“Cyberspace: The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office trucks, from jet fuel fumes and clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines, and choked subways…from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things – from paper to brains – across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.” – Michael Benedikt in Cyberspace
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“The Web isn’t just something that happens in the world; it’s something that’s happening in you. When people set up e-mail accounts or personal web sites or join a chat room or create a MUD persona, what are they doing? They’re saying to the world, I AM. I signify. I am part of a large community. I am part of something bigger than myself.
“These are empowering acts. These acts are an expression of hope. These are spiritual acts. [In fact,] the adjective ‘spiritual’ simply refers to things which have no body, form, or substance. Spirituality is about things that are disembodied, things that are formless, things that are insubstantial, things that are virtual.”
“Spiritual experiences are, in fact, our business. Ours will be an economy of spirits.” – Game designer Brian Moriarty, 1996 Computer Game Developers’ Conference
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“Variously described as a ‘space that wasn’t space’, a ‘nonplace’, and a space in which ‘there are no shadows’ (William Gibson)”
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“The communication of sacra and other forms of esoteric instruction (memes) really involves three processes, though these should not be regarded as in series but as in parallel. The first is the reduction of culture into recognized components or factors; the second is their recombination in fantastic or monstrous patterns and shapes; and the third is their recombination in ways that make sense with regard to the new state and status that the neophytes will enter.” – Victor Turner, Betwixt and Between
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“We will all become angels, and for eternity! Highly unstable, hermaphrodite angels, unforgettable in terms of computer memory. – Nichole Stenger in Cyberspace
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“The notion of ideal forms in early Platonism has the allure of a perfect dream. But the ancient dream remained airy, a landscape of genera and generalities, until the hardware of information retrieval came to support the mind’s quest for knowledge. Now, with the support of the electronic matrix, the dream can incorporate the smallest details of here-and-now existence. With an electronic infrastructure, the dream of perfect FORMS becomes the dream of inFORMation.”
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“The analogy of Indra’s Net is very old, from Hindu mythology, whereby the universe is seen as a great net with a jewel at each intersection that reflects every other jewel in the net.” – Tim McFadden in Cyberspace
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