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archive:history:mindvox
                             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-
     tain  point in time having power that can have real and immediate
     effects upon all society, can do very strange things to your per-
     spective of the world.  Instead of learning to deal with the nor-
     mal barriers that most teenagers in western  culture  find  them-
     selves  faced  with, you discover that you can blow right through
     all of them without even slowing down.  In this way you miss much
     of the growth and acclimation that people go through during their
     teenage years.  Which is where a lot of old friends  parted  ways
     with  reality  and  ceased to be explorers, becoming caught up in
     the real world implications of the power that was  now  at  their
     disposal.   In  effect,  they  lost sight of the underlying theme
     that all our actions had been based upon, that of exploration and
     pushing  the  boundaries,  and  merely  focused on the short-term
     end-result of what their abilities could bring them;  in the pro-
     cess  becoming  the criminals that the Secret Service and FBI had
     said we all were.
     What had begun with the best intentions, as the  ultimate  exten-
     sion  of  human  curiosity, had devolved into a cultural movement
     that had very little to do with the ideals that had inspired  it.
     The term "hacker" had become synonymous with "criminal", and tak-
     ing a look around at the state of the underground, it  looked  as
     if  much  of  it  had  in  fact  degenerated  into  crime cartels
     comprised of angry teens who  had  little  understanding  of  the
     underlying  mechanisms  they were employing to play with reality.
     It was no longer the exhilaration of knowing that you could actu-
     ally  reach  out  and touch a satellite . . . it had come down to
     the negative power trip of fucking with something for the sake of
     pissing  people  off or just showing the world how much power you
     really have at your disposal if you ever decided to throw a  tan-
     trum.
     By 1988 what had replaced our outlook, was a  mindset  where  the
     new  generation saw two things:  one of them was the potential to
     take advantage of holes in the system for personal  gain.   There
     was  no  longer any quest for knowledge, desire to learn, or need
     to push the boundaries of what was possible for the sake  of  ex-
     ploration.   Instead  there were a lot of people who couldn't get
     past making free phone calls, stealing things, and causing  trou-
     ble  by  following  an already well-established pattern of action
     and reaction.
     The second -- and perhaps biggest -- motivating factor had become
     the   desire   for  personal  attention  in  the  form  of  self-
     aggrandizement: the ultimate hack had become  the  media  machine
     itself.  What was originally a by-product of our experiences, had
     become a goal in and of itself.  And here is where things  became
     REALLY twisted.
     The media in the latter half of the twentieth century has  become
     a very strange distortion of reality instead of the reflection it
     was intended to be.  Since this is not an essay on the  evils  of
     manipulation  through  the use of media, I will stick with a very
     simple outline of how events occur in the real world.
     A reporter, journalist, writer -- SOME PERSON who has  their  own
     desires and ambitions, wants to do an exciting story on something
     that will garner him or her  a  lot  of  attention  and  acclaim.
     Really  they  are operating from a point of view that has much in
     common with the "hacker's," which is the mindset  of  "I'm  gonna
     get  mine."  So this journalist looks around at the headlines and
     realizes that there is a mounting wave  of  hysteria  surrounding
     viruses  and  hackers  and  invasion  of  privacy  and . . . gee,
     wouldn't it be a nice career move to do a  story  that  will  mix
     their  name  into whatever the hot topic of the next five minutes
     happens to be.
     If the journalist is attached to any  even  marginally  important
     publication,  they  will  then  get  their  pick  from one of the
     current four or five "names" doing  the  rounds.   On  the  other
     hand,  if  the  journalist  is just starting out and connected to
     something much smaller, then the chances  are  they  will  simply
     show up at some user's group meeting, find the nearest thing they
     can to a "computer nerd," do an interview, and then write  it  up
     expressing  whatever  the  current  publicly-sanctioned viewpoint
     happens to be (the usual slant has become: hackers are  evil  and
     can look at your credit rating, fear them).
     I have been interviewed on many  occasions  and  I  know  roughly
     twenty  people  who  have  done  the interviews that comprise the
     basis of about 90% of all media that exists in  relation  to  the
     underground;  be it in newspaper, periodical, television segment,
     or book format.  WITH *VERY*  FEW  EXCEPTIONS,  there  have  been
     countless  solicitations  to perform illegal acts in the presence
     of journalists, these solicitations move all the way  into  coer-
     cion  in some cases.  There are reports containing sentences that
     were never spoken, quotes taken out of context, information  that
     was  invented  .  .  . there's simply no end to it.  The reporter
     profits first by stroking the hacker's ego  and  giving  him  the
     spotlight that he thinks he wants so badly, and then continues to
     profit as the hacker rides a bigger and bigger wave of  publicity
     that  in  every case leads to a very unhappy ending if the hacker
     in question doesn't have the foresight to get off the ride before
     it derails.
     In any case, whatever happens, the reporter  always  wins.   When
     the  hacker's  ride reaches its date with fate, the journalist in
     question can now write the closing chapter in the  hacker's  saga
     and  tell  the  public how this nefarious evil-doer is being pun-
     ished by the long arm of justice.  This is  followed  up  by  the
     journalist  taking  on  the "official" mantle of "hacker expert,"
     doing the lecture circuit, perhaps writing a book, and then going
     out and finding a new horse to beat to death.
