Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

The Times, about the telegraph, 1858

In early 1995, the etoy gang worked relentlessly for their common aims. Hans and Herbert considered the strategy, created graphics and wrote manifestos and poetry. Peter and Franco wrote and recorded music. Juri explored the working of Web technology. Alberto worked on three-dimensional graphic representations that he hoped would become a ‘virtual disco’. Thomas wrote witty essays about their lifestyle. There was no central direction, but the seven of them had a shared sensibility and all seemed to push in roughly the same direction. ‘It was as if we were ants,’ remembers Juri, ‘and we all knew independently where the sugar was.’

They also began planning a more extensive Web site. They wanted to show its visitors their work – Herbert’s images and Hans’s WORDWAR poems. In the ‘disco’, Peter and Franco were going to make their soundtracks available. To launch themselves and their first steps on the World Wide Web, they decided to hold a party, which they initially hoped could be online, with party-goers logging on around the world, listening to their music and chatting and smooching with each other across the Internet. But while they were confounded by the impossibility of virtual drinks and drugs, their biggest problem was that the technology didn’t quite live up to their expectations: the network was slow and the computers lacked power. In the end, the online-party idea was abandoned in favour of an offline event at a converted Zürich sports-centre. They called their launch party etoy. FASTLANE as a homage to the information superhighway.

Prior to the event, Thomas had filled hundreds of plastic bags with capsules of icing sugar; on the day, many guests thought these contained drugs, thinking the ‘e’ in etoy stood for ecstasy. Laughing gas was served alongside the beer and snacks at the bar. Dominating the room was a huge black box on which Peter danced in a silver dress and sunglasses – trying to be a digital David Bowie – lip-synching his way through two of etoy’s Internet-inspired techno tracks, ‘Mail Me’ and ‘We Can’t Stop’.

Coco, a beautiful blonde transsexual and Swiss tabloid celebrity on the way to greater fame on the Paris catwalks, produced the evening’s climax. Suspended on a rope, she flew across the room dressed in a silver angel costume and singing a Japanese song, while a Russian TV crew filmed the event as the perfect expression of decadent Zürich youth. Coco had recently discovered her own fascination with cyberspace, along with a crush on Herbert. She had offered to be his muse and to use her media connections and photogenic posturing to help the group. In return, Herbert would declare her ‘etoy’s lifestyle angel’. It was as if the Seven Dwarves had discovered their Snow White.

All the members of etoy were pleased with what they considered to be an edgy and glamorous party. For those guests who made it into the VIP area, there was the added thrill of an Internet connection – which many of them were seeing for the first time. It was as etoy had promised in their pre-party press release: ‘Navigate with a mouse-click through worlds that recently were not even imaginable. Cyberspace for everybody! THE FUTURE IS NOW!’

However, the future they thought they had launched didn’t come quickly. A slot they had been promised on a local TV station in Zürich under the tag line ‘etoy – the first street gang on the international super data highway’ fell through, and attempts by Herbert and Peter to secure a record deal in London also came to nothing. Herbert was convinced that the dullards of the entertainment industry didn’t understand quite how the world had moved on. etoy decided that from then on they would only release their music and other creations on the Internet – ‘a non-material platform, the virtual stage for the new travelling generation’, as they called it. For this new world of Internet stardom they coined a new slogan: ‘etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.’

The Internet and pop stars were not the only influences to be fuelling etoy’s dreams. ‘At the core of etoy are the computer and LSD,’ Herbert explains. LSD had been their favourite vice as adolescents; they all remember their first acid trip. Together they had gone to Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse, the home territory of the city’s financial gnomes, and watched hallucinations of blood running down the façades of the banks, which then metamorphosed into the red-and-white Swiss flag. ‘We took these common drug experiences back into reality. It glued us together as a group,’ says Peter. The experience of tripping together welded the bonds of their friendships closer and created a common understanding about their lives and work.

Nowadays the conjunction between computers and LSD seems surreal. Most computers have become simply the dull cogs of the global economy. But in the early 1990s this symbiosis of technology and narcotics did not seem at all strange; even the sixties drug guru Timothy Leary was promoting his latest passion: computers. Although etoy never met him, they came to know his friends, some of whom were to have a profound influence on the gang. In the pantheon of etoy influences Tim Leary is another angel.

