception in several dozen people ask-
ing the same questions with fairly consistent regularity. Namely
those of, "where'd you guys go?", "what's the deal with MindVox?"
and "what have you been doing for the last five years anyway?"
Overture does a decent job of tying up all of the above and
then some, while providing a general overview about who we are at
Phantom Access and what we're in the process of doing with Mind-
Vox. Sections of this article self-plagiarize heavily from my
own writings in ENTROPY CALLING, which will be in a form suitable
for publication sometime around the first quarter of 1993 at the
rate things are going right now. My apologies for the perpetual-
ly blown deadlines regarding this work, but something always
manages to pop up that requires my full attention, in this case
MindVox itself.
I've done what I could to make everything understandable by
even those who have no prior knowledge of who we are or what's
going on, hopefully I have at least partially succeeded. If
something is briefly touched upon and you don't understand its
significance, then it probably means something to a smaller
cross-section of people and you can safely ignore it.
While this is in many respects a personal account of my own
journey through Cyberspace and what it has meant to me and a
handful of my friends, on a larger scale the underlying theme and
basic premise of how the electronic universe began and has
evolved is reflective of the experiences of countless people who
have been traversing the endless pathways of possibility with me
for most of their lives.
First Light
-----------
A long time ago, in a thoughtspace far away, an event that would
forevermore alter the shape of human interaction took place . . .
But we're not here to talk about that, instead we're gonna dis-
cuss computers and how a couple of guys named Ward Christianson
and Randy Seuss wrote a program that would allow them to be set
up as a kind of store-and-forward messaging system designed to
allow their circle of friends to interact with one another by us-
ing these things called modems . . . and how this event would
prove to be the first truly accessible step into the uncharted
territory of what was to become Cyberspace.
From this empowering turning point in the late seventies, the
ideas, dreams and fantasies that would transmute and amplify hu-
man potentials and evolutionary possibilities, broke loose from
the shackles that primitive technology had imposed upon them and
began to spin the electronic universe into existence.
Still in the very early stages of its development, Cyberspace, or
the "modem world" as it is sometimes called, has until very re-
cently remained a largely untapped forum unique within the histo-
ry of our world. It is a rapidly shifting microcosm that in the
early part of the 1990's seems poised to engulf the reality from
which it was born, weaving together the threads of tens of mil-
lions of diverse dreams, into one mercurial tapestry that encom-
passes the collective consciousness of humanity and frees it from
all constraints.
The non-space of Cyberspace is a place where global changes that
would take years or even centuries outside of the online domain,
can occur in weeks or months. It is a place where participants
from all over the world share a unique common-ground based on
nothing less nor more, than a belief in the same vision of possi-
bility. It is a land where people who scoff at "The Elements of
Style" frequently write paragraphs, pages, and even novels, full
of big words, huge concepts, and absolutely gargantuan amounts of
emoting -- while actually saying nothing tangible. In a little
over a decade, the online microcosm has managed to experience the
equivalent of hundreds of years of evolution. Not to mention the
creation of hundreds of words which have found their way into the
online lexicon despite the fact that nobody is quite sure what
they mean in the first place.
During this turbulent period of rapid change the half-dozen sys-
tems of 1978, had grown to 45 or 50 electronic villages by 1980.
These were the original outposts of Cyberspace, running on hacked
together systems, hooked into industrial 8" drives, and network-
ing at the blinding speed of 110 baud. To be honest, there
wasn't really a whole lot of high level philosophizing going on
regarding the brave new world that had dawned. Actually, most of
the conversation tended to focus on things along the lines of,
"How do you hook an 8" drive onto an Apple ][?" and "ANY idiot
can see that setting the 7th bit high on the xdef reg is the
WRONG thing to do, OF COURSE it'll make the program crash, are
you stupid or something?" It was a technological triumph, but
one that was for the most part, still lacking many of the key
participants that would shape the technology into designer reali-
ties.
As the seventies drew to a close, the sterility and bare-bones
functionality that had predominated, began to make way for places
created by people who truly wanted something unique and dif-
ferent. The mere existence of the technology was no longer that
exciting, and as a greater number of people gained access to the
hardware needed to jack in, the first electronic tribes gathered
and began erecting monuments to their own ingenuity.
By the time the eighties were upon us, the handful of systems
that had thrived during the latter half of the previous decade
had multiplied rapidly, giving birth to new systems on an almost
daily basis, and by 1982 there were close to a thousand outposts
on the frontier. Hardware prices were falling, 1200bps modems
were actually within the reach of many people who wanted to pur-
chase them, and the online domain was beginning to attract a wide
variety of participants from outside the technocratic elite.
A second pivotal point came during the summer of 1983 when the
movie WARGAMES was released. Within several months the modem
world literally doubled in size. An entire new generation of
people were about to take the plunge into electronic wonderland
and set off an explosive growth rate that has not slowed since
then. It was a major and irreversible nexus point that would be-
gin the abrupt transition from taking Cyberspace from the realm
of underground sub-culture to the forefront of mainstream media.
In retrospect the early eighties were the "golden age" of Cyber-
space. There truly was a new frontier just over the horizon, and
we were standing at the edge. This period in the history of the
electronic universe was unruly and chaotic, the first settlers on
the frontier wouldn't arrive for another decade or so, and the
only people here were a small collection of explorers eager to
embark on the next adventure.
Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any-
thing, is the trail that led up to it. You are there for some
reason, or usually a very complex series of reasons, that have
shaped your life up until that point in time, and caused you to
become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa-
tion you are locked into in the consensual reality that we all
physically inhabit at present. In other words, the "real world"
isn't making you happy, and you want outta there.
Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits, dropouts, acidheads,
phreaks, hackers, hippies, scientists, students, guys who could
say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight face and really
mean it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many
of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires
and kingdoms of Cyberspace.
As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a lot of
the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this
new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain and dissatis-
faction. When I first became an active participant in this elec-
tronic nervous system that was just beginning to experience its
awakening; I was a little over ten years old. My early under-
standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a handful of
people whose skills I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose
lives I felt great pity and sadness for.
There were of course exceptions, people who were so high on the
potential of this technology and the completely new level of
reality it could bring, that nothing more than a love of their
creation drove them onwards. But these people were pretty uncom-
mon, most of the pioneers were guys who were simply unhappy . . .
or to be more exact, so unhappy that they had given up on finding
joy in the "real world" and were constructing a rocket ship
called Cyberspace to get them out of here as fast as possible.
"Peace, love and happiness" was not exactly the driving force
behind the rise of the electronic domains. A more realistic ral-
lying cry was one of "Gee this technology is neat, and I'm gonna
use it to make a whole new world where I can be happy and none of
you can ever bother me again. You'll all be sorry, just wait and
see!" They were building the cult of high technology in the
hopes that it would somehow save them from whatever they thought
had prevented them from attaining happiness anywhere else.
Sadly enough "they" were not THOSE PEOPLE, "they" had become "us"
and while the first steps into this place had been made possible
by the phone phreaks and misfits of yesterday, the online world
was exploding and changing at an incredible velocity, the rest of
society was about to take notice in a big way, and a handful of
disenfranchised teenagers had seized the reigns and were in the
early stages of walking into the spotlight and taking the status
quo for a big ride . . .
The Fall
--------
Everything really was this big beautiful game, and here we were
with an overview of the whole jigsaw puzzle, and the sudden power
to do anything we wanted to do with it. For the first time in
recent history you COULD reach out and change reality, you could
DO STUFF that effected EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, and you were sud-
denly living this life that was like something out of a comic
book or adventure story. In a place filled with magical lands
and fantastic people who you had only read about, and suddenly
you WERE actually talking to Timothy Leary, or Steven Wozniak,
and some guy who was just on the cover of a magazine was speaking
with you and thought that YOU were cool, and then finally you
were IN the magazines and at the forefront of an entire sub-
culture that was being rapidly assimilated into the cultural
mythos.
It was a VERY interesting time and place in which to grow up.
Of course the problem is a lot of us didn't grow up. At a cer-
tain point in time having power that can have real and immediate
effects upon all society, can do very strange things to your per-
spective of the world. Instead of learning to deal with the nor-
mal barriers that most teenagers in western culture find them-
selves faced with, you discover that you can blow right through
all of them without even slowing down. In this way you miss much
of the growth and acclimation that people go through during their
teenage years. Which is where a lot of old friends parted ways
with reality and ceased to be explorers, becoming caught up in
the real world implications of the power that was now at their
disposal. In effect, they lost sight of the underlying theme
that all our actions had been based upon, that of exploration and
pushing the boundaries, and merely focused on the short-term
end-result of what their abilities could bring them; in the pro-
cess becoming the criminals that the Secret Service and FBI had
said we all were.
What had begun with the best intentions, as the ultimate exten-
sion of human curiosity, had devolved into a cultural movement
that had very little to do with the ideals that had inspired it.
The term "hacker" had become synonymous with "criminal", and tak-
ing a look around at the state of the underground, it looked as
if much of it had in fact degenerated into crime cartels
comprised of angry teens who had little understanding of the
underlying mechanisms they were employing to play with reality.
It was no longer the exhilaration of knowing that you could actu-
ally reach out and touch a satellite . . . it had come down to
the negative power trip of fucking with something for the sake of
pissing people off or just showing the world how much power you
really have at your disposal if you ever decided to throw a tan-
trum.
By 1988 what had replaced our outlook, was a mindset where the
new generation saw two things: one of them was the potential to
take advantage of holes in the system for personal gain. There
was no longer any quest for knowledge, desire to learn, or need
to push the boundaries of what was possible for the sake of ex-
ploration. Instead there were a lot of people who couldn't get
past making free phone calls, stealing things, and causing trou-
ble by following an already well-established pattern of action
and reaction.
The second -- and perhaps biggest -- motivating factor had become
the desire for personal attention in the form of self-
aggrandizement: the ultimate hack had become the media machine
itself. What was originally a by-product of our experiences, had
become a goal in and of itself. And here is where things became
REALLY twisted.
The media in the latter half of the twentieth century has become
a very strange distortion of reality instead of the reflection it
was intended to be. Since this is not an essay on the evils of
manipulation through the use of media, I will stick with a very
simple outline of how events occur in the real world.
A reporter, journalist, writer -- SOME PERSON who has their own
desires and ambitions, wants to do an exciting story on something
that will garner him or her a lot of attention and acclaim.
Really they are operating from a point of view that has much in
common with the "hacker's," which is the mindset of "I'm gonna
get mine." So this journalist looks around at the headlines and
realizes that there is a mounting wave of hysteria surrounding
viruses and hackers and invasion of privacy and . . . gee,
wouldn't it be a nice career move to do a story that will mix
their name into whatever the hot topic of the next five minutes
happens to be.
If the journalist is attached to any even marginally important
publication, they will then get their pick from one of the
current four or five "names" doing the rounds. On the other
hand, if the journalist is just starting out and connected to
something much smaller, then the chances are they will simply
show up at some user's group meeting, find the nearest thing they
can to a "computer nerd," do an interview, and then write it up
expressing whatever the current publicly-sanctioned viewpoint
happens to be (the usual slant has become: hackers are evil and
can look at your credit rating, fear them).
