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Silicon Valley CEOs keep hailing its imminent arrival as they hawk digital goods, but the metaverse was a dystopian idea from its inception. A big shift is apparently underway in Silicon Valley.

Afew​ years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic.

Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life.

Palo Alto, Calif. THE other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye.

Is the iconic 19th-century Parisian wanderer alive and well on the Internet? Look no further than the depths of Tumblr, YouTube, and Wikipedia for your answer.  A cyberflâneur, by definition, strolls through the Internet.

​CyberFeminism \ˈsī-bərˈfe-mə-ni-zəm \ : A wave of thought, criticism, and art that emerged in the early 1990s, galvanizing a generation of feminists, before bursting along with the dot-com bubble.

Amid all the noise the Sony hack generated over the holidays, a far more troubling cyber attack was largely lost in the chaos. Unless you follow security news closely, you likely missed it. I’m referring to the revelation, in a German report released just before Christmas (.

So even though cyberpunk may be dead, the people who grew up on Gibson’s writing, Akira, and Blade Runner are still around.

To see the archetypal in an image is thus not a hermeneutic move. It is an imagistic move. We amplify an image by means of a myth in order not to find its archetypal meaning but in order to feed it with further images that increase its volume and depth and release its fecundity.

In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a rotating cylinder.

Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change, and where did it originally come from?

It all started with "cybernetics," an obscure term popularized by a mathematician named Norbert Weiner in the 1940s. For his groundbreaking book Cybernetics, Weiner borrowed the ancient Greek word "cyber," which is related to the idea of government or governing. Indeed, the only time the word cybernetics had appeared before was in a few works of political theory about the science of governance.

In his writing, Weiner described what was at the time a pretty futuristic idea — that one day there would be a computer system that ran on feedback. Essentially, it would be a self-governing system. And for a long time, cybernetics remained the purview of information theorists like Weiner, and early computer programmers.

Science fiction author Pat Cadigan, whose novel Mindplayers is a cyberpunk classic, recalled that her first encounter with "cyber" was of a decidedly Weinerish variety. She told io9 that the first time she heard the term was when she was in high school in 1967, and somebody mentioned cybernetics. "I asked what cybernetics was. 'It has to do with computers,' was the answer. My eyes glazed over. For years, that was the only word I knew with the prefix 'cyber' in it."

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But all that changed a little over a decade later. Cadigan recalled:

One morning in 1979, I was getting ready for work and Gary Numan's "Cars" came on the radio. Afterwards, the DJ said, "There's some cyberpunk for you." He was making a joke; in 1979, the punk movement was in full flower but the chaotic noise of punk music was starting to evolve into electronic noise. The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 4 SEXPAND Still, that joke quickly became a reality. In the early 1980s, the cyberpunk movement took over science fiction, spurred by the popularity of the film Bladerunner and William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Authors like Cadigan, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker were writing mind-blowing stories about the merging of humans and computers. Cyber became a catch-all prefix that could be added to any word to make it sound cutting-edge. Cadigan noted that cyber "sort of supplanted the term 'digital' in some ways as an indicator of something that was high tech."

The 1990s: Decade of Cyber

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Are you a cyberpunk? This early 1990s poster explains it all to you. R.U. Sirius was a founder of Mondo 2000, the definitive futurist magazine of the early 1990s. And now he's posted a ton of snippets from it over … Read… Cyberpunk was a mostly-underground artistic style in the 1980s, but suddenly in the 1990s everything was cyber. As more and more people got internet access, the alien world of cyberspace from William Gibson's work became a household consumer item.

Richard Holden, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, recently researched the history of cyber for the dictionary. He told io9 that the 1990s were a time when use of the word underwent rapid diversification:

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the prefix cyber­- has evidence of its use going back to 1961 (in Cybertron, as it happens), but . . . it seems to have become particularly popular in the 1990s — we don’t have all that much evidence for its use before then. This seems likely to be a result of the invention of the World Wide Web, and the earliest evidence we’ve found for words like cyber-bully, cybercommunity, cybergeek, cyberlaw, cyberstalker, and, indeed, cybersex and cyberwar all comes from the early 90s. At that time you . . . seem to get a mix of positive and negative terms involving the prefix, which possibly reflects the mixed feelings people often have about the opportunities and threats a new technology can bring. Ben Zimmer, who writes about linguistics for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Holden, noting that the seemingly-incongruous ideas of cybersex and cyberwar "grew up side by side." The earliest recorded use of the term "cybersecurity" came in 1989, the exact same year when the word "cyberporn" was coined. But neither term was dominant. In the heady days of the 1990s "information superhighway," before people got used to the idea that shopping, dating, and work could exist online, adding the prefix cyber to something made it seem like it was taking place in the gleaming, pixelated world inhabited by futuristic youth.

Had the iPhone come along in the 1990s, it's likely that we'd be calling our devices something very different. Cadigan said, "Terminology-wise, I find it interesting that we never had cyber-phones. The mobile/celluar phone became the cell and then evolved into the smart phone, not the cyber-phone." Just as today everything from buildings to phones can be "smart," in the 1990s anything could be cyber.

Including sex.

The Cybersex Moment

The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 56 SEXPAND Back in the days of AOL chat rooms, IRC channels, and text-only multi-user games, lots of people started having cybersex. Most of this furtive online activity involved no more than people talking dirty via text.

But cyber-pundits suggested that teledildonics and virtual reality sex were just around the corner. Soon, we would be having sex with chrome-plated dragon beasts in landscapes made of diamond flowers. And we would be stimulating our lovers 3,000 miles away with sex toys that plugged into both partners, sending the orgasmic shivers of one to the other via the internet.

Zimmer pointed out that Douglas Adams may have invented the idea of cybersex back in 1982, when he remarked in Life, the Universe and Everything that "Zaphod had spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him." As more college age people began piling on to the internet in the mid-1990s, cybersex became trendy slang for what you did with your long-distance boyfriend using the university dial-up connection. And, like most slang, it quickly got shortened to cyber.

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt’s interview centered on another comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.

William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”

I wrote an essay released in tandem with New Sculpt: LaTurbo Avedon‘s first solo exhibition, held at Transfer Gallery, New York – July 20 through August 10, 2013 Excerpt ::: In the past three decades the term “cyberspace” has come to define a social, rather than a geometric common environment. The term still conjures up images of posthuman projections and vast parallax branes, their cross-hatched surfaces woven at right angles by virtual motorcycles. We hear “cyberspace” and we think of terminals, of cables and an ocean of information, yet the most important means by which cyberspace is produced — namely human social and economic relations — barely registers a flicker. The objects of New Sculpt play between these contradictions.

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real?

As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship": the author (say, of the interactive immersive environment in which we actively participate by role-playing) no longer writes detailed story-line, s/he merely provides the basic set of rules (the coordinates of the fictional universe in which we immerse ourselves, the limited set of actions we are allowed to accomplish within this virtual space, etc.)

Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about the regulation by social norms in nineteenth-century England; his book On Liberty is written against that regulation. Many of the progressives in the twentieth century worried about the injustices of the market. The reforms of the market, and the safety nets that surround it, were erected in response.

This regulator is code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. It determines how easy it is to protect privacy, or how easy it is to censor speech. It determines whether access to information is general or whether information is zoned.