     Obviously nothing can ever be this black and white, there must be
     a need for both parties to play their roles.  The reporter is not
     THE EVIL BAD MAN who has corrupted the INNOCENT  ANGELIC  HACKER,
     nor  does this scenario apply to all journalists equally, off the
     top of my head; Bruce Sterling, John Markoff, and Julian  Dibbell
     come to mind as extremely ethical exceptions to the norm.
     Usually the reporter who isn't quite so ethical is just  somebody
     who  is presented with a situation that can easily be twisted and
     misused if the desire for fame and fortune takes precedence  over
     everything  else.   The  reporter  by  the very nature of his job
     tends to be quite "slick" and worldly-wise, whereas the hacker in
     question  is  usually highly knowledgeable about computer systems
     while managing to retain an oblivious naivety about the  workings
     of  human  beings  in that elusive place called "the real world."
     This sets the stage for what transpires.
     And you see a lot of people who used  to  be  your  friends,  get
     ground  up  in  this  endless cycle as it repeats itself over and
     over again until one day you wake up and  come  to  realize  that
     you're  seventeen  or  eighteen going on 90.  You understand that
     everything in the whole world is comprised of bits and pieces  of
     lies  and  half-truths, everyone is inherently corrupt, including
     you; a lot of kids who used to be your friends are now all  grown
     up  with  no  place  to  go and getting busted for such things as
     fraud and grand larceny; and you have  utterly  lost  touch  with
     anything  even remotely "real."  And yet, you're still a teenager
     and have another 70 or 80 years  left  to  hang  around  on  this
     planet.
     This is right around the time that you're back in the media, only
     this  trip  around you're at the receiving end of law enforcement
     who have been prodded into a state of near-hysteria by the  dawn-
     ing  realization  that  a  bunch of kids really can dismantle the
     building  blocks  of  the  infrastructure  that  makes  most   of
     present-day  society  possible.  Naturally enough they're scared,
     and they're in the process of doing what  people  have  done  for
     ages when they are afraid: going on a witch-hunt.  Guess who gets
     to play witch...
     So one day you find yourself wondering why you should bother buy-
     ing  another  computer  system  and trying to figure out what the
     point of it all was anyway; to glimpse  the  limitless  potential
     and  then  fall  back  and  only  see your own flaws amplified to
     cartoon-like proportions.
     The 1980's were a time that saw the birth and death of the  first
     dynasties  of  Cyberspace.   Travelling  through  the  electronic
     landscape of this period in time, was like traversing  this  sur-
     real  range  of mountains, where amongst the sheer outcropping of
     rock, lush valleys, and snow-capped peaks, a collection of rather
     obsessive  dreamers  had built some of the most beautiful castles
     that were ever created and opened their doors to  a  populace  of
     pioneers.   It was absolutely transporting and timeless . . . and
     unfortunately -- in the short term -- doomed.
     This has been an abbreviated summary of the atmosphere and events
     that  started  a  kind  of mass exodus out of the modem world for
     about twenty of us.  We had spent our  entire  childhoods  jacked
     into  this alternate electronic universe, locked into playing our
     overly-developed personas, and almost no time figuring out who we
     were  and  what  we  wanted  out of life beyond "further, better,
     more."  This is nothing new or unique in and of  itself,  it  was
     however  something  that gained a very tangible and immediate im-
     portance to many of us when we found  that  the  thoughtspace  in
     which we had lived a large portion of our lives had disintegrated
     and the people we had  known  and  called  friends,  had  largely
     disappeared and been replaced by every negative quality they pos-
     sessed.
     A lot of us dumped the remnants of this reality into a  stack  of
     boxes  and  took off for parts unknown.  Whether college, work, a
     new circle of friends that didn't know who  you  were  in  Cyber-
     space, or even know what Cyberspace was; just about anywhere were
     we could start over and try to regain what had somehow been lost.
     Transformation
     --------------
                   "Ya live your life like it's a coma,
                    so won't you tell me why we'd wanna?
                       With all the reasons you give,
                        it's kinda hard to believe;
                    But who am I to tell you I've seen,
                      any reason why you should stay;
              Maybe we'd be better off without you anyway..."
                                           --Guns N Roses(*2)
     After coming to the realization that visiting The Tunnel for  the
     fourteenth  time  in  three weeks was not going to change my life
     for the better, and having no idea what I wanted to do  with  my-
     self,  I  dropped it all and got on a plane for the middle of no-
     where New Mexico.  Where I proceeded  to  cycle  through  all  my
     negative  tendencies  at  an  accelerated  pace,   first becoming
     utterly obsessed with bodybuilding, to the point of five  hour  a
     day  workouts,  insane  diets,  steroids,  and a silly-putty like
     transformation of myself to 6'2" 215 pounds and 6% bodyfat.
     This was good for about ten months, before I found myself in  the
     same mindset I had thought I could escape.  Looking in the mirror
     and seeing a parody of who I used to be, wondering  where  to  go
     from  there.  The answer was obviously to buy a Porsche and begin
     re-stocking my wardrobe with everything by  Armani  and  Versace,
     yes  I  had it now, this WAS the right answer, I only had to look
     around at all the people I knew doing just this to see that . . .
     well,  actually  they  were  all  pretty miserable, but again, it
     lasted for about nine or ten months.