I have been interviewed on many occasions and I know roughly
twenty people who have done the interviews that comprise the
basis of about 90% of all media that exists in relation to the
underground; be it in newspaper, periodical, television segment,
or book format. WITH *VERY* FEW EXCEPTIONS, there have been
countless solicitations to perform illegal acts in the presence
of journalists, these solicitations move all the way into coer-
cion in some cases. There are reports containing sentences that
were never spoken, quotes taken out of context, information that
was invented . . . there's simply no end to it. The reporter
profits first by stroking the hacker's ego and giving him the
spotlight that he thinks he wants so badly, and then continues to
profit as the hacker rides a bigger and bigger wave of publicity
that in every case leads to a very unhappy ending if the hacker
in question doesn't have the foresight to get off the ride before
it derails.
In any case, whatever happens, the reporter always wins. When
the hacker's ride reaches its date with fate, the journalist in
question can now write the closing chapter in the hacker's saga
and tell the public how this nefarious evil-doer is being pun-
ished by the long arm of justice. This is followed up by the
journalist taking on the "official" mantle of "hacker expert,"
doing the lecture circuit, perhaps writing a book, and then going
out and finding a new horse to beat to death.
Obviously nothing can ever be this black and white, there must be
a need for both parties to play their roles. The reporter is not
THE EVIL BAD MAN who has corrupted the INNOCENT ANGELIC HACKER,
nor does this scenario apply to all journalists equally, off the
top of my head; Bruce Sterling, John Markoff, and Julian Dibbell
come to mind as extremely ethical exceptions to the norm.
Usually the reporter who isn't quite so ethical is just somebody
who is presented with a situation that can easily be twisted and
misused if the desire for fame and fortune takes precedence over
everything else. The reporter by the very nature of his job
tends to be quite "slick" and worldly-wise, whereas the hacker in
question is usually highly knowledgeable about computer systems
while managing to retain an oblivious naivety about the workings
of human beings in that elusive place called "the real world."
This sets the stage for what transpires.
And you see a lot of people who used to be your friends, get
ground up in this endless cycle as it repeats itself over and
over again until one day you wake up and come to realize that
you're seventeen or eighteen going on 90. You understand that
everything in the whole world is comprised of bits and pieces of
lies and half-truths, everyone is inherently corrupt, including
you; a lot of kids who used to be your friends are now all grown
up with no place to go and getting busted for such things as
fraud and grand larceny; and you have utterly lost touch with
anything even remotely "real." And yet, you're still a teenager
and have another 70 or 80 years left to hang around on this
planet.
This is right around the time that you're back in the media, only
this trip around you're at the receiving end of law enforcement
who have been prodded into a state of near-hysteria by the dawn-
ing realization that a bunch of kids really can dismantle the
building blocks of the infrastructure that makes most of
present-day society possible. Naturally enough they're scared,
and they're in the process of doing what people have done for
ages when they are afraid: going on a witch-hunt. Guess who gets
to play witch...
So one day you find yourself wondering why you should bother buy-
ing another computer system and trying to figure out what the
point of it all was anyway; to glimpse the limitless potential
and then fall back and only see your own flaws amplified to
cartoon-like proportions.
The 1980's were a time that saw the birth and death of the first
dynasties of Cyberspace. Travelling through the electronic
landscape of this period in time, was like traversing this sur-
real range of mountains, where amongst the sheer outcropping of
rock, lush valleys, and snow-capped peaks, a collection of rather
obsessive dreamers had built some of the most beautiful castles
that were ever created and opened their doors to a populace of
pioneers. It was absolutely transporting and timeless . . . and
unfortunately -- in the short term -- doomed.
This has been an abbreviated summary of the atmosphere and events
that started a kind of mass exodus out of the modem world for
about twenty of us. We had spent our entire childhoods jacked
into this alternate electronic universe, locked into playing our
overly-developed personas, and almost no time figuring out who we
were and what we wanted out of life beyond "further, better,
more." This is nothing new or unique in and of itself, it was
however something that gained a very tangible and immediate im-
portance to many of us when we found that the thoughtspace in
which we had lived a large portion of our lives had disintegrated
and the people we had known and called friends, had largely
disappeared and been replaced by every negative quality they pos-
sessed.
A lot of us dumped the remnants of this reality into a stack of
boxes and took off for parts unknown. Whether college, work, a
new circle of friends that didn't know who you were in Cyber-
space, or even know what Cyberspace was; just about anywhere were
we could start over and try to regain what had somehow been lost.
Transformation
--------------
"Ya live your life like it's a coma,
so won't you tell me why we'd wanna?
With all the reasons you give,
it's kinda hard to believe;
But who am I to tell you I've seen,
any reason why you should stay;
Maybe we'd be better off without you anyway..."
--Guns N Roses(*2)
After coming to the realization that visiting The Tunnel for the
fourteenth time in three weeks was not going to change my life
for the better, and having no idea what I wanted to do with my-
self, I dropped it all and got on a plane for the middle of no-
where New Mexico. Where I proceeded to cycle through all my
negative tendencies at an accelerated pace, first becoming
utterly obsessed with bodybuilding, to the point of five hour a
day workouts, insane diets, steroids, and a silly-putty like
transformation of myself to 6'2" 215 pounds and 6% bodyfat.
This was good for about ten months, before I found myself in the
same mindset I had thought I could escape. Looking in the mirror
and seeing a parody of who I used to be, wondering where to go
from there. The answer was obviously to buy a Porsche and begin
re-stocking my wardrobe with everything by Armani and Versace,
yes I had it now, this WAS the right answer, I only had to look
around at all the people I knew doing just this to see that . . .
well, actually they were all pretty miserable, but again, it
lasted for about nine or ten months.
Around this time I realized that aside from the fact that I was a
pretty fucked up person who probably needed a lot of therapy --
which had never quite worked out the right way when I had it
thrust upon me as a teenager -- I had become completely out of
touch with my feelings. Not out of touch that I didn't have
them, I had over a thousand pages of them sprayed across mega-
bytes of disks where I wrote out all the things inside of myself
driving me crazy; but out of touch in the sense that when I be-
gan taking things apart and analyzing reality, I had stopped
listening to anything I felt inside and just tuned in to what
seemed logical.
The problem being that the more you try to act out of logic, the
more you find yourself applying logic to utterly emotional issues
in an completely crazed and self-destructive way. When logic
should be asking: "Why do I want to weigh 215 pounds of muscle?
What the hell am I doing?" it suddenly finds itself in the posi-
tion of contemplating "Ok, so if I want to gain 5 pounds in the
next 2 weeks, how many CC's of Deca do I mix with X mg. of Ana-
var, with what ratio of carbs/fat and what is the minimum PER of
the protein I am going to consume in order to remain in an anti-
catabolic state?"
Welcome to real-life Alice in Wonderland, taking place in your
head.
At the age of twenty-one I had managed to attain a place where I
possessed everything that I ever thought I wanted. Life is funny
that way, you really do get whatever you desire. Endless hours
spent reading thousands of books; the mix and match regimen of
combinations of new nootropics and longevity agents; and the fi-
nal combination of steroids and obsessive workouts had resulted
in my achievement of the goal I had subconsciously been working
towards for most of my life. I had succeeded in my efforts to
become absolutely untouchable by anyone or anything.
When you are no longer in the middle of a situation and have the
comfort of hindsight it's very simple to deduce what the underly-
ing problems behind anything happen to be, and why you are acting
in a way that is physically, mentally and spiritually destructive
to yourself. While there is nothing inherently wrong with any
action I might have taken, it all comes back to the question of
why are you doing something? And looking back upon my life, I
had actually lived very little of it in an attempt to make myself
happy. Almost everything had been some sort of reaction to those
around me, and how I felt I had to respond to them.
Despite my intellectual understanding of how brief moments of
stimulus-response can shape a person's existence, like so many
endlessly-referenced frames of film forever etched in their
brain. Long-gone fragments of time that refuse to relinquish
their hold on the present, telling people who they are, setting
their limitations, and defining the boundaries of what they allow
their lives to mean. In truth I had never managed to apply any
of this knowledge to myself and had lived most of my life in ac-
cordance with the patterns of self-destructive programming per-
petually repeating a loop in my head.
From childhood onwards I have been through a seemingly endless
variety of extremes in my life; moving from levels of comfortable
opulence, to near-poverty and back again, more times than I care
to count. What I had learned from this was that being poor
wasn't that much fun, and could really suck, therefore logic dic-
tates that I must always have a lot of money and do whatever it
takes to get it. In fact I'm going to be so unconcerned with mo-
ney that I will start to feel anxious if I'm not wearing a $300
dollar haircut and a $400 dollar shirt. I have felt controlled
by situations beyond my reach in the past, therefore I am going
to learn as much as I can about everything, so that nobody will
ever be able to fuck with my head and attempt to control me
through misrepresentation of the truth. I have been out-of-
control with various addictions and done such stupid things to
myself that through combinations of downers and alcohol I have at
one point weighed over 300 pounds; therefore I will understand
every fucking piece of biochemistry that is known about the human
body, I will do whatever it takes to look into the mirror and
gain my own approval even if it means working out with such fre-
quency that a pleasant sport becomes a daily torture session that
leaves me nauseous and physically incapable of performing simple
movements because everything hurts all the time. I will look
like someone has spray-painted skin onto a statue no matter how
difficult it is to maintain this state constantly, I will force
myself to eat 6,000 calories of protein and 400 calories of car-
bohydrate, and if I can no longer think or move and my ultimate
fantasy has become sleeping 18 hours a day, then that's what caf-
feine and amphetamines are for. I live in hell therefore I shall
use drugs to escape my hell by taking week-long vacations on opi-
ates, but I will never be controlled by anything, so on the 8th
day I will walk away from heaven and live through a couple of
days of pain that hurt a little bit more than the rest of my
life, but I will never be some fucking junkie, because I not only
can do anything, I WILL do it, and I just dare the fucking
universe to try and prove otherwise, because I can quit anything,
I can conquer anything, I can do anything to prove anything to
anyone and you can't stop me, because the entire world is full of
weak, soft and stupid motherfuckers who talk much and do little;
praise George Bernard Shaw and pass the Nietzsche.
Coming down off the adrenalin and testosterone rush the memories
I used to write that paragraph with have triggered, I'd like to
take this moment to borrow a quote from one of the greatest
poet-philosophers of our time: "Happy happy! Joy joy!"
After endless repetitions of this cycle I had finally reached a
state in which my internal programming ceased to function --
there was simply nothing left I could apply it to. Over the
years I had overcome most of my psychological barriers through
direct mental or physical actions, that had brought with them
physical rewards that I was utterly incapable of applying to my
life at that time. Welcome to oblivion.
Hitting absolute nothingness was the beginning of a very personal
catharsis for me that finally led to turning inwards to see what
was wrong, since externally, everything looked okay. I had at-
tained a physical state that "corrected" everything my subcons-
cious had said was "wrong" with me, yet for some bewildering rea-
son I was not deliriously happy. A series of steps followed
which eventually led to various experiments in the world of thea-
tre and film, where I had the chance to re-connect with emotions,
and get them back into some kind of perspective from the comfort-
able vantage point and attitude of: "they're not really mine, I'm
only playing them." All of which reached a pinnacle when I began
experimenting with LSD for the first time.