In his days as a Harvard professor of psychology, Leary had advocated the benefit of hallucinatory drugs such as LSD to the Flower Power generation. Described by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s as the most dangerous man in America, he had escaped from a twenty-year jail sentence, fleeing first to Algeria and then to Switzerland, only returning to Beverly Hills in the 1980s.

From its outset, Leary was fascinated by the life-altering possibilities of the personal-computer revolution. One of his first endeavours was to create a computer program to analyse the human mind. By the early 1990s he was committed to pushing the computer as a social force, saying that, ‘The PC is the LSD of the nineties’ and reworking his famous drug slogan ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ into ‘Turn On, Tune In, Log on.’ He encouraged his audiences to connect to the Internet as a method of political empowerment, and advocated ‘digital power to the people’.

A regular performer at raves and technology conferences alike, Leary became a guru to a small and peculiar scene in the Bay Area of Northern California that centred around a magazine called Mondo 2000, the self-declared ‘User’s Guide to the New Edge’ which hit American news-stands in 1989 and was soon to become the bible of a new counterculture called cyberculture. The so-called cyberpunks drew their identity from an amalgam of science-fiction literature, the drug rebellion of the sixties and the computer culture of nearby Silicon Valley. By 1993 they had made it to the cover of Time magazine in an article that called cyberculture the ‘defining counterculture of the computer age’ and described it as ‘bubbling up from the underground, popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic HYPERTEXT’.

Mondo 2000’s contributors ranged across the spectrum, from writer William Burroughs to the anarchistic promoter of magic mushrooms Terence McKenna. Also involved were the Grateful Dead’s ex-lyricist and Wyoming farmer John Perry Barlow; monologist Spalding Gray; New Age dolphin researcher John Lilly; and Eric Gullichsen, who had helped develop virtual reality. At Mondo 2000, partying was integral to the cyclic editorial process: ideas for articles appeared at parties; parties happened as a result of articles. In this ‘far out’ environment, Mondo 2000 and Timothy Leary provided each other with a mutual fan club – Mondo declared Leary a ‘cyberdelic guru’ and ‘MVP (Most Valuable Philosopher) of the twentieth century’, while Leary saw the magazine as ‘a really remarkable institution’ for its ‘beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary, and the artistic’.

One idea that captured the collective imagination of the Mondo 2000 group more than any other – because it promised a kind of technology-assisted acid trip – was virtual reality: the simulation of a three-dimensional environment experienced through a computer. By the late 1980s the world’s press had become fascinated by the prospect of existence in another world – the broadsheets by the manipulation of molecules in another three-dimensional space; the tabloids by the prospect of virtual sex, absurdly called teledildonics.

‘Cyberspace’, the term used to describe this ‘other world’ created between computers, was coined by the novelist William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer. In this cult classic he described the new place as a ‘consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation’. Gibson’s dystopian future saw an alternative space, in which people would interact. This was ‘a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.’ Tim Leary loved the idea of cyberspace, believing that it was possible to create ‘electronic realities’ on the other side of the computer screen in which one could talk, dance, swim and float.

By this time Leary, in his seventies and increasingly fragile, became enraptured by thoughts of a non-corporeal future. He reckoned that ‘within ten years many of us will not have to “go” to work. We will get up in the morning, shower, dress in our cyberwear suits, and “beam” our brains to work … Tomorrow our brains will soar on the wings of electrons into the offices of friends in Tokyo, then beam at light speed to a restaurant in Paris for a flirtatious lunch, pay a quick, ten-minute visit to our folks in Seattle – all without physically leaving our living rooms.’

In the coming years, the influences of the acid-head guru and the strange magazine persisted. Their countercultural ideas were currency to the newly established Internet community; and, later, as this community was forced into conflict under the pressure of corporate incomers’ colonisation of cyberspace, it was Leary and Mondo’s philosophies that lent galvanising force to the battles of opposition.

By 1995, etoy had really taken to heart the idea of virtual reality. For the boys, cyberspace was a new and open territory that they were intent on squatting. As with their real-world activities of a few years before, they wanted to create a place in cyberspace that was an alternative cultural centre, as a means of bringing their radical, alternative lifestyle and ideas online.

