Imaginaries offer hopes and fears that often do not appear as hopes and fears, but as real projects just one or two steps away from completion. Much of the urgency people draw from imaginaries stems from this sense of being nearly but not quite completed, meaning people feel a need to act quickly to either prevent the imagined disaster or bring on the imagined benefit. Cyberspace's imaginary creates urgency because technological leaps always appear to be almost completed. Cyberspace's imaginary is structured by a twinned utopia and dystopia that both stem from the awed claim that everything is controlled by information codes that can be manipulated, transmitted and recombined through cyberspace. Certain particular visions are collectively imagined from this realisation and provide some of the unifying thoughts that allow individuals in cyberspace to recognise each other as members of the same community.
Power is the condition and limit of politics, culture and authority.
Power seeps through and around all forms of politics, at times bringing opposites into conflict in a way that reinforces the fundamental flow of power. Cyberpower aims not at the immediately obvious forms of politics, culture and authority that course through cyberspace but at the structures that condition and limit these three. Cyberpower reveals the underlying workings of lives, societies and dreams in cyberspace that can be expected to endure for some time.