If you have never experienced what it is like to be on an acid
trip, it will be difficult for me to convey the kaleidoscopic
depth of experience you are presented with. It does nothing less
nor more, than strip away every preconceived notion that you have
ever had regarding what "reality" is. Beyond the special ef-
fects, intellectual realizations, and creative opportunity it
presents, it leaves you imbued with one very basic truth of the
universe: No matter what the actual outcome of your actions,
what matters is your intent. If what you are doing -- whatever
it may be -- is being done out of any reason other than a desire
to bring happiness to people; to help humanity as a whole reach
some greater level of understanding; to uplift and inspire people
to reach for something that is within everyone's grasp . . . then
you are wasting your time.
This is not exactly news, I mean it is the basic belief system
that every religion on earth is founded on (with the possible ex-
ception of Satanism, and a few other offshoots of this system of
thought). The problem with religion getting such a bad rap most
of the time is largely due to the fact that most people who act
as spokesmen for any given religious cause, are only mouthing
words they comprehend on an intellectual level. They are not ac-
tually living in this state of internal alignment, so what they
have to offer can be very suspect . . . how is someone who has
not attained what he speaks of, supposed to help you attain it
for yourself? While dogma may help a limited few, it will never
reach most of those who posses the ability to think for them-
selves. Nor is standing at a pulpit or in front of a camera and
ranting about damnation, going to help anyone reach any kind of
positive state.
I obviously cannot speak for everybody, but from my own perspec-
tive I had read the holy books of most religions on earth when I
became interested in psychology and the theories of Carl Jung --
who crosses over into mysticism and religious experience, going
as far as the concept of "karma" with his theory of Synchronici-
ty. Yet I never got anything from them other than an intellectu-
al high of understanding how groups of people could be programmed
to behave in certain ways . . . which isn't what it's about. The
EXPERIENCE is what all religions are based on, how you choose to
interpret it is entirely up to you. But a very simple thing that
becomes apparent is the basic truth that wherever your inspira-
tion is coming from, if it fills you with the need to motivate
large groups of people to do SOMETHING, be that something in the
name of "God" or anybody else . . . then somewhere, you got the
wrong message. Because there really isn't all that much to say
beyond the very simple and obvious, "give love and you will get
it." The only thing that needs to be changed is your attitude
and outlook on life. Making group_of_people(x) move twenty paces
to the left while wearing black hats and reading from the Holy
Book of the Arboreal Tree Sloth, isn't gonna make the world a
better place.
While this discourse is tangential to some of the issues at hand,
in a great sense it is the underlying cause for all of them.
Once you have seen the light as it were, or understood the bigger
picture . . . it becomes very hard to go back to living life with
blinders on regarding your own actions. Until it eventually
reaches the place where I found myself. The point at which the
only things I'm going to talk about are those that matter to me,
things I believe in . . . things I believe will help people in
some manner. Along with the realization that I cannot do a lot
of things I used to do anymore. I cannot lie to people and
present them with some image they want to see in order to get
something from them -- because I mean, WHAT is there to "get"
anyway? I can no longer be a politician or figurehead for causes
that I do not believe in, and I will no longer waste my time tak-
ing part in meaningless drivel that serves to do nothing but en-
trench me in bullshit without end; I had already spent most of my
life taking apart the rules and winning at whatever game I tried
to play. What I never bothered to examine was the fact that I
didn't "win" anything that ever brought me any happiness . . .
what is the point in playing if you don't want the "prize?"
Stagnation of the Electronic Frontier
-------------------------------------
Moving forward in time by about two years, this was the attitude
that I had managed to retain as I returned to New York. Every-
thing was the same, yet completely different. What had been per-
vaded by Nihilism and vacuity only a short time ago, was now a
pathway of infinite potential and limitless possibility. For the
first time in almost six years I actually felt completely in-
spired and excited by the possibilities that life in general and
Cyberspace in particular had to offer.
The summer of 1991 was a kind of "class reunion" for many of us.
For the first time in almost half a decade we found ourselves
back in New York City, the place where all of this had started
for us such a long time ago.
What happened was pretty much the expected; an endless stream of
jokes and self-depreciating humor regarding who we used to be,
the three-letter acronyms we used to affiliate with or have in
revolution around us, the state of the universe and everything in
it, and a general time of catching up on who had done what. It
was a strange situation, since we really had disappeared, to the
extent that most of us had not talked with one another in years,
it was almost as if picking up the phone and speaking with some-
one from back then would bring back all the bad things you were
trying to get rid of.
Out of this gathering, I found about a dozen people who I no
longer knew. People who had become submerged in drugs, and be-
come lost in different sub-cultures where they could live out
reasonable facsimiles of their childhoods forevermore; people who
had completely lost touch with what they used to be, and become
stereotypical examples of what people tend to term "computer
geeks," the sum total of their interest in life having been nar-
rowed down to that new bug in X windows client-server architec-
ture and what it would mean to the future of the OSF; people who
hadn't changed at all and were still busy "getting over" on so-
ciety in general; but perhaps most surprising, I found
that about ten people I used to know had gone through a growth
process very similar to my own, and actually succeeded in solving
their quest and winning the prize we had all sought so badly.
The correct solution to the "quest," is of course, that there is
no solution. There is nothing you are looking for, except for
you, and once you realize this, you win the big prize, you find
yourself, and get to live happily ever after.
After re-discovering that a group of us seemed to thoroughly en-
joy each other's company, we eventually ended up having a weekly
meeting where we'd get together and discuss various topics.
Foremost amongst them was one that sprung up with increasing re-
gularity as the weeks went by: getting back onto the frontier
from a completely different angle. As years went by many of us
had started completely different lives; some were in college,
others had started companies or gone to work for companies they
had once laughed at, and still more had started careers complete-
ly unrelated to anything they had been doing in the past. But it
had became clear that what we really wanted to do was take the
incredible promise that had been shown to us during our youth
when we had walked along the edge of a new reality unfolding, and
channel it into a positive direction that would benefit every-
body.
As we found out, the hacker underground had continued with its
headlong dive into oblivion. The underground had basically
ceased to exist after the Operation Sun Devil sweep. Just about
the only "hacker systems" still in existence were those catering
to the teenagers whose priorities focused on ripping off phone
companies, collecting VMB codes and pirating software.
While this was slightly depressing, it was also a foregone con-
clusion and didn't cause too much surprise. The main focus of
our interest was what had become of the mainstream telecommunica-
tions nets -- given half a decade to evolve, something really ex-
citing must have happened by now. The hardware that we ended up
sitting in front of, would have made possible an undreamed of
variety of possibility when taken into context with what was
available in the past. We were used to 64K Apple ][+ systems, or
maybe tricked out //e's with 128K and PC's with 640K, and now we
were sitting at a friend's house in front of a NeXT and an SGI
Indigo. When you thought about the fact that 7 years ago you had
paid about $8,500 for a 4.5megabyte Corvus hard disk, and now you
could buy an entire NeXT with that . . . it was, fantastic.
Before taking off on our expedition of present-day Cyberspace, we
had spoken with some of our friends who were familiar with the
terrain, and received somewhat tepid responses and a general
dismissal of what was going on right now. Thinking the attitude
was one of standard arrogance which we had all gone through, we
didn't pay too much attention to it and set out to explore the
new electronic nervous system of the world.
A couple of hours later it became shockingly apparent that most
of the potential of the bright new technology that now existed .
. . that could have been used to create and house an infinite ex-
panse of innovation, communication, and pooling of thought, lay
dormant. Thus far it had seemingly been utilized to construct
gigantic file servers that advertised their existence by digitiz-
ing porno magazines and editing their dialup lines into the
resulting scan.
All those wonderful places that we had travelled in the past, and
had dominated the landscape only half a decade before . . . had
indeed been razed, paved over, and replaced by an endless elec-
tronic expanse of snap-together tract houses that littered the
landscape with numbingly identical systems. The frontier had
packed up and moved back into labs where people like our friend
with the workstations were working on applications that wouldn't
see the light of day for another decade. And what was out there
right now, was strikingly similar to a generic suburb of AnyTown,
USA.
Objectively a suburb is not a bad thing, it's planned out, logi-
cal, it works, it doesn't need to be any different from any other
suburb . . . in short, it's functional. It's also very different
from the environment we had grown up in, where everything was a
new step further out into the unknown, where anything could hap-
pen, and nobody had ever been there before.
From our vantage point it looked as if the explorers had indeed
gone back to their ivory towers (or haunted dungeons as the case
may be), and a lot of used car salesmen had set up shop cranking
out the snap-together tract houses, when they realized they could
make more money doing that, than say, selling used cars.
It was truly a mind blowing experience to witness for the first
time, systems that actually advertised themselves based upon how
many lines they had, or how much storage. Attitudes that would
have garnered a great deal of scorn and derision -- and in gen-
eral made your advertisement the brunt of a lot of jokes -- were
suddenly the accepted way in which systems chose to differentiate
themselves from one another. Looking at them, it came down to
the fact that the only difference between system (A) and system
(B) was that one might have 16 lines while the other had 24, and
system (C) was inherently superior to both (a) and (b) because it
had 32 lines and 4 gigabytes of storage (used to house 10,000
programs, out of which the same 200 are downloaded over and over
again, as the rest of the junk sits there gathering dust).
Even more frightening, on a system that had 10,000 messages on
it, an average of 9,800 will be echoes of FidoNet or RIME or
whatever-net, leaving a grand total of about 200 messages from
the actual members. And frequently those 200 messages date back
a year and a half . . . a couple of years ago a BAD one line sys-
tem had that many messages in a week. A good one in a couple of
hours.
To a lot of people Cyberspace has become one big file server . .
. strikingly similar to what television has devolved into. An
entirely passive place where you press buttons and get enter-
tained, no thought required, no input necessary.
Realizing that we were merely skimming the surface, and might not
know the whole story, we spent a couple of weeks becoming fami-
liar with what had happened, and what the situation really was.
Based upon several hundred conversations with various people who
were involved with the current scene, we arrived at a couple of
very basic conclusions.
In order to run a system in the present environment, and have
users, you needed to have a pile of hardware, many phone lines,
some sort of marketing and bookkeeping ability, a lot of spare
time, coupled with infinite patience to put up with people, since
they are now your customers, not just your friends, and if they
call you up asking the same goofy questions you cannot take the
phone off the hook or tell them to go away.
Where running a system in the past had meant giving up your
second phone line, it presently involved a great deal of interac-
tion with the department of Red Tape, and Bureau of Tasks You
Really Aren't Interested In. This opened the door to the "used-
car salesmen" people, since these were things they were used to
doing every day. Conversely, it has almost universally been our
experience that the guy who is a Unix wizard and can work magic
with networking and programming, lives in deathly fear of signing
paperwork, filling out his tax returns, or figuring out where he
parked his car. And finally, the creative person whose main in-
terest is making fantastic places, lacks the time and patience to
write the code, and certainly has no interest in administrative
duties.