     Around this time I realized that aside from the fact that I was a
     pretty  fucked  up person who probably needed a lot of therapy --
     which had never quite worked out the right  way  when  I  had  it
     thrust  upon  me  as a teenager -- I had become completely out of
     touch with my feelings.  Not out of  touch  that  I  didn't  have
     them,  I  had  over a thousand pages of them sprayed across mega-
     bytes of disks where I wrote out all the things inside of  myself
     driving  me crazy;  but out of touch in the sense that when I be-
     gan taking things apart and  analyzing  reality,  I  had  stopped
     listening  to  anything  I  felt inside and just tuned in to what
     seemed logical.
     The problem being that the more you try to act out of logic,  the
     more you find yourself applying logic to utterly emotional issues
     in an completely crazed and  self-destructive  way.   When  logic
     should  be  asking: "Why do I want to weigh 215 pounds of muscle?
     What the hell am I doing?" it suddenly finds itself in the  posi-
     tion  of  contemplating "Ok, so if I want to gain 5 pounds in the
     next 2 weeks, how many CC's of Deca do I mix with X mg.  of  Ana-
     var,  with what ratio of carbs/fat and what is the minimum PER of
     the protein I am going to consume in order to remain in an  anti-
     catabolic state?"
     Welcome to real-life Alice in Wonderland, taking  place  in  your
     head.
     At the age of twenty-one I had managed to attain a place where  I
     possessed everything that I ever thought I wanted.  Life is funny
     that way, you really do get whatever you desire.   Endless  hours
     spent  reading  thousands  of books; the mix and match regimen of
     combinations of new nootropics and longevity agents; and the  fi-
     nal  combination  of steroids and obsessive workouts had resulted
     in my achievement of the goal I had subconsciously  been  working
     towards  for  most  of my life.  I had succeeded in my efforts to
     become absolutely untouchable by anyone or anything.
     When you are no longer in the middle of a situation and have  the
     comfort of hindsight it's very simple to deduce what the underly-
     ing problems behind anything happen to be, and why you are acting
     in a way that is physically, mentally and spiritually destructive
     to yourself.  While there is nothing inherently  wrong  with  any
     action  I  might have taken, it all comes back to the question of
     why are you doing something?  And looking back upon  my  life,  I
     had actually lived very little of it in an attempt to make myself
     happy.  Almost everything had been some sort of reaction to those
     around me, and how I felt I had to respond to them.
     Despite my intellectual understanding of  how  brief  moments  of
     stimulus-response  can  shape  a person's existence, like so many
     endlessly-referenced frames  of  film  forever  etched  in  their
     brain.   Long-gone  fragments  of  time that refuse to relinquish
     their hold on the present, telling people who they  are,  setting
     their limitations, and defining the boundaries of what they allow
     their lives to mean.  In truth I had never managed to  apply  any
     of  this knowledge to myself and had lived most of my life in ac-
     cordance with the patterns of self-destructive  programming  per-
     petually repeating a loop in my head.
     From childhood onwards I have been through  a  seemingly  endless
     variety of extremes in my life; moving from levels of comfortable
     opulence, to near-poverty and back again, more times than I  care
     to  count.   What  I  had  learned  from this was that being poor
     wasn't that much fun, and could really suck, therefore logic dic-
     tates  that  I must always have a lot of money and do whatever it
     takes to get it.  In fact I'm going to be so unconcerned with mo-
     ney  that  I will start to feel anxious if I'm not wearing a $300
     dollar haircut and a $400 dollar shirt.  I have  felt  controlled
     by  situations  beyond my reach in the past, therefore I am going
     to learn as much as I can about everything, so that  nobody  will
     ever  be  able  to  fuck  with  my head and attempt to control me
     through misrepresentation of the  truth.   I  have  been  out-of-
     control  with  various  addictions and done such stupid things to
     myself that through combinations of downers and alcohol I have at
     one  point  weighed  over 300 pounds; therefore I will understand
     every fucking piece of biochemistry that is known about the human
     body,  I  will  do  whatever it takes to look into the mirror and
     gain my own approval even if it means working out with such  fre-
     quency that a pleasant sport becomes a daily torture session that
     leaves me nauseous and physically incapable of performing  simple
     movements  because  everything  hurts  all the time.  I will look
     like someone has spray-painted skin onto a statue no  matter  how
     difficult  it  is to maintain this state constantly, I will force
     myself to eat 6,000 calories of protein and 400 calories of  car-
     bohydrate,  and  if I can no longer think or move and my ultimate
     fantasy has become sleeping 18 hours a day, then that's what caf-
     feine and amphetamines are for.  I live in hell therefore I shall
     use drugs to escape my hell by taking week-long vacations on opi-
     ates,  but  I will never be controlled by anything, so on the 8th
     day I will walk away from heaven and live  through  a  couple  of
     days  of  pain  that  hurt  a little bit more than the rest of my
     life, but I will never be some fucking junkie, because I not only
     can  do  anything,  I  WILL  do  it,  and I just dare the fucking
     universe to try and prove otherwise, because I can quit anything,
     I  can  conquer  anything, I can do anything to prove anything to
     anyone and you can't stop me, because the entire world is full of
     weak,  soft and stupid motherfuckers who talk much and do little;
     praise George Bernard Shaw and pass the Nietzsche.
     Coming down off the adrenalin and testosterone rush the  memories
     I  used  to write that paragraph with have triggered, I'd like to
     take this moment to borrow a  quote  from  one  of  the  greatest
     poet-philosophers of our time: "Happy happy! Joy joy!"
