mirasapphira7's review against another edition
5.0
I read this when I was 12 or 13 and it blew my mind and changed my life. My curiosity about hackers is what drew me to it, but it introduced me to the insights from the psychedelic revolution, the magic of chaos theory and fractals, and ideas about paganism, and even including a glowing description of roleplaying games. The core message I remember was that our beliefs, concepts, and inner programming are incredibly powerful in shaping our lives and the way we see the world. It led me into even more mind-blowing books about LSD, including Timothy Leary's. I definitely remember being skeptical about the glowing endorsement of ecstasy and rave culture, though, even though love and oneness with a whole crowd did sound nice! The encouragement to explore inner realms of imagination and unusual states of consciousness was amazing and liberating. At any rate, I'm giving it five stars based on my memory of it, though I feel like I'd better re-read it.
brandur's review
3.0
An interesting history of the early Internet and culture of psychedelics (if a tad disjointed at times). It also had some good information on how these early cultures related to the Bay Area specifically, and talked about some of the early (and long since extinct) cyber clubs in SOMA. I would've liked to see even more information on that.
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