Cyberspace

Electrons were launched like scout ships across static oceans, along routes gleaming copper and gold from silicon ports. The human empire had walked on every shore of its planet that it was possible to walk. Space had closed in on it, grown tight around its girth. But still, it needed to advance. So it reasoned the means by which to create space. Infinite space. Those first electron scouts were sent to discover the new Eden, the virgin continent, the new world. They came back to their designers with hope and plausibility. There was a New World. It was Cyberspace.

With a promise and a dream, life rushed in. Eager prospectors who saw the means to profit in it made port, putting cyberspace’s ready resources to use. It had cheap land to store information. A data trade route that bested the fastest roads the world could offer. Pastures in which to play, dangerous dimensions to explore. The ability to speak out across time and space. The more humans needed space, the bigger cyberspace became to fill that need.

But what was cyberspace, really? What set it apart from the real world?

The answer goes back way further than silicon and gold. The primal cyberspace was flesh and sound, then ink and canvas, and only now is it electronic code. Cyberspace is humanity’s oldest companion and greatest asset. It is, by the very nature of the word, ‘A place of guiding systems’. Whenever something holds inside of it information of things that are outside of it, that’s cyberspace. Everything that is real holds only the information that exists within its own form. A tree holds information about chlorophyll and photosynthesis and osmosis - only things about its unique self and the forces that have shaped it. But the abstract can be that same tree mashed and pulped into a book, filled with stories of planets and people, a medium through which information is passed, a language. Cyberspace was there in the savannah when a precursor human spotted a wildcat and ran home with its image inside to tell the tribe. Cyberspace was restive in the caves, splashed across the rocks with tales of birds and beasts and battles, waiting to update a user.

Cyberspace grew, and grew, and ran rampant whenever reality constricted, or broke apart to reveal what was hidden in its own spaces. Until it at last evolved past all former imagining into ones and zeros, photons and electrons, silicon and gold.

They once called it the Republic of Letters.

It was envisioned as a free exchange of information and ideas. A place where philosophies could be presented in abstraction, before selection for use in Reality. A place where information could be accumulated before judgements were passed on their content. A prototype, an imagination.

You want to know what cyberspace is? Shut your eyes and think. That’s cyberspace.

Now imagine everyone else thinking right at this moment. All those humming, drumming, buzzing thoughts, just beyond the real world. The whole planet is pulsating with it. Small notions, grand ideas. Each held in their own little cyber-sole, swimming in a school of cyber-phish. Communicating constantly, reading one another. Each gets drawn up in a network. Each contributes, in some small way, to the mainframe of a single all-inclusive mind. We now call that mind The Internet.

Of course, a very large part of it is devoted to memes and porn. That’s how a mind works, you see. The fleeting whims and jokes and fears and fragmentary notions sit bottom-heavy, rudimentary ruminations pulsing with energy, leaping up to the top and trying to stay there for as long as possible. That’s society. Each little tweet and tumble is a single possibility in a spectrum of possibilities, submitted to the senses and declared true and valid, or not, or a confusion of the two. But it is within our power to select the thoughts that are worth paying attention to; an important memory shared through flashbacks of pictures or video. News that may compromise or assist the network as a whole. Well-expressed ideas which provide the contextual framework for the influx of data.  The possibilities emerge over and over again to assert their probability, demanding attention and explanation.

We are not The Internet. Not its consciousness, not its intention, not what makes its executive decisions. If such a higher function exists in our great, many-headed cyber-brain, it has never revealed itself. What we are as its users are things used; little synapses firing off in cyberspace, forming something intelligible only on a large scale. But to this leviathan, we are also its citizens. And as its citizens we have something of a responsibility to understand its mechanisms. Like any space on Earth, Cyberspace has its own state, ideology, economy and culture.

New Terminology: Differentiating Cyberspaces

If I talked about how cyberspace looked in a one-user mind, the picture would be very different from how it looks in the internet. The way information travels through it is the same, but the information itself varies. It is composed of wholly exotic permutations of fictive structure. In the process of analyzing this structure, it helps to approach each in turn, careful not to muddy issues by running rampant paths from one realm to the next.

Intraspace

[Intra (within, exclusive) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]

An exclusive intersection of dimensions

Intraspace is the cyberspace of a mind operating on an individual level. It is filled with conceptual patterns that allow us to make sense of what is around us, and perceptual figments or ‘spirits’ that are waiting to be fitted into a pattern, or form a pattern of their own.