     After endless repetitions of this cycle I had finally  reached  a
     state  in  which  my  internal  programming ceased to function --
     there was simply nothing left I could  apply  it  to.   Over  the
     years  I  had  overcome most of my psychological barriers through
     direct mental or physical actions, that  had  brought  with  them
     physical  rewards  that I was utterly incapable of applying to my
     life at that time.  Welcome to oblivion.
     Hitting absolute nothingness was the beginning of a very personal
     catharsis  for me that finally led to turning inwards to see what
     was wrong, since externally, everything looked okay.  I  had  at-
     tained  a  physical state that "corrected" everything my subcons-
     cious had said was "wrong" with me, yet for some bewildering rea-
     son  I  was  not  deliriously  happy.  A series of steps followed
     which eventually led to various experiments in the world of thea-
     tre and film, where I had the chance to re-connect with emotions,
     and get them back into some kind of perspective from the comfort-
     able vantage point and attitude of: "they're not really mine, I'm
     only playing them."  All of which reached a pinnacle when I began
     experimenting with LSD for the first time.
     If you have never experienced what it is like to be  on  an  acid
     trip,  it  will  be  difficult for me to convey the kaleidoscopic
     depth of experience you are presented with.  It does nothing less
     nor more, than strip away every preconceived notion that you have
     ever had regarding what "reality" is.   Beyond  the  special  ef-
     fects,  intellectual  realizations,  and  creative opportunity it
     presents, it leaves you imbued with one very basic truth  of  the
     universe:   No  matter  what  the actual outcome of your actions,
     what matters is your intent.  If what you are doing  --  whatever
     it  may be -- is being done out of any reason other than a desire
     to bring happiness to people; to help humanity as a  whole  reach
     some greater level of understanding; to uplift and inspire people
     to reach for something that is within everyone's grasp . . . then
     you are wasting your time.
     This is not exactly news, I mean it is the  basic  belief  system
     that every religion on earth is founded on (with the possible ex-
     ception of Satanism, and a few other offshoots of this system  of
     thought).   The problem with religion getting such a bad rap most
     of the time is largely due to the fact that most people  who  act
     as  spokesmen  for  any  given religious cause, are only mouthing
     words they comprehend on an intellectual level.  They are not ac-
     tually  living  in this state of internal alignment, so what they
     have to offer can be very suspect . . . how is  someone  who  has
     not  attained  what  he speaks of, supposed to help you attain it
     for yourself?  While dogma may help a limited few, it will  never
     reach  most  of  those  who posses the ability to think for them-
     selves.  Nor is standing at a pulpit or in front of a camera  and
     ranting  about  damnation, going to help anyone reach any kind of
     positive state.
     I obviously cannot speak for everybody, but from my own  perspec-
     tive  I had read the holy books of most religions on earth when I
     became interested in psychology and the theories of Carl Jung  --
     who  crosses  over into mysticism and religious experience, going
     as far as the concept of "karma" with his theory of  Synchronici-
     ty.  Yet I never got anything from them other than an intellectu-
     al high of understanding how groups of people could be programmed
     to behave in certain ways . . . which isn't what it's about.  The
     EXPERIENCE is what all religions are based on, how you choose  to
     interpret it is entirely up to you.  But a very simple thing that
     becomes apparent is the basic truth that wherever  your  inspira-
     tion  is  coming  from, if it fills you with the need to motivate
     large groups of people to do SOMETHING, be that something in  the
     name  of  "God" or anybody else . . . then somewhere, you got the
     wrong message.  Because there really isn't all that much  to  say
     beyond  the  very simple and obvious, "give love and you will get
     it."  The only thing that needs to be changed  is  your  attitude
     and outlook on life.  Making group_of_people(x) move twenty paces
     to the left while wearing black hats and reading  from  the  Holy
     Book  of  the  Arboreal  Tree Sloth, isn't gonna make the world a
     better place.
     While this discourse is tangential to some of the issues at hand,
     in  a  great  sense  it  is the underlying cause for all of them.
     Once you have seen the light as it were, or understood the bigger
     picture . . . it becomes very hard to go back to living life with
     blinders on regarding your  own  actions.   Until  it  eventually
     reaches  the  place where I found myself.  The point at which the
     only things I'm going to talk about are those that matter to  me,
     things  I  believe  in . . . things I believe will help people in
     some manner.  Along with the realization that I cannot do  a  lot
     of  things  I  used  to  do  anymore.  I cannot lie to people and
     present them with some image they want to see  in  order  to  get
     something  from  them  --  because I mean, WHAT is there to "get"
     anyway?  I can no longer be a politician or figurehead for causes
     that I do not believe in, and I will no longer waste my time tak-
     ing part in meaningless drivel that serves to do nothing but  en-
     trench me in bullshit without end; I had already spent most of my
     life taking apart the rules and winning at whatever game I  tried
     to  play.   What  I never bothered to examine was the fact that I
     didn't "win" anything that ever brought me any happiness  .  .  .
     what is the point in playing if you don't want the "prize?"
     Stagnation of the Electronic Frontier
     -------------------------------------
     Moving forward in time by about two years, this was the  attitude
     that  I  had managed to retain as I returned to New York.  Every-
     thing was the same, yet completely different.  What had been per-
     vaded  by  Nihilism  and vacuity only a short time ago, was now a
     pathway of infinite potential and limitless possibility.  For the
     first  time  in  almost  six years I actually felt completely in-
     spired and excited by the possibilities that life in general  and
     Cyberspace in particular had to offer.