However, their rudimentary Web site did not fulfil this ambition and their resources were not sufficient to turn it into a fully functioning virtual space. So, despite their rebellious sensibilities, they turned to government and private agencies for financial help. They were pioneers, and the grant givers did not understand them. One member of the Swiss Arts Council was wrong-footed by the unfamiliar ‘@’ sign on etoy’s business cards and asked what email addresses were; etoy soon realised that the funding bodies had no real idea what the Internet was – never mind the Web. One cultural bureaucrat even suggested to them that a CD-rom would be a more suitable project. This only made etoy all the more determined to prove themselves right.

To find a stage for their Web-based countercultural ideas, in April 1995 Herbert travelled to Linz in Austria in a bid to persuade the organisers of the prestigious arts festival Ars Electronica to hold an etoy event. Situated on the River Danube, with its tourist boats and cargo freighters, Linz had gained unwelcome notoriety as the place where Hitler attended school and was an unusual setting for such a forward-looking event. The festival was first held in the late 1970s, developed initially by the city council as a fringe programme to their annual festival celebrating the Victorian composer Anton Bruckner. The event soon flourished into a fully fledged festival of its own, exploring the relationship of art, technology and society and so becoming a draw for a stellar list of Big Thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the fathers of cyberpunk; Jean Baudrillard, France’s favourite post-modern philosopher; Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control and executive editor of the seminal magazine WIRED; Vilém Flusser, philosopher of communication, and his colleague, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek.

Each year, Ars Electronica has a different theme; and in 1995 it was ‘Welcome to the Wired World’. This was the first time that the festival celebrated the World Wide Web, and included in the schedule was a special prize category for innovative use of this new medium. Herbert hoped that etoy could organise a party there as a means of promoting themselves, but to his disappointment their project was outshone and undercut by some art students from Linz who had offered to organise a cheaper ‘Netnite’ party.

Even without an official role, etoy planned to use the festival as their stage. In preparation they brainstormed how best they could present themselves to the digital-arts world. They remained adamant that their countercultural ideas were best furthered not by a manifesto, a poem or a painting, but by a corporation. Herbert gave out the order that the whole crew must show up in Linz because, as he put it, ‘this is one of etoy’s markets’. The festival would be etoy’s first opportunity to launch their ‘corporation’ to the world of art and culture.

They had big dreams. As Franco remembers, ‘We were dreaming of a headquarters that was a skyscraper, all in glass with a big logo on top of it.’ The key to their venture was etoy’s ‘brand’. Hans borrowed a corporate-identity booklet from his father’s company; what they learned from this led to their decision to establish a rigorously defined set of rules concerning company presentation. Their first step was to design the etoy logo. It was agreed that the name would always appear only in lower case; they chose a typeface – Microstyle Bold Extended Oblique – with a precise stretch of 135 per cent; and then their corporate colour – orange – because it reminded them of warning signals.

One of the boys’ more remarkable moves was to jettison individual fashions in favour of a uniform corporate look. Throughout the Western world, people were ‘dressing down’ and wearing casuals – even Silicon Valley’s millionaires were increasingly jeans- and sneaker-clad – but Herbert and his gang were determined to follow a more time-honoured corporate aesthetic. Just as IBM had once been seen as an army of executives in identical blue jackets and pressed shirts, etoy would from now on adopt a consistent company style. They chose what would become their most notable icon: an orange bomber jacket with the etoy logo on the back. These were set off by black trousers, mirrored pilot sunglasses and little black attaché cases. The final touch was that they all shaved their heads. Spectators described them variously as resembling a group of astronauts, a security squad and a fascist street-gang.

etoy’s corporate identity was a striking break from normal modes of behaviour. It was as if they were forcing themselves into the most radical position with their look and their rigorous graphic style. They seemed to revel in – and criticise – the power of ‘brands’, precisely mirroring one of the era’s dominant themes.

Branding, in 1995, was in the middle of its magisterial rise to prominence. By the end of the nineties, Tom Peters – the preeminent management guru of the decade – would write, ‘It’s a new brand world.’ It was estimated that corporations were spending an annual $465 billion supporting the logos, tag lines and philosophies that gave ‘value’ to their products. Many of the world’s leading corporations divested themselves of responsibility for producing anything at all, instead positioning themselves at the centre of networks of independent contractors and establishing their role simply as ‘managers’ of the all-encompassing world-view of their various brands. As Naomi Klein would write in No Logo, ‘Overnight, “brands, not products!” became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as “meaning brokers” instead of product producers.’