Imagine for the moment that the human mind is a novel that you are writing. In a physical sense, it is a book with a leather cover for a skull, blank pages awaiting abstraction and ink to serve as a medium of abstract symbolism.

You start off writing this novel on Chapter One. Word by word, sentence by sentence, it begins to take form. You write the word ‘knife’. You elaborate a little more and write ‘the knife cut’. Already from the spirit of a few words, a conscious reader gets an idea of what kind of novel this is: a slasher thriller.

But then you finish rounding off the sentence into a grounded concept: ‘The knife cut the salmon’s flesh into three edible strips and the smiling sushi chef placed them atop three scrumptious lumps of rice.’

The words – the spiritual figments – are present in each stage of the process, but they can confuse the reader when taken by themselves. They have to be considered with a degree of anticipation for more information if they are to make any sense.

You finish off the page, and reread what you’ve written. Already there’s a pattern emerging. You’ve used the word ‘like’ an inordinate number of times, and the word ‘massive’ at least seven. You could accept this as your literary style, and proceed deeper into the book page by page until the pattern of the novel is complete. This is the equivalent of adopting a worldview based on the things that you know – deciding that it’s the best way to get things done, and continuing to do it. What works on a small scale, works for mass production, right?

But then you decide that maybe this isn’t the best way to go forward. Maybe the style was wrong, and you really should be writing a slasher thriller. Maybe you should just see what it looks like when you remove the unnecessary ‘like’s and find a few synonyms for ‘massive’. You turn the page.

Chapter One, you start again.

This part of the process is lateral, generative thinking, in which you produce a number of competing patterns in order to select the best one. You could fill the whole book with different versions of Chapter One, and still not exhaust all the possibilities. Lateral thinking is often accompanied by observation, or what we can call inductive thought. The more possibilities of pattern you are aware of, the greater chance there is that you will find a naturally superior way in which to stylize information. But without pausing that industrious work at some point, you’ll never get past Chapter One.

After five drafts of the first page, you select what you see as the best. The metaphors are rich, but the vocabulary is simple. It’s the kind of writing that engages the senses, but packs deliberate symbolism behind every sensation. Eagerly, you rush forward.

Page after page, the book gets deeper. The story is simple: you set out the premises on the very first page, and now you’re just following them to their most natural conclusion.

·         The protagonist is Suzie.

·         Suzie likes Sushi.

So it would be pretty odd if in Chapter Three Suzie decided to open up an Italian restaurant. Less believable than if Suzie decided to become a sushi chef, anyway.

This pattern extrapolation moving forward is vertical thinking, or Logic, in which you take the things that you know and squeeze as much information out of them as possible, stacking up the cubes of data block by block to make the story as tall or as ‘deep’ as possible.

But every now and then, just like in real life, you add more lateral possibilities to the novel to bring richness to the story. The main plot – the main pattern – is about Suzie travelling to Japan to learn to be a master sushi chef. But there’s also a subplot about a Japanese wishing tree where Suzie makes an offering to a kami spirit and begs it to help her become the best sushi chef in the world. This happens in Chapter Seven, so you rush ahead and write Chapter Seven, and then know that logically for Suzie to get from Chapter Three to Chapter Seven she has to take a plane across from Jamaica, where she grew up.

We do this all the time in Intraspace. On one level, we’re deepening the story of our day-to-day existence. But then we decide that in the future, we might like the pattern of our life to change. So we begin to construct a pattern between the present and that possible future with a set of concrete changes: learning a language, learning a craft, dealing with emotional barriers. When the two patterns merge, they form a kind of super-concept that makes a new kind of sense we couldn’t possibly have been aware of just by imagining the possibility.

The novel continues. With twenty chapters behind you, you’ve got pretty good at this. Suzie’s kami answered her prayer and took her into the spirit world to be the sushi chef of the gods, where this kami fell in love with her and decided she could never go home. Suzie laces his next meal with a magical poison, and instead of dying he turns into an Oni. She escapes until such a time as she can feed him the cure, which heals his spirit and softens him to the idea of her going back to her own world.

And while the story’s imagined space has broadened dimensions laterally and vertically, so your own configuration of cyberspace has mirrored that expansion. Do I use the word ‘terrified’ here, or ‘frightened’?  you consider laterally. You find synonyms, because there’s one that’ll most accurately portray the emotion in context. You select it, running it up the flagpole vertically, and it can have a dramatic effect on the story. You do this about twenty times a minute in the process of writing, refining your style, editing to break up old patterns and replace them with better ones.