     The summer of 1991 was a kind of "class reunion" for many of  us.
     For  the  first  time  in almost half a decade we found ourselves
     back in New York City, the place where all of  this  had  started
     for us such a long time ago.
     What happened was pretty much the expected; an endless stream  of
     jokes  and  self-depreciating  humor regarding who we used to be,
     the three-letter acronyms we used to affiliate with  or  have  in
     revolution around us, the state of the universe and everything in
     it, and a general time of catching up on who had done  what.   It
     was  a strange situation, since we really had disappeared, to the
     extent that most of us had not talked with one another in  years,
     it  was almost as if picking up the phone and speaking with some-
     one from back then would bring back all the bad things  you  were
     trying to get rid of.
     Out of this gathering, I found about a  dozen  people  who  I  no
     longer  knew.   People who had become submerged in drugs, and be-
     come lost in different sub-cultures where  they  could  live  out
     reasonable facsimiles of their childhoods forevermore; people who
     had completely lost touch with what they used to be,  and  become
     stereotypical  examples  of  what  people  tend to term "computer
     geeks," the sum total of their interest in life having been  nar-
     rowed  down  to that new bug in X windows client-server architec-
     ture and what it would mean to the future of the OSF; people  who
     hadn't  changed  at all and were still busy "getting over" on so-
     ciety   in   general;  but   perhaps  most  surprising,  I  found
     that about ten people I used to know had gone  through  a  growth
     process very similar to my own, and actually succeeded in solving
     their quest and winning the prize we had all sought so badly.
     The correct solution to the "quest," is of course, that there  is
     no  solution.   There  is nothing you are looking for, except for
     you, and once you realize this, you win the big prize,  you  find
     yourself, and get to live happily ever after.
     After re-discovering that a group of us seemed to thoroughly  en-
     joy  each other's company, we eventually ended up having a weekly
     meeting where we'd  get  together  and  discuss  various  topics.
     Foremost  amongst them was one that sprung up with increasing re-
     gularity as the weeks went by:  getting back  onto  the  frontier
     from  a  completely different angle.  As years went by many of us
     had started completely different lives;  some  were  in  college,
     others  had  started companies or gone to work for companies they
     had once laughed at, and still more had started careers complete-
     ly unrelated to anything they had been doing in the past.  But it
     had became clear that what we really wanted to do  was  take  the
     incredible  promise  that  had  been shown to us during our youth
     when we had walked along the edge of a new reality unfolding, and
     channel  it  into  a positive direction that would benefit every-
     body.
     As we found out, the hacker underground had  continued  with  its
     headlong  dive  into  oblivion.   The  underground  had basically
     ceased to exist after the Operation Sun Devil sweep.  Just  about
     the  only "hacker systems" still in existence were those catering
     to the teenagers whose priorities focused on  ripping  off  phone
     companies, collecting VMB codes and pirating software.
     While this was slightly depressing, it was also a  foregone  con-
     clusion  and  didn't  cause too much surprise.  The main focus of
     our interest was what had become of the mainstream telecommunica-
     tions nets -- given half a decade to evolve, something really ex-
     citing must have happened by now.  The hardware that we ended  up
     sitting  in  front  of,  would have made possible an undreamed of
     variety of possibility when taken  into  context  with  what  was
     available in the past.  We were used to 64K Apple ][+ systems, or
     maybe tricked out //e's with 128K and PC's with 640K, and now  we
     were  sitting  at  a friend's house in front of a NeXT and an SGI
     Indigo.  When you thought about the fact that 7 years ago you had
     paid about $8,500 for a 4.5megabyte Corvus hard disk, and now you
     could buy an entire NeXT with that . . . it was, fantastic.
     Before taking off on our expedition of present-day Cyberspace, we
     had  spoken  with  some of our friends who were familiar with the
     terrain, and received somewhat  tepid  responses  and  a  general
     dismissal  of what was going on right now.  Thinking the attitude
     was one of standard arrogance which we had all gone  through,  we
     didn't  pay  too  much attention to it and set out to explore the
     new electronic nervous system of the world.
     A couple of hours later it became shockingly apparent  that  most
     of  the potential of the bright new technology that now existed .
     . . that could have been used to create and house an infinite ex-
     panse  of  innovation, communication, and pooling of thought, lay
     dormant.  Thus far it had seemingly been  utilized  to  construct
     gigantic file servers that advertised their existence by digitiz-
     ing porno magazines and  editing  their  dialup  lines  into  the
     resulting scan.
     All those wonderful places that we had travelled in the past, and
     had  dominated  the landscape only half a decade before . . . had
     indeed been razed, paved over, and replaced by an  endless  elec-
     tronic  expanse  of  snap-together tract houses that littered the
     landscape with numbingly identical  systems.   The  frontier  had
     packed  up  and moved back into labs where people like our friend
     with the workstations were working on applications that  wouldn't
     see  the light of day for another decade.  And what was out there
     right now, was strikingly similar to a generic suburb of AnyTown,
     USA.
     Objectively a suburb is not a bad thing, it's planned out,  logi-
     cal, it works, it doesn't need to be any different from any other
     suburb . . . in short, it's functional.  It's also very different
     from  the  environment we had grown up in, where everything was a
     new step further out into the unknown, where anything could  hap-
     pen, and nobody had ever been there before.
