Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler
launch party etoy. FASTLANE as a homage to the information superhighway.
Prior to the event, Thomas had filled hundreds of plastic bags with capsules of icing sugar; on the day, many guests thought these contained drugs, thinking the ‘e’ in etoy stood for ecstasy. Laughing gas was served alongside the beer and snacks at the bar. Dominating the room was a huge black box on which Peter danced in a silver dress and sunglasses – trying to be a digital David Bowie – lip-synching his way through two of etoy’s Internet-inspired techno tracks, ‘Mail Me’ and ‘We Can’t Stop’.
Coco, a beautiful blonde transsexual and Swiss tabloid celebrity on the way to greater fame on the Paris catwalks, produced the evening’s climax. Suspended on a rope, she flew across the room dressed in a silver angel costume and singing a Japanese song, while a Russian TV crew filmed the event as the perfect expression of decadent Zürich youth. Coco had recently discovered her own fascination with cyberspace, along with a crush on Herbert. She had offered to be his muse and to use her media connections and photogenic posturing to help the group. In return, Herbert would declare her ‘etoy’s lifestyle angel’. It was as if the Seven Dwarves had discovered their Snow White.
All the members of etoy were pleased with what they considered to be an edgy and glamorous party. For those guests who made it into the VIP area, there was the added thrill of an Internet connection – which many of them were seeing for the first time. It was as etoy had promised in their pre-party press release: ‘Navigate with a mouse-click through worlds that recently were not even imaginable. Cyberspace for everybody! THE FUTURE IS NOW!’
However, the future they thought they had launched didn’t come quickly. A slot they had been promised on a local TV station in Zürich under the tag line ‘etoy – the first street gang on the international super data highway’ fell through, and attempts by Herbert and Peter to secure a record deal in London also came to nothing. Herbert was convinced that the dullards of the entertainment industry didn’t understand quite how the world had moved on. etoy decided that from then on they would only release their music and other creations on the Internet – ‘a non-material platform, the virtual stage for the new travelling generation’, as they called it. For this new world of Internet stardom they coined a new slogan: ‘etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.’
The Internet and pop stars were not the only influences to be fuelling etoy’s dreams. ‘At the core of etoy are the computer and LSD,’ Herbert explains. LSD had been their favourite vice as adolescents; they all remember their first acid trip. Together they had gone to Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse, the home territory of the city’s financial gnomes, and watched hallucinations of blood running down the façades of the banks, which then metamorphosed into the red-and-white Swiss flag. ‘We took these common drug experiences back into reality. It glued us together as a group,’ says Peter. The experience of tripping together welded the bonds of their friendships closer and created a common understanding about their lives and work.
Nowadays the conjunction between computers and LSD seems surreal. Most computers have become simply the dull cogs of the global economy. But in the early 1990s this symbiosis of technology and narcotics did not seem at all strange; even the sixties drug guru Timothy Leary was promoting his latest passion: computers. Although etoy never met him, they came to know his friends, some of whom were to have a profound influence on the gang. In the pantheon of etoy influences Tim Leary is another angel.
In his days as a Harvard professor of psychology, Leary had advocated the benefit of hallucinatory drugs such as LSD to the Flower Power generation. Described by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s as the most dangerous man in America, he had escaped from a twenty-year jail sentence, fleeing first to Algeria and then to Switzerland, only returning to Beverly Hills in the 1980s.
From its outset, Leary was fascinated by the life-altering possibilities of the personal-computer revolution. One of his first endeavours was to create a computer program to analyse the human mind. By the early 1990s he was committed to pushing the computer as a social force, saying that, ‘The PC is the LSD of the nineties’ and reworking his famous drug slogan ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ into ‘Turn On, Tune In, Log on.’ He encouraged his audiences to connect to the Internet as a method of political empowerment, and advocated ‘digital power to the people’.
A regular performer at raves and technology conferences alike, Leary became a guru to a small and peculiar scene in the Bay Area of Northern California that centred around a magazine called Mondo 2000, the self-declared ‘User’s Guide to the New Edge’ which hit American news-stands in 1989 and was soon to become the bible of a new counterculture called cyberculture. The so-called cyberpunks drew their identity from an amalgam of science-fiction literature, the drug rebellion of the sixties and the computer culture of nearby Silicon Valley. By 1993 they had made it to the cover of Time magazine in an article that called cyberculture the ‘defining counterculture of the computer age’ and described it as ‘bubbling up from the underground, popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic HYPERTEXT’.
Mondo 2000’s contributors ranged across the spectrum, from writer William Burroughs to the anarchistic promoter of magic mushrooms Terence McKenna. Also involved were the Grateful Dead’s ex-lyricist and Wyoming farmer John Perry Barlow; monologist Spalding Gray; New Age dolphin researcher John Lilly; and Eric Gullichsen, who had helped develop virtual reality. At Mondo 2000, partying was integral to the cyclic editorial process: ideas for articles appeared at parties; parties happened as a result of articles. In this ‘far out’ environment, Mondo 2000 and Timothy Leary provided each other with a mutual fan club – Mondo declared Leary a ‘cyberdelic guru’ and ‘MVP (Most Valuable Philosopher) of the twentieth century’, while Leary saw the magazine as ‘a really remarkable institution’ for its ‘beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary, and the artistic’.
One idea that captured the collective imagination of the Mondo 2000 group more than any other – because it promised a kind of technology-assisted acid trip – was virtual reality: the simulation of a three-dimensional environment experienced through a computer. By the late 1980s the world’s press had become fascinated by the prospect of existence in another world – the broadsheets by the manipulation of molecules in another three-dimensional space; the tabloids by the prospect of virtual sex, absurdly called teledildonics.
‘Cyberspace’, the term used to describe this ‘other world’ created between computers, was coined by the novelist William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer. In this cult classic he described the new place as a ‘consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation’. Gibson’s dystopian future saw an alternative space, in which people would interact. This was ‘a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.’ Tim Leary loved the idea of cyberspace, believing that it was possible to create ‘electronic realities’ on the other side of the computer screen in which one could talk, dance, swim and float.
By this time Leary, in his seventies and increasingly fragile, became enraptured by thoughts of a non-corporeal future. He reckoned that ‘within ten years many of us will not have to “go” to work. We will get up in the morning, shower, dress in our cyberwear suits, and “beam” our brains to work … Tomorrow our brains will soar on the wings of electrons into the offices of friends in Tokyo, then beam at light speed to a restaurant in Paris for a flirtatious lunch, pay a quick, ten-minute visit to our folks in Seattle – all without physically leaving our living rooms.’
In the coming years, the influences of the acid-head guru and the strange magazine persisted. Their countercultural ideas were currency to the newly established Internet community; and, later, as this community was forced into conflict under the pressure of corporate incomers’ colonisation of cyberspace, it was Leary and Mondo’s philosophies that lent galvanising force to the battles of opposition.
By 1995, etoy had really taken to heart the idea of virtual reality. For the boys, cyberspace was a new and open territory that they were intent on squatting. As with their real-world activities of a few years before, they