**

We use terms like ‘lateral’ and ‘vertical’ to emphasize that Intraspace is space. Lateral length is a dimension, and vertical height is a dimension. A series of intersecting points between them* form a shape of consciousness we refer to as ‘Ego’. The bigger the Ego is, the more self-conscious it is – the more aware it is of the pattern that has been scrawled across the intraspace by its thoughts**.

* These intersection points can be thought of as memory ‘beacons’; points of awareness within the mind than hold ideas together as though they were constantly being viewed, either episodically or through abstract connections to other ideas that are being viewed.

**Which isn’t to say a person with a big ego is a particularly adept thinker, or has made a sensible pattern across their intraspace. It just means that they are aware of their own ability to think. The consequent metaphors for such people are bound up in Earthling meatspace analogies, where air is often thought of as the basic medium for empty space. People with a big ego and little pattern are thought of as ‘windbags’, or ‘full of hot air’. A person with any ego in an undeveloped intraspace is an ‘airhead’.

But ego doesn’t encompass the whole pattern scrawled by thoughts, because we forget things; sometimes deliberately, but mostly unintentionally. They never really go away, they just reside outside of the shape of the Ego. And because we have eyes and ears and noses we’re getting these little nodes of thought popping up representational images in Intraspace all the time, and there’s no way we can be aware of them all at once. So Intraspace is automatically broadened by inductive data (expands laterally), and some of that data more fluidly yields itself to immediate knowledge of a concept (such as the perception of a clock’s moving gears giving a better understanding of mechanics than the clock’s face), and this is the basic awareness of reality we attribute to the sentience of animals.

But it’s also the grounding for what we call the Id – the unconscious functions of Intraspace that operate outside of memory and outside of directed thought. The mechanism of the mind sorts through data nodes in order to organize them the most effectively. In some cases a perceptual permutation of data may be structurally similar to a conceptual form of another permutation. So they end up being organized in a way that groups them together. So when the conscious center shifts – such as when the Ego expands or behaves in a way that deliberately seeks out an alternative pattern, in dreaming or creative thought – then we end up with a surreal combination of confused symbols. A giant rabbit checks the watch it keeps in little red waistcoat. The hydra rears its head, with many mouths attacking to feed a single corporate body. The Tower looms above, telling its own story in endless cycles revisited.

Part of why these symbols are dragged into the ego is because they are relevant composites of data structures already within conscious awareness.  This means that when consciousness focuses on a pattern in its immediate memory, the unconscious mind prioritizes data that is relevant to that memory. Actively we think ‘loan shark’ and understand what that description represents. But it is likely we will also get an image in our heads of something else, like a businessman in a pinstripe suit and a red tie, smiling with a row of shark teeth. This kind of sympathetic repatterning is how the Ego and Id interact. It’s often described as a ‘bubbling up’, as though there’s been a reaction in the Id that results in a particularly volatile association. But since the brain uses electricity I prefer to see in as a static discharge: as the brain storms, pockets of clouded data get charged with electrons. They are ‘grounded’ by an assembly of thoughts in the ego, and spark them as though pulled to a lightning conductor. Sometimes those thoughts are coherent enough to charge a lightbulb moment.

The Superego is at once similar and different from the Id. Like the Id, it exists in that realm of unconsciousness surrounding the Ego. But unlike it, it doesn’t produce and merge data: It orders it. This is subtly different from what happens when percepts collide in the Id: When the Superego functions correctly it is non-perceptual, focused rather on integrating conceptual information. But concepts have to be generated by first passing through the ego.

There were these stencil spinning tops that were popular when I was a kid, and I think of them as a perceptual image of the Ego-Superego interaction. The spinning top is the ego, moving across a piece of paper that plays the part of surrounding Intraspace. The needle is the accumulated pressure of conscious thought, pressing deeply into the page so as to make a mark. The needle at the tip of the spinning top roves around quite a bit, leaving a complicated trace of pattern that could, under analysis, tell a person everything about the spinning top that they want to know. If the spinning top is the ego, then that pattern is the ego extended to every instant of its existence – consciousness’s profits unrestricted by time and space – The Superego.

The brain is not a stenciled page, so the deeper pattern formed by the roving consciousness is a thought pattern. And the more fixedly the needle of consciousness attends to those patterns, the more difficult it is to get out of them. They form a kind of localized race track in the vicinity of the Ego, though they do not entirely encompassed it. The Ego may have traced an unusual pattern once in a moment of epiphany, only to veer off in another direction.

