Voices In My Head MindVox: The Overture Copyright (c) 1992, by Patrick Karel Kroupa (Lord Digital) All Rights Reserved "...just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners; saints" --The Rolling Stones (Jane's Addiction cover(*1)) Prelude ------- This article has its inception in several dozen people ask- ing the same questions with fairly consistent regularity. Namely those of, "where'd you guys go?", "what's the deal with MindVox?" and "what have you been doing for the last five years anyway?" Overture does a decent job of tying up all of the above and then some, while providing a general overview about who we are at Phantom Access and what we're in the process of doing with Mind- Vox. Sections of this article self-plagiarize heavily from my own writings in ENTROPY CALLING, which will be in a form suitable for publication sometime around the first quarter of 1993 at the rate things are going right now. My apologies for the perpetual- ly blown deadlines regarding this work, but something always manages to pop up that requires my full attention, in this case MindVox itself. I've done what I could to make everything understandable by even those who have no prior knowledge of who we are or what's going on, hopefully I have at least partially succeeded. If something is briefly touched upon and you don't understand its significance, then it probably means something to a smaller cross-section of people and you can safely ignore it. While this is in many respects a personal account of my own journey through Cyberspace and what it has meant to me and a handful of my friends, on a larger scale the underlying theme and basic premise of how the electronic universe began and has evolved is reflective of the experiences of countless people who have been traversing the endless pathways of possibility with me for most of their lives. First Light ----------- A long time ago, in a thoughtspace far away, an event that would forevermore alter the shape of human interaction took place . . . But we're not here to talk about that, instead we're gonna dis- cuss computers and how a couple of guys named Ward Christianson and Randy Seuss wrote a program that would allow them to be set up as a kind of store-and-forward messaging system designed to allow their circle of friends to interact with one another by us- ing these things called modems . . . and how this event would prove to be the first truly accessible step into the uncharted territory of what was to become Cyberspace. From this empowering turning point in the late seventies, the ideas, dreams and fantasies that would transmute and amplify hu- man potentials and evolutionary possibilities, broke loose from the shackles that primitive technology had imposed upon them and began to spin the electronic universe into existence. Still in the very early stages of its development, Cyberspace, or the "modem world" as it is sometimes called, has until very re- cently remained a largely untapped forum unique within the histo- ry of our world. It is a rapidly shifting microcosm that in the early part of the 1990's seems poised to engulf the reality from which it was born, weaving together the threads of tens of mil- lions of diverse dreams, into one mercurial tapestry that encom- passes the collective consciousness of humanity and frees it from all constraints. The non-space of Cyberspace is a place where global changes that would take years or even centuries outside of the online domain, can occur in weeks or months. It is a place where participants from all over the world share a unique common-ground based on nothing less nor more, than a belief in the same vision of possi- bility. It is a land where people who scoff at "The Elements of Style" frequently write paragraphs, pages, and even novels, full of big words, huge concepts, and absolutely gargantuan amounts of emoting -- while actually saying nothing tangible. In a little over a decade, the online microcosm has managed to experience the equivalent of hundreds of years of evolution. Not to mention the creation of hundreds of words which have found their way into the online lexicon despite the fact that nobody is quite sure what they mean in the first place. During this turbulent period of rapid change the half-dozen sys- tems of 1978, had grown to 45 or 50 electronic villages by 1980. These were the original outposts of Cyberspace, running on hacked together systems, hooked into industrial 8" drives, and network- ing at the blinding speed of 110 baud. To be honest, there wasn't really a whole lot of high level philosophizing going on regarding the brave new world that had dawned. Actually, most of the conversation tended to focus on things along the lines of, "How do you hook an 8" drive onto an Apple ][?" and "ANY idiot can see that setting the 7th bit high on the xdef reg is the WRONG thing to do, OF COURSE it'll make the program crash, are you stupid or something?" It was a technological triumph, but one that was for the most part, still lacking many of the key participants that would shape the technology into designer reali- ties. As the seventies drew to a close, the sterility and bare-bones functionality that had predominated, began to make way for places created by people who truly wanted something unique and dif- ferent. The mere existence of the technology was no longer that exciting, and as a greater number of people gained access to the hardware needed to jack in, the first electronic tribes gathered and began erecting monuments to their own ingenuity. By the time the eighties were upon us, the handful of systems that had thrived during the latter half of the previous decade had multiplied rapidly, giving birth to new systems on an almost daily basis, and by 1982 there were close to a thousand outposts on the frontier. Hardware prices were falling, 1200bps modems were actually within the reach of many people who wanted to pur- chase them, and the online domain was beginning to attract a wide variety of participants from outside the technocratic elite. A second pivotal point came during the summer of 1983 when the movie WARGAMES was released. Within several months the modem world literally doubled in size. An entire new generation of people were about to take the plunge into electronic wonderland and set off an explosive growth rate that has not slowed since then. It was a major and irreversible nexus point that would be- gin the abrupt transition from taking Cyberspace from the realm of underground sub-culture to the forefront of mainstream media. In retrospect the early eighties were the "golden age" of Cyber- space. There truly was a new frontier just over the horizon, and we were standing at the edge. This period in the history of the electronic universe was unruly and chaotic, the first settlers on the frontier wouldn't arrive for another decade or so, and the only people here were a small collection of explorers eager to embark on the next adventure. Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any- thing, is the trail that led up to it. You are there for some reason, or usually a very complex series of reasons, that have shaped your life up until that point in time, and caused you to become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa- tion you are locked into in the consensual reality that we all physically inhabit at present. In other words, the "real world" isn't making you happy, and you want outta there. Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits, dropouts, acidheads, phreaks, hackers, hippies, scientists, students, guys who could say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight face and really mean it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires and kingdoms of Cyberspace. As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a lot of the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain and dissatis- faction. When I first became an active participant in this elec- tronic nervous system that was just beginning to experience its awakening; I was a little over ten years old. My early under- standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a handful of people whose skills I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose lives I felt great pity and sadness for. There were of course exceptions, people who were so high on the potential of this technology and the completely new level of reality it could bring, that nothing more than a love of their creation drove them onwards. But these people were pretty uncom- mon, most of the pioneers were guys who were simply unhappy . . . or to be more exact, so unhappy that they had given up on finding joy in the "real world" and were constructing a rocket ship called Cyberspace to get them out of here as fast as possible. "Peace, love and happiness" was not exactly the driving force behind the rise of the electronic domains. A more realistic ral- lying cry was one of "Gee this technology is neat, and I'm gonna use it to make a whole new world where I can be happy and none of you can ever bother me again. You'll all be sorry, just wait and see!" They were building the cult of high technology in the hopes that it would somehow save them from whatever they thought had prevented them from attaining happiness anywhere else. Sadly enough "they" were not THOSE PEOPLE, "they" had become "us" and while the first steps into this place had been made possible by the phone phreaks and misfits of yesterday, the online world was exploding and changing at an incredible velocity, the rest of society was about to take notice in a big way, and a handful of disenfranchised teenagers had seized the reigns and were in the early stages of walking into the spotlight and taking the status quo for a big ride . . . The Fall -------- Everything really was this big beautiful game, and here we were with an overview of the whole jigsaw puzzle, and the sudden power to do anything we wanted to do with it. For the first time in recent history you COULD reach out and change reality, you could DO STUFF that effected EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, and you were sud- denly living this life that was like something out of a comic book or adventure story. In a place filled with magical lands and fantastic people who you had only read about, and suddenly you WERE actually talking to Timothy Leary, or Steven Wozniak, and some guy who was just on the cover of a magazine was speaking with you and thought that YOU were cool, and then finally you were IN the magazines and at the forefront of an entire sub- culture that was being rapidly assimilated into the cultural mythos. It was a VERY interesting time and place in which to grow up. Of course the problem is a lot of us didn't grow up. At a cer- tain point in time having power that can have real and immediate effects upon all society, can do very strange things to your per- spective of the world. Instead of learning to deal with the nor- mal barriers that most teenagers in western culture find them- selves faced with, you discover that you can blow right through all of them without even slowing down. In this way you miss much of the growth and acclimation that people go through during their teenage years. Which is where a lot of old friends parted ways with reality and ceased to be explorers, becoming caught up in the real world implications of the power that was now at their disposal. In effect, they lost sight of the underlying theme that all our actions had been based upon, that of exploration and pushing the boundaries, and merely focused on the short-term end-result of what their abilities could bring them; in the pro- cess becoming the criminals that the Secret Service and FBI had said we all were. What had begun with the best intentions, as the ultimate exten- sion of human curiosity, had devolved into a cultural movement that had very little to do with the ideals that had inspired it. The term "hacker" had become synonymous with "criminal", and tak- ing a look around at the state of the underground, it looked as if much of it had in fact degenerated into crime cartels comprised of angry teens who had little understanding of the underlying mechanisms they were employing to play with reality. It was no longer the exhilaration of knowing that you could actu- ally reach out and touch a satellite . . . it had come down to the negative power trip of fucking with something for the sake of pissing people off or just showing the world how much power you really have at your disposal if you ever decided to throw a tan- trum. By 1988 what had replaced our outlook, was a mindset where the new generation saw two things: one of them was the potential to take advantage of holes in the system for personal gain. There was no longer any quest for knowledge, desire to learn, or need to push the boundaries of what was possible for the sake of ex- ploration. Instead there were a lot of people who couldn't get past making free phone calls, stealing things, and causing trou- ble by following an already well-established pattern of action and reaction. The second -- and perhaps biggest -- motivating factor had become the desire for personal attention in the form of self- aggrandizement: the ultimate hack had become the media machine itself. What was originally a by-product of our experiences, had become a goal in and of itself. And here is where things became REALLY twisted. The media in the latter half of the twentieth century has become a very strange distortion of reality instead of the reflection it was intended to be. Since this is not an essay on the evils of manipulation through the use of media, I will stick with a very simple outline of how events occur in the real world. A reporter, journalist, writer -- SOME PERSON who has their own desires and ambitions, wants to do an exciting story on something that will garner him or her a lot of attention and acclaim. Really they are operating from a point of view that has much in common with the "hacker's," which is the mindset of "I'm g