mindvox.txt

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                               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-