The etoy brand’s ‘meaning’ was the group’s antagonistic sensibility itself, standing against the banality of the ordinary, the dullness of life. They would steal the clothes of corporations – the branding, the rhetoric and the aesthetic – to create an absurdist critique of corporate culture. Theirs was a satire of the overbearing power of corporations, and yet they simultaneously paid a kind of twisted homage to the heroic brands that had dominated their youth. They were not afraid of playing both ends against the middle, paradoxically celebrating and lampooning corporate life in demonstration of their cynicism. Even their intentions became couched in the language of enterprise, as Herbert remembers, ‘We wanted to enter a market, the market of entertainment, art and culture. It’s a limited market, so we had to fight for recognition and promote etoy internationally … We played it hard.’

Beyond the thin epidermis of branding, the corporate ideal was to have a profound effect on how the gang behaved. Again like IBM, which in the 1950s had a corporate ideology that extended to a song book containing such lyrics as ‘All Hail to the IBM’, the etoy members resolved to push their absolutist dogma to its limits and submit to the will of the corporation. The source of this will was not to be a CEO or a Board of Directors, but rather a computer. As if the boys had canonised their computer system, they vested in it a power beyond their control. ‘The system itself was at the centre,’ says Herbert. ‘The server [computer] was like our god, being superhuman and incomprehensible.’

The commandments that this computer-Moses brought down from the mountain were absurd. The most important rule was that etoy members should always put the company first, which meant being reachable at all hours of the day and night and dedicating most of their energy to the company’s success. The corporation also determined when members were allowed to go on holiday – and even when they were allowed to see their girlfriends.

The commandments in a sense codified the dominant work-ethic of the contemporary technology industry. After all, computer scientists and early hackers had for years worked eccentrically long hours – a tendency only exacerbated by the arrival of the Web, when everything was always online and always available. In the frenzied ethos of the day, each moment spent away from a terminal came to seem like a missed opportunity. By the time one came in to work, who knew, the world might have changed again, another future forged by someone who had not gone out for dinner.

etoy’s company rules also insisted that members keep the group’s inner workings secret from outsiders; any transgression of this was fiercely punished. It was an intensely claustrophobic adventure that Herbert remembers being like a journey into space. ‘We often used the metaphor of the spacemen. They can only concentrate on their work when they are isolated from the rest of the world. The spaceship is also a symbol for risk and loneliness, for setting off and leaving many things behind.’

Their ultimate sacrifice on the altar of company ‘professionalism’ was their decision to give up their names. It was at this point that they began to call themselves ‘agents’ and adopted new titles. Peter, the charming musician, had already taken a different name because he hated his own; he had chosen Goldstein when he became a radio DJ after the character in the novel 1984 whom Orwell described as ‘the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity’. Therefore when the others chose their new names the obvious choice for him was to stick to what he had and simply become agent.GOLDSTEIN. The new monikers would be capitalised as part of the group’s obsessive rules of corporate identity.

Hans searched for a name that would match his aspirations and chose to become agent.BRAINHARD. Herbert called himself agent.ZAI and for years afterwards would symbolically spell it for journalists, Zoo, America, Idiot. Alberto used Gramazio; Franco chose Esposto; Juri opted for Udatny and Thomas became Kubli. Henceforth they would only be known by these titles, except on occasions when the group swapped names to confuse journalists. Despite the boys’ real names being easily available on the Web, Zai still sweats with anger when journalists reveal his.

As time wore on, the boys’ intonation and vocabulary sounded increasingly similar; this, along with their orange jackets and skinheads and interchangeable names, ensured that it became nearly impossible for anyone to tell them apart. In some ways they were merging into a single character, played out by seven individuals, their own identities more and more difficult to distinguish. In uniformity, the etoy group found a salve for their explosive egos, because, as Zai explains, ‘It prevented members from putting their individual characters into the foreground. No one could stick out, and this guaranteed the group’s equilibrium; it solved several problems at once. That the members were interchangeable was good for the art aspect also.’

