Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

The digital age will always be marked by the spirit of its first emergence, and the tension from the very first between corporate high-tech and the appropriation of information technologies by the counter-culture. Cyberia is an ideas-led, exuberant documentary written in 1994 about the converging strands of this new era, the empowerments of cyber-technology and the emergent hacker and cyber milieu. Mondo 2000 and Wired, smart drugs and nicknames that Warhol’s factory crew would have killed for, fractals and issues of electronic privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and raves. Cyberia is about the confluence of all these into an identifiable novum. The story grows out of conversations with the first cyberians - those who wrote the software, or cracked the sites, who took inspiration from complex maths and psychedelic drugs. Rushkoff’s is a journalist’s record, but with an infectious momentum borrowed from the birth of a new age. Whatever the mutations of global culture in a digital age, Cyberia will always serve as a benchmark of the first beginnings. This edition is supplemented by new material from Rushkoff’s journalism on the subject since publication of the first edition. Also included is a new introduction by the author.