Id is composed of nodal points: small, localized patterns.

Superego is composed of a nodal network: an extensive, interconnected pattern.

And Ego, to complete the triptych, is pattern recognition and directed pattern formation.

*

Intraspace is a fascinating realm, and arguably the most important of all cyberspace. Every single one of us operates in Intraspace – we can choose to avoid any other platform of existence, but not the platform of existence that allows us to think, and have choice. You have a kind of responsibility to yourself to understand your own mind. Everything done elsewhere is blind grasping until you do.

Socialspace

[Social (Relating to the aggregate of people living in an ordered way) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]

An intersection of dimensions between people.

The novel you wrote about Suzie and the Kami has come far since where we left it. It’s grown deep and interesting, creative and insightful. But now you want to enable it to do what novels do: you want to share the model of Intraspace you developed with other people.

Socialspace is the cyberspace network held between users in a community, expressed through interaction and conversation. It has some similarities with intraspace, and some very big differences. For starters, nodes of data in intraspace were held as elemental quantities in a formless abyss. In social space, nodes of data are held as people.

Every user functions individually as a percept*, and while it may have deeper concepts and connections running through its Intraspace, the part that they share in Socialspace is two-dimensionally summarized.

*From the perspective of another user.

You aren’t going to try and publish all the drafts of Chapter One that contributed to your novel. You’re going to take out the redundant data and present a concise summary. Just so, when you walk outside wearing a summer hat you don’t announce “This is a hat I am wearing because the sunlight is directly above and I wish to avoid sprouting melanomas.” You just wear the hat, and if that isn’t a clear summary of your actions, you wait for people to ask.

The difficulty with these percepts – these people – is the same as in meatspace and Intraspace. How do you tell which are honestly based in concepts, and which are ‘hallucinatory’ percepts containing very little valuable data? You give the novel to your mother, who reads it. She thinks it’s wonderful. But is that just because she associates it with the percept that is ‘you’ which she nepotistically favors? You decide it’s better to give the novel to an impartial stranger. That stranger thinks it’s awful – but can you rely on the expertise of someone you picked off the street to know good literature?

This specialized function of telling good data from bad is facilitated by a Socialspace operator known as a Maven. Mavens collate sources of data in a social network and analyze them to determine the value of specific sources of data within their field. Should the maven be optimal, they then spread the certainty of their findings to others generously. Mavens aren’t one strange, general profession aside from ordinary life, though in some ways the Otaku fits that description – Mavens are integrated into the functions of everyday society. There are fashion mavens, or coupon mavens, or software mavens. 

There are book mavens who read a lot and would probably be the best choice of person to get an honest opinion about your novel. Quite often their professional life reflects this passion for information, and they become motor experts, or sports commentators, or editors. So this is the function mavens serve to Intraspace innovators: to let them know they’ve made a good summary. To let them know there’s integrity between what they can see in meatspace, and the reams of data encoded into that Intraspace summary.

After finding the right kind of maven, you’re left with the knowledge that your book is actually very good – a literary masterpiece, actually. And while that makes you happy, it hasn’t achieved the very best of what you set out to do. You want your masterpiece to be widely experienced by others, and be considered for a place as a memory beacon in their individual Intraspaces. But the maven can’t help you there. The maven knows what people want – but doesn’t know how people connect.

In Socialspace, intraspace nodes are connected in overarching patterns simply referred to as social networks. Within a social network there are very deeply ingrained paths, just like there are in thought patterns in the mind. The enterprising pioneer (you, the novelist) moves through Socialspace along these paths, trying to find a junction between them. You could ask your friend Arthur to read your book – Arthur is a chatterbox and you know he’ll mention your book to just about anyone he meets in the street. But while Arthur likes spreading information, he doesn’t exactly have many people who consider him a friend, and value his vocalized opinions. However Arthur speaks with a certain reverence about Hildegard, a well-known member of his social network. Hildegard is one of those people who everyone knows and everyone likes – not just in your own social network, but in groups of people you’d never dream of talking to. She is an experienced hiker, and is very active at her community church. And the strange thing about Hildegard that separates her from Arthur is that she’s everyone’s best friend. They are all desperate to get closer to her by sharing experiences with her, like watching a TV series she’s seen or reading a book that she’s read.