In effect, most people with the desire to do something better,
did not have the necessary $25-30k laying around, and even if
they did, they would never act on it because they'd be forced to
spend a great deal of their time doing a hundred things they had
no interest in doing. So the online world had begun to be dom-
inated by the file servers, who didn't really have much of an in-
terest in being anything other than file servers, since that made
the most money with the least effort, and anybody with $25,000
could toss up a snap-together MeSsyDOS based system with very
little technical ability required.
Thus began the era of the "tract-houses" where advertising and
atmosphere consisted of rattling off hardware statistics and
number of phone lines, along with the number of shareware pro-
grams available for downloading (an extremely amusing concept,
considering that there are literally TERABYTES of free software
available for the taking on ftp sites all over the Internet,
which cost NOTHING to download from).
With the exception of two of three bright lights that had the
right idea and were trying to do something different, most of the
electronic frontier had indeed vanished. And it isn't so hard to
see where a couple of years from now the same advertising agen-
cies that sell brain-dead ads designed to induce you to crave one
brand of beer over another, will be pushing SYSTEM X, because IT
HAS 10,000 phone lines! Call now and leave your mind at the
door!
Transcendence
-------------
It has generally been our experience that people are neither stu-
pid, nor shallow. Everyone has the potential to think for them-
selves, to overcome adverse situations, and contribute something
to this world. When placed in situations that offer these possi-
bilities, people tend to come through with surprising regularity.
In a fairly short amount of time you end up with a group of peo-
ple doing something they themselves would have deemed improbable,
if not downright impossible, if you had asked them at any other
point in their lives.
Virtual Reality has the potential to become the single most im-
portant development in the history of human evolution. It is a
technology that holds the promise of absolute liberation. It
also holds the possibility of turning the world into the rather
grim one that is the basis of much Cyberpunk fiction, a dark
place where technology is used to oppress and suppress people.
By its very nature, it is very difficult to ever imagine the
latter. In order to have a police state, you need to amass a
certain amount of power, yet Cyberspace is the ultimate equaliz-
er. It is a place where one person can wield as much power as
100, 1,000, or 100,000 people. Physical limitations are cast
off, and in the event of conflict the playing field becomes that
of mind vs. mind. Sheer numbers and a mob rules mentality cease
to have any meaning when you can create infinite numbers of elec-
tronic organisms to do anything you want them to do.
The hope is that it will never sink to such a level of stupidity.
Games are wonderful, but there is no need for conflict, all
struggle tends to be internal conflict that has become external-
ized. When you want to convert the sinners, or prove you are
right, all you're doing is having an argument with yourself. The
beautiful thing about Virtual Reality is the fact that you are
free to do that, for as long as you need, to work out that par-
ticular set of problems -- without harming anybody.
There is only one ultimate truth, which is BEING HAPPY and ex-
periencing LOVE. How you choose to perceive it is a very indivi-
dual matter. While it might mean blue to you, orange to that guy
over there, and silver to me, it's all the same thing. In the
real world if we held fast to those beliefs and behaved as people
have been classically shown to behave, then we'd be killing each
other over who has the right idea about love . . . Cyberspace al-
lows everyone the freedom to co-exist without harming anyone
else's world-view or belief system. And if you truly are given
the opportunity to live in an environment conducive to you happi-
ness, then if that heretic who thinks orange is the answer were
ever to show up at your front door, chances are you would be able
to tolerate him, and even, "God" forbid, express the love you
claim to espouse.
Phantom Access - The Ethereal Takes Shape
-----------------------------------------
There was never any solid dividing line where we decided that we
really wanted to put together a system where we could have the
freedom of expression we wanted, with the ultimate goal really
being the very simple one of pushing the envelope further and
further out there. All of us had obligations, school, and per-
sonal commitments that would be difficult to integrate into this
major change of plans. But inevitably the mass exodus out of
college, the avoidance of unnecessary responsibilities, and the
initial stages of planning were set in motion.
Six months later we had close to a hundred thousand dollars,
top-down system design, a fully designed multi-user simulation
engine, a general idea of what we would do and how we would go
about it, a team of our friends together one more time, only this
time as a real corporation, and over one thousand megabytes of
the collected history of Cyberspace, dating back to systems that
existed in 1979, that had been laying in dusty boxes filled with
old Apple DOS 3.3 disks.
On April 1st 1992 MindVox went into its alpha-testing stage.
Which loosely speaking means that we put everything together and
watched it disintegrate repeatedly as the last 300-400 bugs were
worked out of the system. Since then it has been running in pro-
tected environment mode with a collection of our friends and as-
sociates crash-testing the software, suggesting where rough-edges
might be smoothed, and generally having a good time creating some
of the atmosphere while trying to destroy the software in every
conceivable way so that everything is solid upon inception.
In May of 1992 MindVox will open it's doors to the public. As
much as we'd like to say that it's going to completely change
everything, it will not. All it can do is allow people who feel
in rhythm with this vision of the world to converge together in
one of the most interesting nexus points of Cyberspace. To ex-
tend their reach, explore new levels of experience, and interact
with some of the pioneers in the fields of computer science, net-
working, science-fiction, music, the arts, politics, religion,
altered states, and future reality.
Our main priority is to create and continuously evolve an en-
vironment that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, cou-
pled with access to information and ideas, that present you with
a far greater spectrum of possibility than you might otherwise be
able to access.
Thanks
------
Nothing of this magnitude could ever take shape based upon the
merits of any one individual. The entire Phantom Access Group
has been a collaborative effort since it began some ten years
ago; the MindVox project is merely the first confluence of the
diverse talents that comprise the core of Phantom Access Techno-
logies, that has been directed towards the electronic and socie-
tal mainstream.
Looking back over the years, there are very few of my friends who
have not in some way contributed to the genesis of Phantom Access
and the creation of MindVox, and I'd like to take this opportuni-
ty to express my gratitude to all of them.
People I would like to specifically thank, and without whom Mind-
Vox could not have been launched in the manner we wanted, in-
clude:
First and foremost, my fiance Delia, who has made much of
the last several years possible; who never knew about "Lord Digi-
tal" when she met me; who has gone from "computers, uh, ugh,
that's so . . . um, dull" to not only seeing the potentials in-
herent in the capabilities the technology presents to all so-
ciety, but actually extending many hundreds of hours of her time
to scripting sections of the project and designing human interac-
tion POV's based upon her lifelong experience with theatre and
film. She has also shown remarkable grace by retaining a sense
of humor when dealing with 2am anonymous calls from computer
dudes who feel compelled to ask "so, what does Lord Digital do in
bed?" questions.
The second person to whom I owe a great deal is Bruce Fanch-
er, my partner in this endeavor, as well as half a hundred pro-
jects that have spanned over a decade. Without you many things
would not have been possible, and those that were would have been
a lot less fun. It has been an interesting experience watching
someone grow into an adult who has retained all the qualities
that made them so much fun to hang out with in our youth, yet
managed to temper that childlike glee with responsibility, humor
in the face of adversity, and that elusive quality called charac-
ter. Here's to another couple of decades of Lord & Lord.
I would like to thank every member of the Phantom Access
Group for the thousands of hours spent designing, implementing
and de-bugging the programs that make MindVox come to life.
Respective of some people's desire to remain out of the
spotlight, I will leave it at that. You know who you are & any-
one who really cares to find that out can do so at any time they
desire.
Phiber Optik: For applying his considerable skills in a po-
sitive direction and helping us make MindVox a very difficult
fortress to lay siege to, while at the same time adding a tremen-
dous amount of versatility to our networking and communications
interface options. Most of all, thank you for having the courage
to realize that the world is not always a logical or fair place
and that no matter how intelligent you are or how noble your in-
tentions, you can be dragged down by the stupidity and fear of
those around you if you associate with people who do not share
the same qualities you possess.
Charles: For a great deal of assistance in updating many of
us regarding the current status of new technology and what's just
over the horizon, as well as providing tremendous aid by showing
us functional examples of the state of the art in distributed
electronic networking, and taking us on a fast-forward cruise
through a wide variety of hardware platforms and development
tools. Your friendship, advice, and persistent belief in our vi-
sion, has been invaluable.
Len Rose: For being a good friend over the years and always
giving assistance with anything we have needed. Most of all
thanks for coming out of everything you've been through with op-
timism about the future and an intact belief system. Peace.
George Gleason: For being a person who has become one of my
close friends faster than anyone else ever did. For possessing a
really beautiful outlook on life & everything in it, and for al-
ways being a calming voice when things are completely crazy and
the moon is full.
Bruce Sterling: For his encouragement, support, and a real-
ly funny talk at CFP-2. Most of all, the deepest appreciation
for doing an admirable job of presenting the unbiased truth while
chronicling some of the events that have taken place on the fron-
tiers of Cyberspace.
Mike Godwin: For putting up with many long and strange
phone calls regarding a wide variety of topics; for helping us to
avoid potential pitfalls and difficulty; for providing encourage-
ment and advice, and in general, for being a really cool person
who has gone out of his way many times to provide us with assis-
tance.
Thomas Dell: For writing code full of obscure jokes and
weird ramblings that do wonders to wake you up and get your full
attention when you are changing things at 3am, and for being an
exceptionally gracious guy who is one of the limited handful of
people that have maintained their sense of vision in the face of
impending mediocrity and industrialization.
Special thanks to Dan, SN, SR, D00f and everyone in DPAK and
cDc, who comprise some of the very few who managed to grasp the
obvious, and in turn make use of this knowledge in an entertain-
ing and lucid manner. Additional accolades to DPAK for being the
only eL!te duDeZ to use a four letter acronym instead of a three
letter one. The vision, the sheer wow!
Mega-Supra-Surfin-the-Ozone Thanks to Mondo 2000. Beyond
the sea of screaming fluff and designer hyperbole contained
within the covers of any issue of Mondo, there is also a great
deal of truth to be found about Cyberspace, music, art, film, and
life in general. Mondo has thus far shown itself to be beyond
reproach as far as journalistic ethics and presentation of the
facts are concerned. It is also to be commended as a publication
with a sound belief in typing words at random and letting them
fall where they may.
Finally, tremendous gratitude goes to Jim Thomas. A person
I do not know and have never spoken with, yet someone who has
done an exceptionally important service to all of Cyberspace
with the forum presented by Computer Underground Digest. Ir-
respective even of CuD, I have heard nothing but praise and
well-wishing from the many you have helped. Thank you.
Additional thanks to: Paul, Yuri, Eric & Eric, Ken & every-
one who has made the move to Phibro Energy, Drowned Fish, Andrew,
Randy, Carl, The Plastics, TV, Eric Madeson, Richard, Harlequin,
Dane, Jeff, The Galactic Knight, Laszlo Nibble, Colleen, Cereal
"I live to be annoying" Killer, the cast & crew of LightStorm
lighting and Manny "huh?" Riggs at Record Plant.
Patrick K. Kroupa digital@phantom.com
Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. +1 212 988 5987
_________________________________________________________________
*1 Lyrics are (c) Copyright, some year or another by Mick Jagger
& Keith Richards, otherwise known as the Rolling Stones. The
version I was listening to is a cover version done by
Jane's Addiction.
*2 Lyrics are (c) Copyright, 1991 by Guns N Roses music
Uzi/Suicide Records.
