Collected Essays (17 page)

Cyberculture

In the late eighties there was suddenly a big cultural interest in cyberpunk, cyberspace and Virtual Reality. Part of this was due to the weird Berkeley magazine
Mondo 2000
, which presented these ideas as something like a new form of LSD.

In point of fact, the
Mondo
crew were mostly not very technical. Some of them were quite devoted to psychedelics, and you might say that cyberspace and Virtual Reality were new forms they used for thinking about drug visions. Tripping and calling people on the phone can seem a lot like being in cyberspace, for instance. In any case,
Mondo
did a lot to popularize what might be called “cyberculture.”

One way to explain the word “cyberpunk” is that “cyber” means computer/human interface and “punk” means rebellious countercultural people. The computer gives power to the punk. More broadly speaking, cyberpunk science fiction is about the fusion of humans and machines. It isn’t really about the future, it’s about the present. It’s a way for us to step back and look at what’s happening right now. The brain plug is you with your keyboard and your screen. The Virtual Reality is you watching television.

Mondo
added on additional layers of meaning to the word, and in 1992 I helped edit a collection of their articles called the
Mondo
User’s Guide
. The book got good publicity, and even occasioned a cover story on cyberpunk by
Time
magazine (Feb 8, 1993.) Cyberpunk suddenly stood for a whole independent culture and reality, far beyond what I thought it had meant. It began to seem that by paying attention to the world in certain ways you could begin to live in cyberspace.

The writer John Perry Barlow remarked, for instance, that “cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the telephone.” A few weeks later I was at a conference in Toronto. It was evening, I was walking down a deserted city street alone and I missed Sylvia. At every second corner there was a telephone. I stopped at one and tried to call Sylvia, punching in all the twenty-five necessary numbers for a credit card call. The phone was busy. It was too cold to stand there waiting. I kept walking, and at every second block was an identical deserted phone, and at each one I punched in the numbers. At the fifth phone I got her. It struck me that as I’d been walking, I’d been moving through a kind of continuous jelly of cyberspace.

The Web

In a way, the focus on Virtual Reality was a diversion, a detour. For a computer reality to engross, it isn’t so important after all that it have really great 3-D immersive graphics. It’s more important that it react to what you do, and that it include other people.

Your mind is rich enough that in fact you can get mesmerized by very low bandwith things. People can completely get into, for instance, something as graphically crude as text-based conversations in a chat room.

And the system’s turnaround reaction time doesn’t even have to be very high. If you do a lot of electronic mail, you get used to checking your email once or twice a day, and it’s like there is a big buzz of conversation going on that you are part of. If you can’t get to your email you’re kind of uncomfortable. It’s a big thrill to find a cybercafe in a strange city and suddenly be able to plug into your familiar email corner of cyberspace.

One definition of something being a reality is that several people can go there and see the same thing. This is certainly the case with the Web. It’s a space that we go out into all the time, and interesting things are happening there. Unlike watching television, the Web is interactive. You can move around and look at whatever it is that you want to see.

An advantage of the Web over physical reality is that it’s physically safe inside your computer, that is, it’s not like the real world where you can get into a car accident, trip and fall down, get wet, have to walk home, etc. A disadvantage is that you’re sitting in a chair punching a plastic keyboard.

But the real attraction of the Web’s cyberspace is that you don’t need to be lonely in there. You can say things and people will hear you. Email flits back and forth. People put things up for you to look at. It’s a kind of community. It’s a global computer. It’s everywhere. Cyberspace is a pleasant, anarchistic alternate universe that we’re all free to live in.

Future Memories of Cyberspace

The following passages, assembled in October, 1992, were all drawn from the cyberspace-related novel I was then working on, The Hacker and the Ants.

But what was cyberspace? Where did it come from? Cyberspace oozed out of the world’s computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation being collectively run by planet Earth’s computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space.

My job back then was with GoMotion Unlimited of Santa Clara, California. GoMotion got its start selling kits for a self-guiding dune-buggy called the Iron Camel. The kit was a computer software CD that was like an interactive three-dimensional blueprint along with assembly instructions. GoMotion kit software could use electronic mail to order all the parts you needed, and it would guide you step by step through the assembly, calling in registered building helpers if you needed them. Once you got the thing built, our kit would load intelligent software into the vehicle’s processor board, and you’d have a dune-buggy that could drive itself. By now, various models of the Iron Camel have sold one and a half million units worldwide!

GoMotion hired me to help develop a new product: a kit and the software for a customized personal robot called the Veep. Our preliminary design work was all in virtual reality. Instead of building lots of prototype machines, GoMotion would put together virtual models of machines that we could cheaply test inside our computers’ artificial reality simulations—in cyberspace.

My cyberspace deck had two gray Spandex control gloves and a white plastic headset, all connected to a computer by wireless radio link. My deck generated three-dimensional graphics that it could show from any angle, in stereo vision, by feeding pairs of images to the two electronic lenses of my headset. The headset had a microphone and speakers, also a sensor that would tell the system about my head movements so it could update the viewpoint.

The system let me feel as if I was inside a different space, the artificial reality of the computer, cyberspace. Turning or moving my head would change my viewpoint; I could lean to one side and look around a nearby object. The gloves let the computer generate realtime images of my hands. Seeing moving images of my hands in front of me enhanced the illusion that I was really inside cyberspace.

The simulated objects of cyberspace were called simmies. My hand-images were simmies, as was the virtual phone in my cyberspace office. As well as having a characteristic appearance, a simmie had a characteristic behavior—one simmie might sit still, and another might like to move around. The behavior part of a simmie could become so complicated that the things practically seemed alive.

If the phone was ringing annoyingly, I might don my headset and control gloves, enter my virtual office, and rip the simmie wires out of my simmie phone. The ringing would stop.

