From: david@c-cat.UUCP (Dave)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: John P. Barlow Article in Microtimes Magazine Pt 1 of 5
Date: 24 Jan 93 23:27:39 GMT
Organization: Intergalactic Rest Area For Weary Travellers


I found this article by J.P. Barlow off on a local BBS. I though it
was quite interesting, and there is some mention of Jerry Garcia

Since my editor cant handle more than 255 lines at a clip I am posting 
in parts.

thanks John, Great article.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==CUT HERE--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=

BEING IN NOTHINGNESS
Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace

By John Perry Barlow
Published in Microtimes Magazine

"Cyberspace.  A consensual hallucination experienced daily 
by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...A 
graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of 
every computer in the human system.  Unthinkable 
complexity.  Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the 
mind, clusters and constellations of data.  Like city lights, 
receding..."
                        --William Gibson, Neuromancer

Suddenly I don't have a body anymore.  

All that remains of the aging shambles which usually constitutes my 
corporeal self  is a glowing, golden hand floating before me like 
Macbeth's dagger.  I point my finger and drift down its length to the 
bookshelf on the office wall.

I try to grab a book but my hand passes through it.  

"Make a fist inside the book and you'll have it," says my invisible 
guide.  

I do, and when I move my hand again, the book remains embedded in 
it.  I open my hand and withdraw it.  The book remains suspended 
above the shelf.

I look up.  Above me I can see the framework of red girders which 
supports the walls of the office...above them the blue-blackness of 
space.  The office has no ceiling, but it hardly needs one.  There's never 
any weather here.  

I point up and begin my ascent, passing right through one of the 
overhead beams on my way up.  Several hundred feet above the office, 
I look down.  It sits in the middle of a little island in space.   I 
remember the home asteroid of The Little Prince with its one volcano, 
it's one plant.

How very like the future this place might be: a tiny world just big 
enough to support the cubicle of one Knowledge Worker.  I feel a wave 
of loneliness and head back down.  But I'm going too fast.  I plunge 
right on through the office floor and into the bottomless indigo below.  
Suddenly I can't remember how to stop and turn around.  Do I point 
behind myself?  Do I have to turn around before I can point?  I flip into 
brain fugue.

"Just relax," says my guide in her cool clinical voice.  "Point straight 
up and open your hand when you get where you want to be."

Sure.  But how can you get where you want to be when you're coming 
from nowhere at all?  

And I don't seem to have a location exactly.  In this pulsating new 
landscape, I've been reduced to a point of view.  The whole subject of  
"me" yawns into a chasm of interesting questions.  It's like Disneyland 
for epistomologists.  "If a virtual tree falls in the computer-generated 
forest..?"  Or "How many cybernauts can dance on the head of a 
shaded solid?"  Gregory Bateson would have loved this.  Wittgenstein, 
phone home. 

At least I know where I left my body.  It's in a room called Cyberia in a 
building called Autodesk in a town called Sausalito, California.  Planet 
Earth.  Milky Way.  So on and so forth.  My body is cradled in its usual 
cozy node of space-time vectors.

But I...or "I"...am in cyberspace, a universe churned up from computer 
code by a Compaq 386 and a pair of Matrox graphics boards, then fed 
into my rods and cones by  VPL Eyephones, a set of goggles through 
whose twin, parallax-corrected video screens I see this new world.  

When I move my head, the motion is tracked by a a Polhemus 
magnetic sensor and the imaging engine of cyberspace is instructed to 
alter what I see accordingly.  Thus, having made a controlled ascent 
back up through the floor of the "office," I turn to the left and I see red 
chair with a desk behind it.  I turn to the right and I see a door leading 
out onto the floating platform.  

The configuration and position of my right hand is fed into the system 
by a VPL DataGlove, also with an Polhemus attached to it.  The 
relationship between my hand and the eyephones is precisely 
measured by the two trackers so that my hand appears where I would 
expect it to.  When I point or make a fist, the fiber optics sewn into the 
DataGlove convert kinesthetics into electronics.  For a decisecond or so, 
my hand disappears and then reappears, glowing and toon-like, in the 
appropriate shape.

Despite the current confines of my little office-island, I know that I 
have become a traveller in a realm which will be ultimately bounded 
only by human imagination, a world without any of the usual limits of 
geography, growth, carrying capacity, density or ownership.  In this 
magic theater, there's no gravity, no Second Law of Thermodynamics, 
indeed, no laws at all beyond those imposed by computer processing 
speed...and given the accelerating capacity of that constraint, this 
universe will probably expand faster than the one I'm used to.

Welcome to Virtual Reality.  We've leapt through the looking glass.  
Now what?  Go ask Alice.