MindVox: The Overture
Copyright (c) 1992, by Patrick Karel Kroupa (Lord Digital)
All Rights Reserved
"...just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners; saints"
--The Rolling Stones (Jane's Addiction cover(*1))
Prelude
-------
This article has its inception in several dozen people ask-
ing the same questions with fairly consistent regularity. Namely
those of, "where'd you guys go?", "what's the deal with MindVox?"
and "what have you been doing for the last five years anyway?"
Overture does a decent job of tying up all of the above and
then some, while providing a general overview about who we are at
Phantom Access and what we're in the process of doing with Mind-
Vox. Sections of this article self-plagiarize heavily from my
own writings in ENTROPY CALLING, which will be in a form suitable
for publication sometime around the first quarter of 1993 at the
rate things are going right now. My apologies for the perpetual-
ly blown deadlines regarding this work, but something always
manages to pop up that requires my full attention, in this case
MindVox itself.
I've done what I could to make everything understandable by
even those who have no prior knowledge of who we are or what's
going on, hopefully I have at least partially succeeded. If
something is briefly touched upon and you don't understand its
significance, then it probably means something to a smaller
cross-section of people and you can safely ignore it.
While this is in many respects a personal account of my own
journey through Cyberspace and what it has meant to me and a
handful of my friends, on a larger scale the underlying theme and
basic premise of how the electronic universe began and has
evolved is reflective of the experiences of countless people who
have been traversing the endless pathways of possibility with me
for most of their lives.
First Light
-----------
A long time ago, in a thoughtspace far away, an event that would
forevermore alter the shape of human interaction took place . . .
But we're not here to talk about that, instead we're gonna dis-
cuss computers and how a couple of guys named Ward Christianson
and Randy Seuss wrote a program that would allow them to be set
up as a kind of store-and-forward messaging system designed to
allow their circle of friends to interact with one another by us-
ing these things called modems . . . and how this event would
prove to be the first truly accessible step into the uncharted
territory of what was to become Cyberspace.
From this empowering turning point in the late seventies, the
ideas, dreams and fantasies that would transmute and amplify hu-
man potentials and evolutionary possibilities, broke loose from
the shackles that primitive technology had imposed upon them and
began to spin the electronic universe into existence.
Still in the very early stages of its development, Cyberspace, or
the "modem world" as it is sometimes called, has until very re-
cently remained a largely untapped forum unique within the histo-
ry of our world. It is a rapidly shifting microcosm that in the
early part of the 1990's seems poised to engulf the reality from
which it was born, weaving together the threads of tens of mil-
lions of diverse dreams, into one mercurial tapestry that encom-
passes the collective consciousness of humanity and frees it from
all constraints.
The non-space of Cyberspace is a place where global changes that
would take years or even centuries outside of the online domain,
can occur in weeks or months. It is a place where participants
from all over the world share a unique common-ground based on
nothing less nor more, than a belief in the same vision of possi-
bility. It is a land where people who scoff at "The Elements of
Style" frequently write paragraphs, pages, and even novels, full
of big words, huge concepts, and absolutely gargantuan amounts of
emoting -- while actually saying nothing tangible. In a little
over a decade, the online microcosm has managed to experience the
equivalent of hundreds of years of evolution. Not to mention the
creation of hundreds of words which have found their way into the
online lexicon despite the fact that nobody is quite sure what
they mean in the first place.
During this turbulent period of rapid change the half-dozen sys-
tems of 1978, had grown to 45 or 50 electronic villages by 1980.
These were the original outposts of Cyberspace, running on hacked
together systems, hooked into industrial 8" drives, and network-
ing at the blinding speed of 110 baud. To be honest, there
wasn't really a whole lot of high level philosophizing going on
regarding the brave new world that had dawned. Actually, most of
the conversation tended to focus on things along the lines of,
"How do you hook an 8" drive onto an Apple ][?" and "ANY idiot
can see that setting the 7th bit high on the xdef reg is the
WRONG thing to do, OF COURSE it'll make the program crash, are
you stupid or something?" It was a technological triumph, but
one that was for the most part, still lacking many of the key
participants that would shape the technology into designer reali-
ties.
As the seventies drew to a close, the sterility and bare-bones
functionality that had predominated, began to make way for places
created by people who truly wanted something unique and dif-
ferent. The mere existence of the technology was no longer that
exciting, and as a greater number of people gained access to the
hardware needed to jack in, the first electronic tribes gathered
and began erecting monuments to their own ingenuity.
By the time the eighties were upon us, the handful of systems
that had thrived during the latter half of the previous decade
had multiplied rapidly, giving birth to new systems on an almost
daily basis, and by 1982 there were close to a thousand outposts
on the frontier. Hardware prices were falling, 1200bps modems
were actually within the reach of many people who wanted to pur-
chase them, and the online domain was beginning to attract a wide
variety of participants from outside the technocratic elite.
A second pivotal point came during the summer of 1983 when the
movie WARGAMES was released. Within several months the modem
world literally doubled in size. An entire new generation of
people were about to take the plunge into electronic wonderland
and set off an explosive growth rate that has not slowed since
then. It was a major and irreversible nexus point that would be-
gin the abrupt transition from taking Cyberspace from the realm
of underground sub-culture to the forefront of mainstream media.
In retrospect the early eighties were the "golden age" of Cyber-
space. There truly was a new frontier just over the horizon, and
we were standing at the edge. This period in the history of the
electronic universe was unruly and chaotic, the first settlers on
the frontier wouldn't arrive for another decade or so, and the
only people here were a small collection of explorers eager to
embark on the next adventure.
Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any-
thing, is the trail that led up to it. You are there for some
reason, or usually a very complex series of reasons, that have
shaped your life up until that point in time, and caused you to
become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa-
tion you are locked into in the consensual reality that we all
physically inhabit at present. In other words, the "real world"
isn't making you happy, and you want outta there.
Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits, dropouts, acidheads,
phreaks, hackers, hippies, scientists, students, guys who could
say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight face and really
mean it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many
of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires
and kingdoms of Cyberspace.
As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a lot of
the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this
new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain and dissatis-
faction. When I first became an active participant in this elec-
tronic nervous system that was just beginning to experience its
awakening; I was a little over ten years old. My early under-
standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a handful of
people whose skills I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose
lives I felt great pity and sadness for.
There were of course exceptions, people who were so high on the
potential of this technology and the completely new level of
reality it could bring, that nothing more than a love of their
creation drove them onwards. But these people were pretty uncom-
mon, most of the pioneers were guys who were simply unhappy . . .
or to be more exact, so unhappy that they had given up on finding
joy in the "real world" and were constructing a rocket ship
called Cyberspace to get them out of here as fast as possible.
"Peace, love and happiness" was not exactly the driving force
behind the rise of the electronic domains. A more realistic ral-
lying cry was one of "Gee this technology is neat, and I'm gonna
use it to make a whole new world where I can be happy and none of
you can ever bother me again. You'll all be sorry, just wait and
see!" They were building the cult of high technology in the
hopes that it would somehow save them from whatever they thought
had prevented them from attaining happiness anywhere else.
Sadly enough "they" were not THOSE PEOPLE, "they" had become "us"
and while the first steps into this place had been made possible
by the phone phreaks and misfits of yesterday, the online world
was exploding and changing at an incredible velocity, the rest of
society was about to take notice in a big way, and a handful of
disenfranchised teenagers had seized the reigns and were in the
early stages of walking into the spotlight and taking the status
quo for a big ride . . .
The Fall
--------
Everything really was this big beautiful game, and here we were
with an overview of the whole jigsaw puzzle, and the sudden power
to do anything we wanted to do with it. For the first time in
recent history you COULD reach out and change reality, you could
DO STUFF that effected EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, and you were sud-
denly living this life that was like something out of a comic
book or adventure story. In a place filled with magical lands
and fantastic people who you had only read about, and suddenly
you WERE actually talking to Timothy Leary, or Steven Wozniak,
and some guy who was just on the cover of a magazine was speaking
with you and thought that YOU were cool, and then finally you
were IN the magazines and at the forefront of an entire sub-
culture that was being rapidly assimilated into the cultural
mythos.
It was a VERY interesting time and place in which to grow up.
Of course the problem is a lot of us didn't grow up. At a cer-
tain point in time having power that can have real and immediate
effects upon all society, can do very strange things to your per-
spective of the world. Instead of learning to deal with the nor-
mal barriers that most teenagers in western culture find them-
selves faced with, you discover that you can blow right through
all of them without even slowing down. In this way you miss much
of the growth and acclimation that people go through during their
teenage years. Which is where a lot of old friends parted ways
with reality and ceased to be explorers, becoming caught up in
the real world implications of the power that was now at their
disposal. In effect, they lost sight of the underlying theme
that all our actions had been based upon, that of exploration and
pushing the boundaries, and merely focused on the short-term
end-result of what their abilities could bring them; in the pro-
cess becoming the criminals that the Secret Service and FBI had
said we all were.
What had begun with the best intentions, as the ultimate exten-
sion of human curiosity, had devolved into a cultural movement
that had very little to do with the ideals that had inspired it.
The term "hacker" had become synonymous with "criminal", and tak-
ing a look around at the state of the underground, it looked as
if much of it had in fact degenerated into crime cartels
comprised of angry teens who had little understanding of the
underlying mechanisms they were employing to play with reality.
It was no longer the exhilaration of knowing that you could actu-
ally reach out and touch a satellite . . . it had come down to
the negative power trip of fucking with something for the sake of
pissing people off or just showing the world how much power you
really have at your disposal if you ever decided to throw a tan-
trum.
By 1988 what had replaced our outlook, was a mindset where the
new generation saw two things: one of them was the potential to
take advantage of holes in the system for personal gain. There
was no longer any quest for knowledge, desire to learn, or need
to push the boundaries of what was possible for the sake of ex-
ploration. Instead there were a lot of people who couldn't get
past making free phone calls, stealing things, and causing trou-
ble by following an already well-established pattern of action
and reaction.
The second -- and perhaps biggest -- motivating factor had become
the desire for personal attention in the form of self-
aggrandizement: the ultimate hack had become the media machine
itself. What was originally a by-product of our experiences, had
become a goal in and of itself. And here is where things became
REALLY twisted.
The media in the latter half of the twentieth century has become
a very strange distortion of reality instead of the reflection it
was intended to be. Since this is not an essay on the evils of
manipulation through the use of media, I will stick with a very
simple outline of how events occur in the real world.
A reporter, journalist, writer -- SOME PERSON who has their own
desires and ambitions, wants to do an exciting story on something
that will garner him or her a lot of attention and acclaim.
Really they are operating from a point of view that has much in
common with the "hacker's," which is the mindset of "I'm gonna
get mine." So this journalist looks around at the headlines and
realizes that there is a mounting wave of hysteria surrounding
viruses and hackers and invasion of privacy and . . . gee,
wouldn't it be a nice career move to do a story that will mix
their name into whatever the hot topic of the next five minutes
happens to be.
If the journalist is attached to any even marginally important
publication, they will then get their pick from one of the
current four or five "names" doing the rounds. On the other
hand, if the journalist is just starting out and connected to
something much smaller, then the chances are they will simply
show up at some user's group meeting, find the nearest thing they
can to a "computer nerd," do an interview, and then write it up
expressing whatever the current publicly-sanctioned viewpoint
happens to be (the usual slant has become: hackers are evil and
can look at your credit rating, fear them).
