Introduction to Cyberspace: First Steps MICHAEL BENEDIKT MIT Press, 1991 Cyberspace: A word from the pen of William Gibson, science fiction writer, circa 1984. An unhappy word, perhaps, if it remains tied to the desperate, dystopic vision of the near future found in the pages of Neuromancer (1984) and Count Zero (1987)—visions of corporate hegemony and urban decay, of neural implants, of a life in paranoia and pain—but a word, in fact, that gives a name to a new stage, a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology. Cyberspace: A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night. Cyberspace: Accessed through any computer linked into the system; a place, one place, limitless; entered equally from a basement in Vancouver, a boat in Port- au-Prince, a cab in New York, a garage in Texas City, an apartment in Rome, an office in Hong Kong, a bar in Kyoto, a cafe in Kinshasa, a laboratory on the Moon. Cyberspace: The tablet become a page become a screen become a world, a virtual world. Everywhere and nowhere, a place where nothing is forgotten and yet everything changes. 1