Hildegard is what is called a Supersocial, a person adept at forming data node patterns and then filtering data through that network. It’s estimated that the number of close, intimate relationships an average person can have at any one time is 12. For someone like Hildegard, that number is more in the region of 20. This means that on top of that there are hundreds if not thousands of people in Hildegard’s social network, many of whom are bound to be supersocials themselves.

Often when meeting these kinds of people, you get the sense that you’re an extra, and they are the protagonist. Even though most of the time you assume that because you are the all-seeing narrator of your own life, that makes you the protagonist by default. But in a way this is due to a perspective shift. Sharing your novel through Socialspace isn’t about restructuring your own mind at all – that was Writing It, the process of intraspace. Sharing a novel is about society’s mind, and society’s cyberspace. On that level you really are an extra – a blip of Id data on the extending map of human evolution. The mistake many people make is to attempt to be the conscious center of Socialspace and Intraspace. They believe that to get their novel known they have to be a Supersocial, making dozens of friends, learning to manipulate people they don’t like and get favors from those they do. All this wasted energy just means they have less time to operate on the Intra- level, and the only things they have to seed at the end of the exercise are inferior ideas.

Hildegard is the answer to this. You don’t want to approach Hildegard directly, because just having her blindly promoting your book won’t be an honest projection of enthusiasm – it’ll be reluctant, a favour. Instead, you study the 20 closest people in her network. These are the people you want to give the novel to – especially if one of those people is a maven. How it gets to them doesn’t really matter. 

Shove it in their mailboxes, claim to be doing market research, or just honestly say you’re trying everything you can to get the book off the ground. If the novel is good – which the mavens say it is – then there’s a very high probability it’ll reach Hildegard. And if it does, and she likes it so much she wants to share the experience with others – the novel diffuses through society. Suddenly people have Read That. Which was the point of the whole exercise.

So that’s Socialspace:

You, the pioneering data node, set out with the intention of changing Cyberspace.

The Maven acts as Socialspace’s relevancy feed, presenting valuable percept data to Socialspace’s Ego.

The Supersocial is that Ego, a person capable of directing user consciousness. They process the percept and funnel it into a Social Network, the conceptual Superego of society.

Once your data has been passed through the social network – you’re golden. You’re a part of the thinking process of society. You’ve transcended a platform.

Internet

[Inter (Out, Inclusive) + Net (Network: An arrangement of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines)]

A grid embodying the relation between dimensional points.

The Interspace – which I refer to as Internet because otherwise at a glance it could be confused for intraspace – is a growing innovation in the 21^st century linking Socialspace to Intraspace on a digital platform. When we talk of cyberspace generally, we’re referring to the internet. You’ve probably heard of it.

The genius of the internet is in that in using it we become distinctly aware of what is meant by patterns -  how easy it is for data to move in some ways (and for some kinds of data to move) and very difficult for it to move in others. We’ve built artificial constructs that mimic the function of Socialspace user-nodes; Sites like Facebook and MySpace are artificial Supersocials, focused on the automation of the way data spreads within trusted networks and extended interest groups. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr are maven sites, where regular accounts plug choice information. Sites like Youtube, Deviant Art and Wordpress are User sites, designed to exhibit the creations of individual users across a variety of formats. These sites aren’t intended to exist in isolation, but to connect with one another and function in a way that sorts data, exactly as we select information in Intraspace and Socialspace. In a way it can be seen as the next evolutionary step of abstract thinking – a mind the size of a whole planet, each contributing to the focus of our awareness and actions.

Let’s say Hildegard loves your novel. She loves it so much, she finds you and asks you if she can share it with her friends. You give her the nod – the whole point of putting the book out there was to get as many readers as possible. In the bad old days, Hildegard would be forced to traffic the book manually through her Socialspace. But with the internet it’s much easier. Hildegarde has roughly two-thousand friends and nine-hundred followers. So she broadcasts in a single message that she likes your book. Quite a few people pick it up and start reading, hoping to stay relevant to Hildegard through their emotional attachment to her. Then they re-whatever their own review.

By chance you also pick up a Fan. Fans are people who are so in love with a work they are highly motivated to keep it alive in their day-to-day existence. In this regard, you’ve hooked Alice, who likes to make GIF-sets for her Tumblr account. She assembles a group of images that roughly portray the characters and world in your book. In a single collage, she’s depicted a kind of visual ‘blurb’ for your book that’s going to draw in more interest. People who are attracted to visual data more than pure text (let’s face it... that’s practically all of us) are now more inclined to associate your book with sympathetic themes. It’s like having an abstract cover placed over the ideas held within, and put on a bookshelf for people to see it clearly.