I have been interviewed on many occasions and I know roughly
twenty people who have done the interviews that comprise the
basis of about 90% of all media that exists in relation to the
underground; be it in newspaper, periodical, television segment,
or book format. WITH *VERY* FEW EXCEPTIONS, there have been
countless solicitations to perform illegal acts in the presence
of journalists, these solicitations move all the way into coer-
cion in some cases. There are reports containing sentences that
were never spoken, quotes taken out of context, information that
was invented . . . there's simply no end to it. The reporter
profits first by stroking the hacker's ego and giving him the
spotlight that he thinks he wants so badly, and then continues to
profit as the hacker rides a bigger and bigger wave of publicity
that in every case leads to a very unhappy ending if the hacker
in question doesn't have the foresight to get off the ride before
it derails.
In any case, whatever happens, the reporter always wins. When
the hacker's ride reaches its date with fate, the journalist in
question can now write the closing chapter in the hacker's saga
and tell the public how this nefarious evil-doer is being pun-
ished by the long arm of justice. This is followed up by the
journalist taking on the "official" mantle of "hacker expert,"
doing the lecture circuit, perhaps writing a book, and then going
out and finding a new horse to beat to death.
Obviously nothing can ever be this black and white, there must be
a need for both parties to play their roles. The reporter is not
THE EVIL BAD MAN who has corrupted the INNOCENT ANGELIC HACKER,
nor does this scenario apply to all journalists equally, off the
top of my head; Bruce Sterling, John Markoff, and Julian Dibbell
come to mind as extremely ethical exceptions to the norm.
Usually the reporter who isn't quite so ethical is just somebody
who is presented with a situation that can easily be twisted and
misused if the desire for fame and fortune takes precedence over
everything else. The reporter by the very nature of his job
tends to be quite "slick" and worldly-wise, whereas the hacker in
question is usually highly knowledgeable about computer systems
while managing to retain an oblivious naivety about the workings
of human beings in that elusive place called "the real world."
This sets the stage for what transpires.
And you see a lot of people who used to be your friends, get
ground up in this endless cycle as it repeats itself over and
over again until one day you wake up and come to realize that
you're seventeen or eighteen going on 90. You understand that
everything in the whole world is comprised of bits and pieces of
lies and half-truths, everyone is inherently corrupt, including
you; a lot of kids who used to be your friends are now all grown
up with no place to go and getting busted for such things as
fraud and grand larceny; and you have utterly lost touch with
anything even remotely "real." And yet, you're still a teenager
and have another 70 or 80 years left to hang around on this
planet.
This is right around the time that you're back in the media, only
this trip around you're at the receiving end of law enforcement
who have been prodded into a state of near-hysteria by the dawn-
ing realization that a bunch of kids really can dismantle the
building blocks of the infrastructure that makes most of
present-day society possible. Naturally enough they're scared,
and they're in the process of doing what people have done for
ages when they are afraid: going on a witch-hunt. Guess who gets
to play witch...
So one day you find yourself wondering why you should bother buy-
ing another computer system and trying to figure out what the
point of it all was anyway; to glimpse the limitless potential
and then fall back and only see your own flaws amplified to
cartoon-like proportions.
The 1980's were a time that saw the birth and death of the first
dynasties of Cyberspace. Travelling through the electronic
landscape of this period in time, was like traversing this sur-
real range of mountains, where amongst the sheer outcropping of
rock, lush valleys, and snow-capped peaks, a collection of rather
obsessive dreamers had built some of the most beautiful castles
that were ever created and opened their doors to a populace of
pioneers. It was absolutely transporting and timeless . . . and
unfortunately -- in the short term -- doomed.
This has been an abbreviated summary of the atmosphere and events
that started a kind of mass exodus out of the modem world for
about twenty of us. We had spent our entire childhoods jacked
into this alternate electronic universe, locked into playing our
overly-developed personas, and almost no time figuring out who we
were and what we wanted out of life beyond "further, better,
more." This is nothing new or unique in and of itself, it was
however something that gained a very tangible and immediate im-
portance to many of us when we found that the thoughtspace in
which we had lived a large portion of our lives had disintegrated
and the people we had known and called friends, had largely
disappeared and been replaced by every negative quality they pos-
sessed.
A lot of us dumped the remnants of this reality into a stack of
boxes and took off for parts unknown. Whether college, work, a
new circle of friends that didn't know who you were in Cyber-
space, or even know what Cyberspace was; just about anywhere were
we could start over and try to regain what had somehow been lost.
Transformation
--------------
"Ya live your life like it's a coma,
so won't you tell me why we'd wanna?
With all the reasons you give,
it's kinda hard to believe;
But who am I to tell you I've seen,
any reason why you should stay;
Maybe we'd be better off without you anyway..."
--Guns N Roses(*2)
After coming to the realization that visiting The Tunnel for the
fourteenth time in three weeks was not going to change my life
for the better, and having no idea what I wanted to do with my-
self, I dropped it all and got on a plane for the middle of no-
where New Mexico. Where I proceeded to cycle through all my
negative tendencies at an accelerated pace, first becoming
utterly obsessed with bodybuilding, to the point of five hour a
day workouts, insane diets, steroids, and a silly-putty like
transformation of myself to 6'2" 215 pounds and 6% bodyfat.
This was good for about ten months, before I found myself in the
same mindset I had thought I could escape. Looking in the mirror
and seeing a parody of who I used to be, wondering where to go
from there. The answer was obviously to buy a Porsche and begin
re-stocking my wardrobe with everything by Armani and Versace,
yes I had it now, this WAS the right answer, I only had to look
around at all the people I knew doing just this to see that . . .
well, actually they were all pretty miserable, but again, it
lasted for about nine or ten months.
Around this time I realized that aside from the fact that I was a
pretty fucked up person who probably needed a lot of therapy --
which had never quite worked out the right way when I had it
thrust upon me as a teenager -- I had become completely out of
touch with my feelings. Not out of touch that I didn't have
them, I had over a thousand pages of them sprayed across mega-
bytes of disks where I wrote out all the things inside of myself
driving me crazy; but out of touch in the sense that when I be-
gan taking things apart and analyzing reality, I had stopped
listening to anything I felt inside and just tuned in to what
seemed logical.
The problem being that the more you try to act out of logic, the
more you find yourself applying logic to utterly emotional issues
in an completely crazed and self-destructive way. When logic
should be asking: "Why do I want to weigh 215 pounds of muscle?
What the hell am I doing?" it suddenly finds itself in the posi-
tion of contemplating "Ok, so if I want to gain 5 pounds in the
next 2 weeks, how many CC's of Deca do I mix with X mg. of Ana-
var, with what ratio of carbs/fat and what is the minimum PER of
the protein I am going to consume in order to remain in an anti-
catabolic state?"
Welcome to real-life Alice in Wonderland, taking place in your
head.
At the age of twenty-one I had managed to attain a place where I
possessed everything that I ever thought I wanted. Life is funny
that way, you really do get whatever you desire. Endless hours
spent reading thousands of books; the mix and match regimen of
combinations of new nootropics and longevity agents; and the fi-
nal combination of steroids and obsessive workouts had resulted
in my achievement of the goal I had subconsciously been working
towards for most of my life. I had succeeded in my efforts to
become absolutely untouchable by anyone or anything.
When you are no longer in the middle of a situation and have the
comfort of hindsight it's very simple to deduce what the underly-
ing problems behind anything happen to be, and why you are acting
in a way that is physically, mentally and spiritually destructive
to yourself. While there is nothing inherently wrong with any
action I might have taken, it all comes back to the question of
why are you doing something? And looking back upon my life, I
had actually lived very little of it in an attempt to make myself
happy. Almost everything had been some sort of reaction to those
around me, and how I felt I had to respond to them.
Despite my intellectual understanding of how brief moments of
stimulus-response can shape a person's existence, like so many
endlessly-referenced frames of film forever etched in their
brain. Long-gone fragments of time that refuse to relinquish
their hold on the present, telling people who they are, setting
their limitations, and defining the boundaries of what they allow
their lives to mean. In truth I had never managed to apply any
of this knowledge to myself and had lived most of my life in ac-
cordance with the patterns of self-destructive programming per-
petually repeating a loop in my head.
From childhood onwards I have been through a seemingly endless
variety of extremes in my life; moving from levels of comfortable
opulence, to near-poverty and back again, more times than I care
to count. What I had learned from this was that being poor
wasn't that much fun, and could really suck, therefore logic dic-
tates that I must always have a lot of money and do whatever it
takes to get it. In fact I'm going to be so unconcerned with mo-
ney that I will start to feel anxious if I'm not wearing a $300
dollar haircut and a $400 dollar shirt. I have felt controlled
by situations beyond my reach in the past, therefore I am going
to learn as much as I can about everything, so that nobody will
ever be able to fuck with my head and attempt to control me
through misrepresentation of the truth. I have been out-of-
control with various addictions and done such stupid things to
myself that through combinations of downers and alcohol I have at
one point weighed over 300 pounds; therefore I will understand
every fucking piece of biochemistry that is known about the human
body, I will do whatever it takes to look into the mirror and
gain my own approval even if it means working out with such fre-
quency that a pleasant sport becomes a daily torture session that
leaves me nauseous and physically incapable of performing simple
movements because everything hurts all the time. I will look
like someone has spray-painted skin onto a statue no matter how
difficult it is to maintain this state constantly, I will force
myself to eat 6,000 calories of protein and 400 calories of car-
bohydrate, and if I can no longer think or move and my ultimate
fantasy has become sleeping 18 hours a day, then that's what caf-
feine and amphetamines are for. I live in hell therefore I shall
use drugs to escape my hell by taking week-long vacations on opi-
ates, but I will never be controlled by anything, so on the 8th
day I will walk away from heaven and live through a couple of
days of pain that hurt a little bit more than the rest of my
life, but I will never be some fucking junkie, because I not only
can do anything, I WILL do it, and I just dare the fucking
universe to try and prove otherwise, because I can quit anything,
I can conquer anything, I can do anything to prove anything to
anyone and you can't stop me, because the entire world is full of
weak, soft and stupid motherfuckers who talk much and do little;
praise George Bernard Shaw and pass the Nietzsche.
Coming down off the adrenalin and testosterone rush the memories
I used to write that paragraph with have triggered, I'd like to
take this moment to borrow a quote from one of the greatest
poet-philosophers of our time: "Happy happy! Joy joy!"
After endless repetitions of this cycle I had finally reached a
state in which my internal programming ceased to function --
there was simply nothing left I could apply it to. Over the
years I had overcome most of my psychological barriers through
direct mental or physical actions, that had brought with them
physical rewards that I was utterly incapable of applying to my
life at that time. Welcome to oblivion.
Hitting absolute nothingness was the beginning of a very personal
catharsis for me that finally led to turning inwards to see what
was wrong, since externally, everything looked okay. I had at-
tained a physical state that "corrected" everything my subcons-
cious had said was "wrong" with me, yet for some bewildering rea-
son I was not deliriously happy. A series of steps followed
which eventually led to various experiments in the world of thea-
tre and film, where I had the chance to re-connect with emotions,
and get them back into some kind of perspective from the comfort-
able vantage point and attitude of: "they're not really mine, I'm
only playing them." All of which reached a pinnacle when I began
experimenting with LSD for the first time.
