Cyberia

Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Rushkoff's debut book is an immersive portrait of the early internet subculture — the hackers, ravers, cyberpunks, chaos mathematicians, and psychedelic philosophers who were building the digital frontier in the early 1990s.

Written from the inside — Rushkoff was a participant observer, not a journalist — Cyberia captures a moment of genuine utopian ferment when the internet still seemed like a tool for liberation rather than surveillance, and when the intersection of technology, consciousness expansion, and community felt genuinely revolutionary.

The book profiles figures from Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna to early web designers and hacker collectives — and situates all of them within a broader argument about chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, and the way the digital revolution was changing human consciousness.

Reading Cyberia today is a vivid and bittersweet experience: a reminder of what the early internet felt like to those who believed it could change everything.