     From our vantage point it looked as if the explorers  had  indeed
     gone  back to their ivory towers (or haunted dungeons as the case
     may be), and a lot of used car salesmen had set up shop  cranking
     out the snap-together tract houses, when they realized they could
     make more money doing that, than say, selling used cars.
     It was truly a mind blowing experience to witness for  the  first
     time,  systems that actually advertised themselves based upon how
     many lines they had, or how much storage.  Attitudes  that  would
     have  garnered  a great deal of scorn and derision -- and in gen-
     eral made your advertisement the brunt of a lot of jokes --  were
     suddenly the accepted way in which systems chose to differentiate
     themselves from one another.  Looking at them, it  came  down  to
     the  fact  that the only difference between system (A) and system
     (B) was that one might have 16 lines while the other had 24,  and
     system (C) was inherently superior to both (a) and (b) because it
     had 32 lines and 4 gigabytes of storage  (used  to  house  10,000
     programs,  out of which the same 200 are downloaded over and over
     again, as the rest of the junk sits there gathering dust).
     Even more frightening, on a system that had  10,000  messages  on
     it,  an  average  of  9,800  will be echoes of FidoNet or RIME or
     whatever-net, leaving a grand total of about  200  messages  from
     the  actual members.  And frequently those 200 messages date back
     a year and a half . . . a couple of years ago a BAD one line sys-
     tem  had that many messages in a week.  A good one in a couple of
     hours.
     To a lot of people Cyberspace has become one big file server .  .
     .  strikingly  similar  to what television has devolved into.  An
     entirely passive place where you press  buttons  and  get  enter-
     tained, no thought required, no input necessary.
     Realizing that we were merely skimming the surface, and might not
     know  the  whole story, we spent a couple of weeks becoming fami-
     liar with what had happened, and what the situation  really  was.
     Based  upon several hundred conversations with various people who
     were involved with the current scene, we arrived at a  couple  of
     very basic conclusions.
     In order to run a system in the  present  environment,  and  have
     users,  you  needed to have a pile of hardware, many phone lines,
     some sort of marketing and bookkeeping ability, a  lot  of  spare
     time, coupled with infinite patience to put up with people, since
     they are now your customers, not just your friends, and  if  they
     call  you  up asking the same goofy questions you cannot take the
     phone off the hook or tell them to go away.
     Where running a system in the  past  had  meant  giving  up  your
     second phone line, it presently involved a great deal of interac-
     tion with the department of Red Tape, and  Bureau  of  Tasks  You
     Really  Aren't Interested In.  This opened the door to the "used-
     car salesmen" people, since these were things they were  used  to
     doing  every day.  Conversely, it has almost universally been our
     experience that the guy who is a Unix wizard and can  work  magic
     with networking and programming, lives in deathly fear of signing
     paperwork, filling out his tax returns, or figuring out where  he
     parked  his car.  And finally, the creative person whose main in-
     terest is making fantastic places, lacks the time and patience to
     write  the  code, and certainly has no interest in administrative
     duties.
     In effect, most people with the desire to  do  something  better,
     did  not  have  the  necessary $25-30k laying around, and even if
     they did, they would never act on it because they'd be forced  to
     spend  a great deal of their time doing a hundred things they had
     no interest in doing.  So the online world had begun to  be  dom-
     inated by the file servers, who didn't really have much of an in-
     terest in being anything other than file servers, since that made
     the  most  money  with the least effort, and anybody with $25,000
     could toss up a snap-together MeSsyDOS  based  system  with  very
     little technical ability required.
     Thus began the era of the "tract-houses"  where  advertising  and
     atmosphere  consisted  of  rattling  off  hardware statistics and
     number of phone lines, along with the number  of  shareware  pro-
     grams  available  for  downloading (an extremely amusing concept,
     considering that there are literally TERABYTES of  free  software
     available  for  the  taking  on  ftp sites all over the Internet,
     which cost NOTHING to download from).
     With the exception of two of three bright  lights  that  had  the
     right idea and were trying to do something different, most of the
     electronic frontier had indeed vanished.  And it isn't so hard to
     see  where  a couple of years from now the same advertising agen-
     cies that sell brain-dead ads designed to induce you to crave one
     brand  of beer over another, will be pushing SYSTEM X, because IT
     HAS 10,000 phone lines!  Call now and  leave  your  mind  at  the
     door!
     Transcendence
     -------------
     It has generally been our experience that people are neither stu-
     pid,  nor shallow.  Everyone has the potential to think for them-
     selves, to overcome adverse situations, and contribute  something
     to this world.  When placed in situations that offer these possi-
     bilities, people tend to come through with surprising regularity.
     In  a fairly short amount of time you end up with a group of peo-
     ple doing something they themselves would have deemed improbable,
     if  not  downright impossible, if you had asked them at any other
     point in their lives.
     Virtual Reality has the potential to become the single  most  im-
     portant  development  in the history of human evolution.  It is a
     technology that holds the promise  of  absolute  liberation.   It
     also  holds  the possibility of turning the world into the rather
     grim one that is the basis of  much  Cyberpunk  fiction,  a  dark
     place where technology is used to oppress and suppress people.