If you have never experienced what it is like to be on an acid
trip, it will be difficult for me to convey the kaleidoscopic
depth of experience you are presented with. It does nothing less
nor more, than strip away every preconceived notion that you have
ever had regarding what "reality" is. Beyond the special ef-
fects, intellectual realizations, and creative opportunity it
presents, it leaves you imbued with one very basic truth of the
universe: No matter what the actual outcome of your actions,
what matters is your intent. If what you are doing -- whatever
it may be -- is being done out of any reason other than a desire
to bring happiness to people; to help humanity as a whole reach
some greater level of understanding; to uplift and inspire people
to reach for something that is within everyone's grasp . . . then
you are wasting your time.
This is not exactly news, I mean it is the basic belief system
that every religion on earth is founded on (with the possible ex-
ception of Satanism, and a few other offshoots of this system of
thought). The problem with religion getting such a bad rap most
of the time is largely due to the fact that most people who act
as spokesmen for any given religious cause, are only mouthing
words they comprehend on an intellectual level. They are not ac-
tually living in this state of internal alignment, so what they
have to offer can be very suspect . . . how is someone who has
not attained what he speaks of, supposed to help you attain it
for yourself? While dogma may help a limited few, it will never
reach most of those who posses the ability to think for them-
selves. Nor is standing at a pulpit or in front of a camera and
ranting about damnation, going to help anyone reach any kind of
positive state.
I obviously cannot speak for everybody, but from my own perspec-
tive I had read the holy books of most religions on earth when I
became interested in psychology and the theories of Carl Jung --
who crosses over into mysticism and religious experience, going
as far as the concept of "karma" with his theory of Synchronici-
ty. Yet I never got anything from them other than an intellectu-
al high of understanding how groups of people could be programmed
to behave in certain ways . . . which isn't what it's about. The
EXPERIENCE is what all religions are based on, how you choose to
interpret it is entirely up to you. But a very simple thing that
becomes apparent is the basic truth that wherever your inspira-
tion is coming from, if it fills you with the need to motivate
large groups of people to do SOMETHING, be that something in the
name of "God" or anybody else . . . then somewhere, you got the
wrong message. Because there really isn't all that much to say
beyond the very simple and obvious, "give love and you will get
it." The only thing that needs to be changed is your attitude
and outlook on life. Making group_of_people(x) move twenty paces
to the left while wearing black hats and reading from the Holy
Book of the Arboreal Tree Sloth, isn't gonna make the world a
better place.
While this discourse is tangential to some of the issues at hand,
in a great sense it is the underlying cause for all of them.
Once you have seen the light as it were, or understood the bigger
picture . . . it becomes very hard to go back to living life with
blinders on regarding your own actions. Until it eventually
reaches the place where I found myself. The point at which the
only things I'm going to talk about are those that matter to me,
things I believe in . . . things I believe will help people in
some manner. Along with the realization that I cannot do a lot
of things I used to do anymore. I cannot lie to people and
present them with some image they want to see in order to get
something from them -- because I mean, WHAT is there to "get"
anyway? I can no longer be a politician or figurehead for causes
that I do not believe in, and I will no longer waste my time tak-
ing part in meaningless drivel that serves to do nothing but en-
trench me in bullshit without end; I had already spent most of my
life taking apart the rules and winning at whatever game I tried
to play. What I never bothered to examine was the fact that I
didn't "win" anything that ever brought me any happiness . . .
what is the point in playing if you don't want the "prize?"
Stagnation of the Electronic Frontier
-------------------------------------
Moving forward in time by about two years, this was the attitude
that I had managed to retain as I returned to New York. Every-
thing was the same, yet completely different. What had been per-
vaded by Nihilism and vacuity only a short time ago, was now a
pathway of infinite potential and limitless possibility. For the
first time in almost six years I actually felt completely in-
spired and excited by the possibilities that life in general and
Cyberspace in particular had to offer.
The summer of 1991 was a kind of "class reunion" for many of us.
For the first time in almost half a decade we found ourselves
back in New York City, the place where all of this had started
for us such a long time ago.
What happened was pretty much the expected; an endless stream of
jokes and self-depreciating humor regarding who we used to be,
the three-letter acronyms we used to affiliate with or have in
revolution around us, the state of the universe and everything in
it, and a general time of catching up on who had done what. It
was a strange situation, since we really had disappeared, to the
extent that most of us had not talked with one another in years,
it was almost as if picking up the phone and speaking with some-
one from back then would bring back all the bad things you were
trying to get rid of.
Out of this gathering, I found about a dozen people who I no
longer knew. People who had become submerged in drugs, and be-
come lost in different sub-cultures where they could live out
reasonable facsimiles of their childhoods forevermore; people who
had completely lost touch with what they used to be, and become
stereotypical examples of what people tend to term "computer
geeks," the sum total of their interest in life having been nar-
rowed down to that new bug in X windows client-server architec-
ture and what it would mean to the future of the OSF; people who
hadn't changed at all and were still busy "getting over" on so-
ciety in general; but perhaps most surprising, I found
that about ten people I used to know had gone through a growth
process very similar to my own, and actually succeeded in solving
their quest and winning the prize we had all sought so badly.
The correct solution to the "quest," is of course, that there is
no solution. There is nothing you are looking for, except for
you, and once you realize this, you win the big prize, you find
yourself, and get to live happily ever after.
After re-discovering that a group of us seemed to thoroughly en-
joy each other's company, we eventually ended up having a weekly
meeting where we'd get together and discuss various topics.
Foremost amongst them was one that sprung up with increasing re-
gularity as the weeks went by: getting back onto the frontier
from a completely different angle. As years went by many of us
had started completely different lives; some were in college,
others had started companies or gone to work for companies they
had once laughed at, and still more had started careers complete-
ly unrelated to anything they had been doing in the past. But it
had became clear that what we really wanted to do was take the
incredible promise that had been shown to us during our youth
when we had walked along the edge of a new reality unfolding, and
channel it into a positive direction that would benefit every-
body.
As we found out, the hacker underground had continued with its
headlong dive into oblivion. The underground had basically
ceased to exist after the Operation Sun Devil sweep. Just about
the only "hacker systems" still in existence were those catering
to the teenagers whose priorities focused on ripping off phone
companies, collecting VMB codes and pirating software.
While this was slightly depressing, it was also a foregone con-
clusion and didn't cause too much surprise. The main focus of
our interest was what had become of the mainstream telecommunica-
tions nets -- given half a decade to evolve, something really ex-
citing must have happened by now. The hardware that we ended up
sitting in front of, would have made possible an undreamed of
variety of possibility when taken into context with what was
available in the past. We were used to 64K Apple ][+ systems, or
maybe tricked out //e's with 128K and PC's with 640K, and now we
were sitting at a friend's house in front of a NeXT and an SGI
Indigo. When you thought about the fact that 7 years ago you had
paid about $8,500 for a 4.5megabyte Corvus hard disk, and now you
could buy an entire NeXT with that . . . it was, fantastic.
Before taking off on our expedition of present-day Cyberspace, we
had spoken with some of our friends who were familiar with the
terrain, and received somewhat tepid responses and a general
dismissal of what was going on right now. Thinking the attitude
was one of standard arrogance which we had all gone through, we
didn't pay too much attention to it and set out to explore the
new electronic nervous system of the world.
A couple of hours later it became shockingly apparent that most
of the potential of the bright new technology that now existed .
. . that could have been used to create and house an infinite ex-
panse of innovation, communication, and pooling of thought, lay
dormant. Thus far it had seemingly been utilized to construct
gigantic file servers that advertised their existence by digitiz-
ing porno magazines and editing their dialup lines into the
resulting scan.
All those wonderful places that we had travelled in the past, and
had dominated the landscape only half a decade before . . . had
indeed been razed, paved over, and replaced by an endless elec-
tronic expanse of snap-together tract houses that littered the
landscape with numbingly identical systems. The frontier had
packed up and moved back into labs where people like our friend
with the workstations were working on applications that wouldn't
see the light of day for another decade. And what was out there
right now, was strikingly similar to a generic suburb of AnyTown,
USA.
Objectively a suburb is not a bad thing, it's planned out, logi-
cal, it works, it doesn't need to be any different from any other
suburb . . . in short, it's functional. It's also very different
from the environment we had grown up in, where everything was a
new step further out into the unknown, where anything could hap-
pen, and nobody had ever been there before.
From our vantage point it looked as if the explorers had indeed
gone back to their ivory towers (or haunted dungeons as the case
may be), and a lot of used car salesmen had set up shop cranking
out the snap-together tract houses, when they realized they could
make more money doing that, than say, selling used cars.
It was truly a mind blowing experience to witness for the first
time, systems that actually advertised themselves based upon how
many lines they had, or how much storage. Attitudes that would
have garnered a great deal of scorn and derision -- and in gen-
eral made your advertisement the brunt of a lot of jokes -- were
suddenly the accepted way in which systems chose to differentiate
themselves from one another. Looking at them, it came down to
the fact that the only difference between system (A) and system
(B) was that one might have 16 lines while the other had 24, and
system (C) was inherently superior to both (a) and (b) because it
had 32 lines and 4 gigabytes of storage (used to house 10,000
programs, out of which the same 200 are downloaded over and over
again, as the rest of the junk sits there gathering dust).
Even more frightening, on a system that had 10,000 messages on
it, an average of 9,800 will be echoes of FidoNet or RIME or
whatever-net, leaving a grand total of about 200 messages from
the actual members. And frequently those 200 messages date back
a year and a half . . . a couple of years ago a BAD one line sys-
tem had that many messages in a week. A good one in a couple of
hours.
To a lot of people Cyberspace has become one big file server . .
. strikingly similar to what television has devolved into. An
entirely passive place where you press buttons and get enter-
tained, no thought required, no input necessary.
Realizing that we were merely skimming the surface, and might not
know the whole story, we spent a couple of weeks becoming fami-
liar with what had happened, and what the situation really was.
Based upon several hundred conversations with various people who
were involved with the current scene, we arrived at a couple of
very basic conclusions.
In order to run a system in the present environment, and have
users, you needed to have a pile of hardware, many phone lines,
some sort of marketing and bookkeeping ability, a lot of spare
time, coupled with infinite patience to put up with people, since
they are now your customers, not just your friends, and if they
call you up asking the same goofy questions you cannot take the
phone off the hook or tell them to go away.
Where running a system in the past had meant giving up your
second phone line, it presently involved a great deal of interac-
tion with the department of Red Tape, and Bureau of Tasks You
Really Aren't Interested In. This opened the door to the "used-
car salesmen" people, since these were things they were used to
doing every day. Conversely, it has almost universally been our
experience that the guy who is a Unix wizard and can work magic
with networking and programming, lives in deathly fear of signing
paperwork, filling out his tax returns, or figuring out where he
parked his car. And finally, the creative person whose main in-
terest is making fantastic places, lacks the time and patience to
write the code, and certainly has no interest in administrative
duties.
