Cyberia is a book by Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media...

, published in 1994. The book discusses many different ideas revolving around technology, drugs and subcultures. Rushkoff takes a Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

 Electric Kool Aid Acid Test style (or roman à clef

Roman à clef

Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...

), as he actively becomes a part of the people and culture that he is writing about. The books goes with Rushkoff as he discusses topics ranging from online culture

Virtual community

A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...

, the concept of a global brain as put forth in Gaia theory, and Neoshamanism

Neoshamanism

Neoshamanism is a term signaling a "new" form or a revival of an old form of "shamanism", a system that comprises a range of beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spiritual world....

.
Few of the people mentioned, included: Craig Neidorf

Craig Neidorf

Craig Neidorf , aka Knight Lightning, was one of the two founding editors of Phrack Magazine, an online, text-based ezine that defined the hacker mentality of the mid 1980s....

, Ralph Abraham

Ralph Abraham

Ralph H. Abraham is an American mathematician. He has been a member of the mathematics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1968.- Life and work :...

, John Barlow

John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow is an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic...

, Dan Kottke, David Gans

David Gans (musician)

David Gans, in Los Angeles, California, is an American musician, songwriter, and music journalist. He is a guitarist, and is known for incisive, literate songwriting. He is also noted for his music loop work, often creating spontaneous compositions in performance...

, Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality .A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves...

, Bruce Eisner

Bruce Eisner

Bruce Jay Ehrlich , better known by his pen name Bruce Eisner, is an American writer, psychologist, and counterculture spokesman best known for his book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story.-Biography:...

, Fraser Clark

Fraser Clark

The late Fraser Clark was the founder and editor of Encyclopedia Psychedelica and a key advocate of the rave movement, hosting regular small underground parties which laid the way for the launch of the first large legal festi-rave club in central London, Megatripolis in 1993.He advocated a new form...

, Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor

Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...

, Phiber Optik

Mark Abene

Mark Abene , better known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker from New York City. Phiber Optik was once a member of the hacker groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception....

, Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold

-See also:* Collective intelligence* Information society* The WELL* Virtual community-External links:***** at TED conference** a 48MB Quicktime movie, hosted by the Internet Archive...

, R.U. Sirius, Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna

Terence Kemp McKenna was an Irish-American philosopher, psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects, such as human consciousness, language, psychedelic drugs, the evolution of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe, alchemy, and extraterrestrial beings.-Early...

, John Draper

John Draper

John Thomas Draper , also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman , is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a legendary figure within the computer programming world.- Background :Draper is the son of a U.S...

, Neysa "Earth Girl" Griffith and Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary

Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...

External links

• The full text of Cyberia is freely available on Rushkoff's website.
• A downloadable pdf-version is also available from The Cyberpunk Project's library.