As soon as I put on the gloves and the headset, it was like being in different room, an invisible secret room of my house: my virtual office. When I talked or made gestures in my virtual office, my cyberspace deck would interpret me and execute my commands. The “pulling wires out of the phone” gesture, for instance, would cause my computer to shunt all my incoming phone calls to an answering-machine.

My virtual office could look like almost anything—it could be a palace, an igloo, or a bubble in the deep blue sea. I used the default office-pattern which came with the my cyberspace software: it had one wall missing and no ceiling. Over the walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was presently hottest for—a long-term favorite was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I got it off the Net.

How did I look in cyberspace? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body-simmies tuxedos. My tuxedo was a suite of video images bitmapped onto a blank humanoid form. The form’s surface was a mesh of triangles which could be adjusted like a dress-maker’s dummy; and inside the form were virtual armatures and hinges so that the thing moved about as realistically as one of those little wooden manikins that artists used to have. The overall size of the thing was adjusted to closely match my body size with, of course, a few inches taken off the waist. I had my bodysurfaces taped by a professional bodymapping studio.

Alternatively, you could choose an art-tux. Some I remember seeing were: a club-wielding caveman, a breast-plated Amazon, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a happy carrot, Michelangelo’s marble David, a pointillist Seurat woman with a bustle, a centaur, “Bob” Dobbs, a teddy bear, the Pope, Bo Diddley, a vertically divided half-Elvis half-Marilyn, JFK with brains dangling from the back of his head, a knight in paisley armor, a forties secretary with glasses and tight bun, a saucer-alien with tentacles on its face, a crying clown, and many more.

At GoMotion, once we had specs for a new prototype, instead of actually building it out of wires and metal, we would generate a simmie of the thing and test it out in cyberspace.

To really get a feel for the effectiveness of a personal robot simulations, I would set my viewpoint so that I saw through the virtual robot’s eyes and moved its parts with sensors on my own hands and legs. I wore the robot-model like a tuxedo, and I drove the robot around in cyberspace houses. No actual robot and no actual house—just an idea for a robot in an idea of a house. I’d try and figure out what was right and wrong with the current model. If I noticed a problem with any of the hardware—bad pincer design for instance—I’d get the GoMotion engineers to generate improved specs and a new simmie Veep robot.

Once a simmie robot model worked with me driving it, I’d pull back to try and write software that could drive it around without me being “in” it. And then I might need to change the simmie to make it work better with the new software. This process took dozens, scores, hundreds, or even thousands of iterations. The only way to make a profit was to do as much of this as possible in virtual reality.

My home robot Studly was the first physical prototype of a Veep that GoMotion actually built. Studly was a joy to behold, a heart-warming payoff for all the mind-numbing hacking that went into making him to happen. He moved around on single-jointed legs which ended in off-the-shelf stunt-bicycle wheels. There were small idler wheels on the knees of these legs, so that on smooth surfaces Studly could kneel down and nestle his body in between his big wheels, with the little knee wheels rolling on ahead. In this mode, he didn’t waste compute time keeping his balance. Out in the yard, Studly would rise up into a bent-knee crouch, using arm-motions and internal gyroscopes to steady himself. On stairs, the full glory of Studly’s control-theoretic algorithms came into play; he turned sideways and worked his way up or down with his two wheels on different steps, using precise lunges and gyro pulses to keep from falling over. Depending on your mood, Studly’s peculiar movements could seem comical, beautiful, or obscurely sinister.

The two neatest things in my virtual office were my Lorenz attractor and my dollhouse. The Lorenz attractor was a floating dynamical system consisting of orbiting three-dimensional icons, little simmie images that stood for pieces of information or which represented things my computer could do. The icons tumbled along taffy trajectories that knotted into a rollercoaster pair of floppy ears with a chaotic figure-eight intersection. If I liked, I could make myself small and ride around on the Lorenz attractor in a painless demolition derby with my files. It was a fun way to mull things over.

My dollhouse was a special CAD model of the house I lived in. I’d tweaked my real house’s alarm system so that if anyone touched a door or window, the little model of that door or window lighted up on the dollhouse. I had a little doll of Studly moving around in my house. Studly had a position sensor which kept my deck always aware of where he was, rolling around and cleaning, gardening, keeping an eye on things, taking care of business, and occasionally talking to me. If I wanted to check something in the house, I could switch over to Studly’s viewpoint, and see what he was seeing through his two video-camera eyes.

Three things might keep a user from taking off cyberspace equipment were “voodoo cyberspaces,” “the dark dream,” and “stunglasses burn.”

A voodoo cyberspace had hypnotic flickering and rhythmic sound intended to numb or fascinate the user too much to want to leave. Voodoo cyberspaces were really a form of entertainment, not unlike commercials or music videos.

In the dark dream, you’d think you’ve taken off the gloves and headset when you really hadn’t. Right before you thought you’d taken off your headset, the dark dream would show you a perfectly taped and enhanced image of it happening, synched to your movements. The dark dream worked by tricking the hand-eye feedback loop, and like some defective robot, you’d failed to “physically acquire” the headset before you “took it off.”

“Stunglasses burn” could happen when you were using your cyberspace goggles in passthrough mode—like if you were too busy to want to fully leave cyberspace. To use your headset as “stunglasses,” you’d have two little bead-sized TV cameras right on the goggles taking in the real images around you and feeding them to your deck, with your deck putting the images back onto the screens of your goggles. The “burn” element came into play if somebody started playing with what your deck did to the things you thought were real images.

One time some phreaks really nailed me with a stunglasses burn. When they were through with me I thought I’d shit in my pants, eviscerated a dog, and strangled my girlfriend. They did it to me because I’d crypped the CyberBarbie meshes from Mattel to use for people in the house where I was testing the GoMotion robot simmies.