In effect, most people with the desire to do something better,
did not have the necessary $25-30k laying around, and even if
they did, they would never act on it because they'd be forced to
spend a great deal of their time doing a hundred things they had
no interest in doing. So the online world had begun to be dom-
inated by the file servers, who didn't really have much of an in-
terest in being anything other than file servers, since that made
the most money with the least effort, and anybody with $25,000
could toss up a snap-together MeSsyDOS based system with very
little technical ability required.
Thus began the era of the "tract-houses" where advertising and
atmosphere consisted of rattling off hardware statistics and
number of phone lines, along with the number of shareware pro-
grams available for downloading (an extremely amusing concept,
considering that there are literally TERABYTES of free software
available for the taking on ftp sites all over the Internet,
which cost NOTHING to download from).
With the exception of two of three bright lights that had the
right idea and were trying to do something different, most of the
electronic frontier had indeed vanished. And it isn't so hard to
see where a couple of years from now the same advertising agen-
cies that sell brain-dead ads designed to induce you to crave one
brand of beer over another, will be pushing SYSTEM X, because IT
HAS 10,000 phone lines! Call now and leave your mind at the
door!
Transcendence
-------------
It has generally been our experience that people are neither stu-
pid, nor shallow. Everyone has the potential to think for them-
selves, to overcome adverse situations, and contribute something
to this world. When placed in situations that offer these possi-
bilities, people tend to come through with surprising regularity.
In a fairly short amount of time you end up with a group of peo-
ple doing something they themselves would have deemed improbable,
if not downright impossible, if you had asked them at any other
point in their lives.
Virtual Reality has the potential to become the single most im-
portant development in the history of human evolution. It is a
technology that holds the promise of absolute liberation. It
also holds the possibility of turning the world into the rather
grim one that is the basis of much Cyberpunk fiction, a dark
place where technology is used to oppress and suppress people.
By its very nature, it is very difficult to ever imagine the
latter. In order to have a police state, you need to amass a
certain amount of power, yet Cyberspace is the ultimate equaliz-
er. It is a place where one person can wield as much power as
100, 1,000, or 100,000 people. Physical limitations are cast
off, and in the event of conflict the playing field becomes that
of mind vs. mind. Sheer numbers and a mob rules mentality cease
to have any meaning when you can create infinite numbers of elec-
tronic organisms to do anything you want them to do.
The hope is that it will never sink to such a level of stupidity.
Games are wonderful, but there is no need for conflict, all
struggle tends to be internal conflict that has become external-
ized. When you want to convert the sinners, or prove you are
right, all you're doing is having an argument with yourself. The
beautiful thing about Virtual Reality is the fact that you are
free to do that, for as long as you need, to work out that par-
ticular set of problems -- without harming anybody.
There is only one ultimate truth, which is BEING HAPPY and ex-
periencing LOVE. How you choose to perceive it is a very indivi-
dual matter. While it might mean blue to you, orange to that guy
over there, and silver to me, it's all the same thing. In the
real world if we held fast to those beliefs and behaved as people
have been classically shown to behave, then we'd be killing each
other over who has the right idea about love . . . Cyberspace al-
lows everyone the freedom to co-exist without harming anyone
else's world-view or belief system. And if you truly are given
the opportunity to live in an environment conducive to you happi-
ness, then if that heretic who thinks orange is the answer were
ever to show up at your front door, chances are you would be able
to tolerate him, and even, "God" forbid, express the love you
claim to espouse.
Phantom Access - The Ethereal Takes Shape
-----------------------------------------
There was never any solid dividing line where we decided that we
really wanted to put together a system where we could have the
freedom of expression we wanted, with the ultimate goal really
being the very simple one of pushing the envelope further and
further out there. All of us had obligations, school, and per-
sonal commitments that would be difficult to integrate into this
major change of plans. But inevitably the mass exodus out of
college, the avoidance of unnecessary responsibilities, and the
initial stages of planning were set in motion.
Six months later we had close to a hundred thousand dollars,
top-down system design, a fully designed multi-user simulation
engine, a general idea of what we would do and how we would go
about it, a team of our friends together one more time, only this
time as a real corporation, and over one thousand megabytes of
the collected history of Cyberspace, dating back to systems that
existed in 1979, that had been laying in dusty boxes filled with
old Apple DOS 3.3 disks.
On April 1st 1992 MindVox went into its alpha-testing stage.
Which loosely speaking means that we put everything together and
watched it disintegrate repeatedly as the last 300-400 bugs were
worked out of the system. Since then it has been running in pro-
tected environment mode with a collection of our friends and as-
sociates crash-testing the software, suggesting where rough-edges
might be smoothed, and generally having a good time creating some
of the atmosphere while trying to destroy the software in every
conceivable way so that everything is solid upon inception.
In May of 1992 MindVox will open it's doors to the public. As
much as we'd like to say that it's going to completely change
everything, it will not. All it can do is allow people who feel
in rhythm with this vision of the world to converge together in
one of the most interesting nexus points of Cyberspace. To ex-
tend their reach, explore new levels of experience, and interact
with some of the pioneers in the fields of computer science, net-
working, science-fiction, music, the arts, politics, religion,
altered states, and future reality.
Our main priority is to create and continuously evolve an en-
vironment that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, cou-
pled with access to information and ideas, that present you with
a far greater spectrum of possibility than you might otherwise be
able to access.
Thanks
------
Nothing of this magnitude could ever take shape based upon the
merits of any one individual. The entire Phantom Access Group
has been a collaborative effort since it began some ten years
ago; the MindVox project is merely the first confluence of the
diverse talents that comprise the core of Phantom Access Techno-
logies, that has been directed towards the electronic and socie-
tal mainstream.
Looking back over the years, there are very few of my friends who
have not in some way contributed to the genesis of Phantom Access
and the creation of MindVox, and I'd like to take this opportuni-
ty to express my gratitude to all of them.
People I would like to specifically thank, and without whom Mind-
Vox could not have been launched in the manner we wanted, in-
clude:
First and foremost, my fiance Delia, who has made much of
the last several years possible; who never knew about "Lord Digi-
tal" when she met me; who has gone from "computers, uh, ugh,
that's so . . . um, dull" to not only seeing the potentials in-
herent in the capabilities the technology presents to all so-
ciety, but actually extending many hundreds of hours of her time
to scripting sections of the project and designing human interac-
tion POV's based upon her lifelong experience with theatre and
film. She has also shown remarkable grace by retaining a sense
of humor when dealing with 2am anonymous calls from computer
dudes who feel compelled to ask "so, what does Lord Digital do in
bed?" questions.
The second person to whom I owe a great deal is Bruce Fanch-
er, my partner in this endeavor, as well as half a hundred pro-
jects that have spanned over a decade. Without you many things
would not have been possible, and those that were would have been
a lot less fun. It has been an interesting experience watching
someone grow into an adult who has retained all the qualities
that made them so much fun to hang out with in our youth, yet
managed to temper that childlike glee with responsibility, humor
in the face of adversity, and that elusive quality called charac-
ter. Here's to another couple of decades of Lord & Lord.
I would like to thank every member of the Phantom Access
Group for the thousands of hours spent designing, implementing
and de-bugging the programs that make MindVox come to life.
Respective of some people's desire to remain out of the
spotlight, I will leave it at that. You know who you are & any-
one who really cares to find that out can do so at any time they
desire.
Phiber Optik: For applying his considerable skills in a po-
sitive direction and helping us make MindVox a very difficult
fortress to lay siege to, while at the same time adding a tremen-
dous amount of versatility to our networking and communications
interface options. Most of all, thank you for having the courage
to realize that the world is not always a logical or fair place
and that no matter how intelligent you are or how noble your in-
tentions, you can be dragged down by the stupidity and fear of
those around you if you associate with people who do not share
the same qualities you possess.
Charles: For a great deal of assistance in updating many of
us regarding the current status of new technology and what's just
over the horizon, as well as providing tremendous aid by showing
us functional examples of the state of the art in distributed
electronic networking, and taking us on a fast-forward cruise
through a wide variety of hardware platforms and development
tools. Your friendship, advice, and persistent belief in our vi-
sion, has been invaluable.
Len Rose: For being a good friend over the years and always
giving assistance with anything we have needed. Most of all
thanks for coming out of everything you've been through with op-
timism about the future and an intact belief system. Peace.
George Gleason: For being a person who has become one of my
close friends faster than anyone else ever did. For possessing a
really beautiful outlook on life & everything in it, and for al-
ways being a calming voice when things are completely crazy and
the moon is full.
Bruce Sterling: For his encouragement, support, and a real-
ly funny talk at CFP-2. Most of all, the deepest appreciation
for doing an admirable job of presenting the unbiased truth while
chronicling some of the events that have taken place on the fron-
tiers of Cyberspace.
Mike Godwin: For putting up with many long and strange
phone calls regarding a wide variety of topics; for helping us to
avoid potential pitfalls and difficulty; for providing encourage-
ment and advice, and in general, for being a really cool person
who has gone out of his way many times to provide us with assis-
tance.
Thomas Dell: For writing code full of obscure jokes and
weird ramblings that do wonders to wake you up and get your full
attention when you are changing things at 3am, and for being an
exceptionally gracious guy who is one of the limited handful of
people that have maintained their sense of vision in the face of
impending mediocrity and industrialization.
Special thanks to Dan, SN, SR, D00f and everyone in DPAK and
cDc, who comprise some of the very few who managed to grasp the
obvious, and in turn make use of this knowledge in an entertain-
ing and lucid manner. Additional accolades to DPAK for being the
only eL!te duDeZ to use a four letter acronym instead of a three
letter one. The vision, the sheer wow!
Mega-Supra-Surfin-the-Ozone Thanks to Mondo 2000. Beyond
the sea of screaming fluff and designer hyperbole contained
within the covers of any issue of Mondo, there is also a great
deal of truth to be found about Cyberspace, music, art, film, and
life in general. Mondo has thus far shown itself to be beyond
reproach as far as journalistic ethics and presentation of the
facts are concerned. It is also to be commended as a publication
with a sound belief in typing words at random and letting them
fall where they may.
Finally, tremendous gratitude goes to Jim Thomas. A person
I do not know and have never spoken with, yet someone who has
done an exceptionally important service to all of Cyberspace
with the forum presented by Computer Underground Digest. Ir-
respective even of CuD, I have heard nothing but praise and
well-wishing from the many you have helped. Thank you.
Additional thanks to: Paul, Yuri, Eric & Eric, Ken & every-
one who has made the move to Phibro Energy, Drowned Fish, Andrew,
Randy, Carl, The Plastics, TV, Eric Madeson, Richard, Harlequin,
Dane, Jeff, The Galactic Knight, Laszlo Nibble, Colleen, Cereal
"I live to be annoying" Killer, the cast & crew of LightStorm
lighting and Manny "huh?" Riggs at Record Plant.
Patrick K. Kroupa digital@phantom.com
Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. +1 212 988 5987
_________________________________________________________________
*1 Lyrics are (c) Copyright, some year or another by Mick Jagger
& Keith Richards, otherwise known as the Rolling Stones. The
version I was listening to is a cover version done by
Jane's Addiction.
*2 Lyrics are (c) Copyright, 1991 by Guns N Roses music
Uzi/Suicide Records.
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