     By its very nature, it is very  difficult  to  ever  imagine  the
     latter.   In  order  to  have a police state, you need to amass a
     certain amount of power, yet Cyberspace is the ultimate  equaliz-
     er.   It  is  a place where one person can wield as much power as
     100, 1,000, or 100,000 people.   Physical  limitations  are  cast
     off,  and in the event of conflict the playing field becomes that
     of mind vs. mind.  Sheer numbers and a mob rules mentality  cease
     to have any meaning when you can create infinite numbers of elec-
     tronic organisms to do anything you want them to do.
     The hope is that it will never sink to such a level of stupidity.
     Games  are  wonderful,  but  there  is  no need for conflict, all
     struggle tends to be internal conflict that has become  external-
     ized.   When  you  want  to convert the sinners, or prove you are
     right, all you're doing is having an argument with yourself.  The
     beautiful  thing  about  Virtual Reality is the fact that you are
     free to do that, for as long as you need, to work out  that  par-
     ticular set of problems -- without harming anybody.
     There is only one ultimate truth, which is BEING  HAPPY  and  ex-
     periencing LOVE.  How you choose to perceive it is a very indivi-
     dual matter.  While it might mean blue to you, orange to that guy
     over  there,  and  silver to me, it's all the same thing.  In the
     real world if we held fast to those beliefs and behaved as people
     have  been classically shown to behave, then we'd be killing each
     other over who has the right idea about love . . . Cyberspace al-
     lows  everyone  the  freedom  to  co-exist without harming anyone
     else's world-view or belief system.  And if you truly  are  given
     the opportunity to live in an environment conducive to you happi-
     ness, then if that heretic who thinks orange is the  answer  were
     ever to show up at your front door, chances are you would be able
     to tolerate him, and even, "God" forbid,  express  the  love  you
     claim to espouse.
     Phantom Access - The Ethereal Takes Shape
     -----------------------------------------
     There was never any solid dividing line where we decided that  we
     really  wanted  to  put together a system where we could have the
     freedom of expression we wanted, with the  ultimate  goal  really
     being  the  very  simple  one of pushing the envelope further and
     further out there.  All of us had obligations, school,  and  per-
     sonal  commitments that would be difficult to integrate into this
     major change of plans.  But inevitably the  mass  exodus  out  of
     college,  the  avoidance of unnecessary responsibilities, and the
     initial stages of planning were set in motion.
     Six months later we had close  to  a  hundred  thousand  dollars,
     top-down  system  design,  a fully designed multi-user simulation
     engine, a general idea of what we would do and how  we  would  go
     about it, a team of our friends together one more time, only this
     time as a real corporation, and over one  thousand  megabytes  of
     the  collected history of Cyberspace, dating back to systems that
     existed in 1979, that had been laying in dusty boxes filled  with
     old Apple DOS 3.3 disks.
     On April 1st 1992 MindVox  went  into  its  alpha-testing  stage.
     Which  loosely speaking means that we put everything together and
     watched it disintegrate repeatedly as the last 300-400 bugs  were
     worked out of the system.  Since then it has been running in pro-
     tected environment mode with a collection of our friends and  as-
     sociates crash-testing the software, suggesting where rough-edges
     might be smoothed, and generally having a good time creating some
     of  the  atmosphere while trying to destroy the software in every
     conceivable way so that everything is solid upon inception.
     In May of 1992 MindVox will open it's doors to  the  public.   As
     much  as  we'd  like  to say that it's going to completely change
     everything, it will not.  All it can do is allow people who  feel
     in  rhythm  with this vision of the world to converge together in
     one of the most interesting nexus points of Cyberspace.   To  ex-
     tend  their reach, explore new levels of experience, and interact
     with some of the pioneers in the fields of computer science, net-
     working,  science-fiction,  music,  the arts, politics, religion,
     altered states, and future reality.
     Our main priority is to create and  continuously  evolve  an  en-
     vironment  that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, cou-
     pled with access to information and ideas, that present you  with
     a far greater spectrum of possibility than you might otherwise be
     able to access.
     Thanks
     ------
     Nothing of this magnitude could ever take shape  based  upon  the
     merits  of  any  one individual.  The entire Phantom Access Group
     has been a collaborative effort since it  began  some  ten  years
     ago;  the  MindVox  project is merely the first confluence of the
     diverse talents that comprise the core of Phantom Access  Techno-
     logies,  that has been directed towards the electronic and socie-
     tal mainstream.
     Looking back over the years, there are very few of my friends who
     have not in some way contributed to the genesis of Phantom Access
     and the creation of MindVox, and I'd like to take this opportuni-
     ty to express my gratitude to all of them.
     People I would like to specifically thank, and without whom Mind-
     Vox  could  not  have  been launched in the manner we wanted, in-
     clude:
          First and foremost, my fiance Delia, who has  made  much  of
     the last several years possible; who never knew about "Lord Digi-
     tal" when she met me; who has  gone  from  "computers,  uh,  ugh,
     that's  so  . . . um, dull" to not only seeing the potentials in-
     herent in the capabilities the technology  presents  to  all  so-
     ciety,  but actually extending many hundreds of hours of her time
     to scripting sections of the project and designing human interac-
     tion  POV's  based  upon her lifelong experience with theatre and
     film.  She has also shown remarkable grace by retaining  a  sense
     of  humor  when  dealing  with  2am anonymous calls from computer
     dudes who feel compelled to ask "so, what does Lord Digital do in
     bed?" questions.