Then some mavens in Hildegard’s extended network hear about the book. One of them is an editor, and thinks it has serious publishing potential. The public approval you’ve garnered in the local network proves it. At last, you’ve climbed from simply scrawling the word ‘knife’ to a point of complexity that will affect thousands if not millions of minds, serving as a formal concept in their own ideas and inventions.

The internet managed this by its own lateral and vertical agencies within the server structure. Vertically the book has been promoted by Likes and Shares, which is to say by way of Affirmation. This means that it has a greater presence within a user base. However, that user base itself may be quite small, which accounts for why very good ideas will often get ‘cult’ followings. Even though Hildegarde operates in several different social settings, there are literally thousands of cultures to reach which are beyond the ability of one Supersocial to tap – even a Supersocial like Facebook, which keeps thinking up new ways to get people to communicate across cultural barriers.

The lateral axis of the Internet is seen in an idea’s fan base, and the ways it examines, comments or enriches the experience of an idea. What was originally a small culture can extend into an enormous one by branching off into movies, TV shows, fanfiction, soundtracks – just about any other medium, and its own interpretation of that idea. Lateral generation surrounding a dominant idea and its crucial factors not only extends an idea across the user population, but allows an idea to realize its most effective medium. You wrote a book, but as it turns out Suzie’s life is actually much better understood through the multimedia of a TV series. This doesn’t mean you were wrong to write the book – the series wouldn’t even exist if you hadn’t made the approach. Data has to undergo a process of weakening and strengthening to find its most effective format, just as data’s form in argumentation is teased to eke out sound reason.

In the Internet’s Ego, the important nodes that create a field of awareness are webpages, typically ones on which a user has an account. This builds up an identity profile which when effectively used acts as a conceptual representation of all aspects of their identity they deem functionally important. These can break off into 3-Dimensional facets, where multiple identities exist for the same user, a construction known as an ‘alter-ego’.

The SuperEgo of the internet is entirely more concrete and traceable than anything visible in cyberspace to date. It’s a combination of what you Like, but just as importantly what you Ignore. I say ‘ignore’ because ‘disliking’ something still patterns an association with it – a negative association, but one which will persist in the structure of an online profile. Ignoring is subtly different because it effectively excludes information from a user’s existence, marking it as irrelevant, and inaccurate.

The SuperEgo we lay down on the internet isn’t an active part of our profiles, but like the stencil spinning top it traces where we’ve gone in virtual space and how we’ve interacted with nodes along the way. Like Socialspace, this pattern is used to make up something that can be seen not as a user node’s ego, but the Internet’s ego. If the internet has a consciousness, some point of focused thought, it is the point to which the most nodes have trafficked their attention. The most likes, the most views, the most shares. It’s easiest to experience this after something newsworthy, when the same thought is affirmed across dozens of nodes on the network. It downloads to Intraspace, and we can’t help but think about it and its place according to our own identities.

*****

Hopefully understanding the way these three platforms connect will help people realize the importance of all three, and how to move between them if at any point they feel stuck. We know that this is how cyberspace operates, but not necessarily why it operates in this way. From the perspective of one Intra- node, why should the Inter- Ego matter? Why do people crave attention, be it from friends or strangers or even from their own mind?

I think that ultimately we have a strong conceptual awareness that observation premeditates control. We struggle for our ideas to be known not for the virtue of being known, but for the virtue of being used. When the precursor ran home with an abstraction of a wildcat inside to share the experience with the tribe, it was with the knowledge that it could enrich the lives of those updated. It was not done with the intention of controlling the actions of the tribe, but done so that members of the tribe could more readily control their own lives. That to me is what cyberspace is all about; providing a guidance map for others to realize there is more in the world than the one path they have walked throughout their lives. To provide that for something as reaching as the Internet seems to me to be a very positive trait. To want to inform oneself through contact with nodes of cyberspace – an entirely freeing, life-giving experience.

Inspirational Reading:

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

For understanding Socialspace and how ideas take off. Very good read, very diverse selection of experiences to draw from. Contains some gorgeous math on epidemics.

Edward De Bono's Lateral Thinking

A revolutionary novel in terms of understanding Intraspace according to vertical (selective) and lateral (generative) thought. Very short, as it mainly contains exercises.