"Douglass Rushkoff - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

The people in this book, and thousands of others like them around
the world,
understand the implications of our technologies on our culture, thought
systems, spiritual
beliefs, and even our biological evolution. They still stand as the most
optimistic and
forward-thinking appraisers of our civilization's fate. As we draw ever
nearer to the
consensually hallucinatory reality for which these cyberians drew the
blueprints, their
impressions of life on the edge become even more relevant for the rest of
us. And they make
more sense.

Douglas Rushkoff
New York City, 1994

Introduction
Surfing the Learning Curve of Sisyphus

On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of feeling
like an immigrant in a
place where your children are natives--where you're always going to
be behind the
8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can
learn it. It's what I
call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are
going to be
comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and
ambiguity. I look at
confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not everybody feels
that way. That's
not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's
based on the ability of
people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion
as a way of life,
concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't
control anything. At best
it's a matter of surfing the whitewater.
--John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and cofounder of the
Electronic
Frontiers Foundation

The kid who handed me the brightly colored flyer must have figured
I was younger or
at least more open-minded than I really am. Or maybe he had me pegged from
the beginning.
Sure, I had done a little experimenting" in college and had gotten my world
view a bit
expanded, but I was hardly ready to immerse myself in a subculture as odd,