          The second person to whom I owe a great deal is Bruce Fanch-
     er,  my  partner in this endeavor, as well as half a hundred pro-
     jects that have spanned over a decade.  Without you  many  things
     would not have been possible, and those that were would have been
     a lot less fun.  It has been an interesting  experience  watching
     someone  grow  into  an  adult who has retained all the qualities
     that made them so much fun to hang out with  in  our  youth,  yet
     managed  to temper that childlike glee with responsibility, humor
     in the face of adversity, and that elusive quality called charac-
     ter.  Here's to another couple of decades of Lord & Lord.
          I would like to thank every member  of  the  Phantom  Access
     Group  for  the  thousands of hours spent designing, implementing
     and de-bugging the programs  that  make  MindVox  come  to  life.
     Respective   of  some  people's  desire  to  remain  out  of  the
     spotlight, I will leave it at that.  You know who you are &  any-
     one  who really cares to find that out can do so at any time they
     desire.
          Phiber Optik:  For applying his considerable skills in a po-
     sitive  direction  and  helping  us make MindVox a very difficult
     fortress to lay siege to, while at the same time adding a tremen-
     dous  amount  of versatility to our networking and communications
     interface options.  Most of all, thank you for having the courage
     to  realize  that the world is not always a logical or fair place
     and that no matter how intelligent you are or how noble your  in-
     tentions,  you  can  be dragged down by the stupidity and fear of
     those around you if you associate with people who  do  not  share
     the same qualities you possess.
          Charles:  For a great deal of assistance in updating many of
     us regarding the current status of new technology and what's just
     over the horizon, as well as providing tremendous aid by  showing
     us  functional  examples  of  the state of the art in distributed
     electronic networking, and taking us  on  a  fast-forward  cruise
     through  a  wide  variety  of  hardware platforms and development
     tools.  Your friendship, advice, and persistent belief in our vi-
     sion, has been invaluable.
          Len Rose:  For being a good friend over the years and always
     giving  assistance  with  anything  we  have needed.  Most of all
     thanks for coming out of everything you've been through with  op-
     timism about the future and an intact belief system.  Peace.
          George Gleason:  For being a person who has become one of my
     close friends faster than anyone else ever did.  For possessing a
     really beautiful outlook on life & everything in it, and for  al-
     ways  being  a calming voice when things are completely crazy and
     the moon is full.
          Bruce Sterling:  For his encouragement, support, and a real-
     ly  funny  talk  at CFP-2.  Most of all, the deepest appreciation
     for doing an admirable job of presenting the unbiased truth while
     chronicling some of the events that have taken place on the fron-
     tiers of Cyberspace.
          Mike Godwin:  For putting up  with  many  long  and  strange
     phone calls regarding a wide variety of topics; for helping us to
     avoid potential pitfalls and difficulty; for providing encourage-
     ment  and  advice, and in general, for being a really cool person
     who has gone out of his way many times to provide us with  assis-
     tance.
          Thomas Dell:  For writing code full  of  obscure  jokes  and
     weird  ramblings that do wonders to wake you up and get your full
     attention when you are changing things at 3am, and for  being  an
     exceptionally  gracious  guy who is one of the limited handful of
     people that have maintained their sense of vision in the face  of
     impending mediocrity and industrialization.
          Special thanks to Dan, SN, SR, D00f and everyone in DPAK and
     cDc,  who  comprise some of the very few who managed to grasp the
     obvious, and in turn make use of this knowledge in an  entertain-
     ing and lucid manner.  Additional accolades to DPAK for being the
     only eL!te duDeZ to use a four letter acronym instead of a  three
     letter one.  The vision, the sheer wow!
          Mega-Supra-Surfin-the-Ozone Thanks to  Mondo  2000.   Beyond
     the  sea  of  screaming  fluff  and  designer hyperbole contained
     within the covers of any issue of Mondo, there is  also  a  great
     deal of truth to be found about Cyberspace, music, art, film, and
     life in general.  Mondo has thus far shown itself  to  be  beyond
     reproach  as  far  as journalistic ethics and presentation of the
     facts are concerned.  It is also to be commended as a publication
     with  a  sound  belief in typing words at random and letting them
     fall where they may.
          Finally, tremendous gratitude goes to Jim Thomas.  A  person
     I  do  not  know  and have never spoken with, yet someone who has
     done an exceptionally important  service  to  all  of  Cyberspace
     with  the  forum  presented  by Computer Underground Digest.  Ir-
     respective even of CuD, I  have  heard  nothing  but  praise  and
     well-wishing from the many you have helped.  Thank you.
          Additional thanks to:  Paul, Yuri, Eric & Eric, Ken & every-
     one who has made the move to Phibro Energy, Drowned Fish, Andrew,
     Randy, Carl, The Plastics, TV, Eric Madeson, Richard,  Harlequin,
     Dane,  Jeff,  The Galactic Knight, Laszlo Nibble, Colleen, Cereal
     "I live to be annoying" Killer, the cast  &  crew  of  LightStorm
     lighting and Manny "huh?" Riggs at Record Plant.
     Patrick K. Kroupa                             digital@phantom.com
             Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. +1 212 988 5987
     _________________________________________________________________
  • 1 Lyrics are © Copyright, some year or another by Mick Jagger

& Keith Richards, otherwise known as the Rolling Stones. The

     version   I  was  listening  to  is  a  cover  version   done  by
     Jane's Addiction.
  • 2 Lyrics are © Copyright, 1991 by Guns N Roses music

Uzi/Suicide Records.

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