Submitting to the company was a painful process that most of the group did not enjoy, but they were prisoners of ambition and friendship. ‘It was a collective decision,’ Brainhard (formerly the blustering poet Hans) remembers. ‘It was, in a very cool way, radical, experimental and completely crazy.’ They all thought they were playing an ‘edge game’ pushing ideas about identity and technology to their limits in the hope of provoking a response both from the world’s staid institutions and from their peers, who they dreamed of as their fans. The result was a complicated intellectual construct, an absurd fantasy-world of branding that was a sort of amalgamation of a company, an artists’ club, and an absolutist sect.

They hoped also that this weird world might be able to make them a living. Like the designer of Diesel Jeans, Renzo Rosso, who piously claims, ‘We don’t sell a product, we sell a style of life’, etoy declares, ‘The notion of lifestyle is central to what we were searching for. We wanted to create our own lifestyle and sell it.’ More specifically, they wanted to sell what they called ‘Digital Lifestyle’, which would include their products, projected images and music for parties.

It was with this rigorous formation in place that etoy set forth to conquer Ars Electronica, determined to make their mark although still without an official role. The festival was opened in June 1995 by the Mayor of Linz and comprised, among other things, a collection of performances, including one by the New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson. There was also what the programme esoterically described as ‘an attempt to do a critical analysis of Wagner’s works on the basis of Bernard Shaw’s simultaneous reading of Wagner’s operas and Karl Marx’s Kapital.’

Heads turned as the seven orange-clad shaven-headed youths wandered the streets of Linz. ‘We staged ourselves like a boy-band, and we always drank too much,’ Zai recalls. But when they gatecrashed the gala party and tried to shock the celebrating crowd, they were received with only wry amusement from the openhearted liberals.

One of the festival events was a symposium to which a dozen speakers had been invited to share their visions of a wired future. As the programme stated, ‘no longer do we live in streets and houses alone, but also in cable channels, telegraph wires, email boxes, and global digital Net-worlds’. Zai and the gang were diligent attendees, while one of the major stars to appear was Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Another was John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist, now a pre-eminent defender of liberty on the Internet. In the five years prior to this Ars Electronica, he had established himself as a sort of roving ambassador, travelling the world promoting the Internet community. Some of this time had been spent as an advisor to US Vice President Al Gore and also to Newt Gingrich, yet in conflicts and court cases against the government he was often taking the side of hackers and community insiders.

In the auditorium at Ars Electronica, John Perry Barlow told the assembled mass – including the attentive etoy crew – how he had initially found his way on to the Internet, in the late 1980s. At the time he was a farmer, running a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and he had wanted to eavesdrop on a community of Grateful Dead fans – the Deadheads. Someone pointed him towards the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an early online service that had started in 1985 and was for the most part a collection of bulletin boards. Users could send a message to whichever board they found of particular interest, and in turn provoke responses from others in lively strings of discussion that would continue intermittently. These debates about politics, music, culture and technology were often thoughtful, erudite and long-running. As a result, the WELL was regarded for years to come as the prototypical model for all ‘online communities’.

Barlow told the audience at the festival of how he won his struggle with modems and cables to gain access to the WELL: ‘I found myself looking at the glowing yellow word “Login”, beyond which lay my future … I was delighted. I felt I had found the new locale of human community.’ Remarkably, for a community where people had no physical contact, he thought it much like his home in Pinedale, Wyoming, because its members ‘had a place [where] their hearts could remain as the companies they worked for shuffled their bodies around America. They could put down roots which could not be ripped out by forces of economic history. They had a collective stake.’

What had most intrigued Barlow was that this was a self-governing community, pioneering its own set of laws about member behaviour and applying its own sanctions against those who transgressed them. Consequently Barlow was one of the first to identify the Internet as being a place with real politics, where interest groups and individuals could struggle for power between themselves. To distinguish the Internet as an arena for social forces, power and politics, he decided to name it borrowing William Gibson’s word, cyberspace, and in so doing gave it political intent.

Almost as soon as he found cyberspace, Barlow became concerned that governments and corporations were trying to impose their will on ‘the desperadoes and mountain men and vigilantes’ of the digital Wild West. Thus in 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to defend freedom of speech online. His partner was Mitch Kapor, the man who founded Lotus Computers and who was by 1990 a bona fide member of Silicon Valley royalty. Together, Barlow and Kapor corralled a collection of their friends – some of them the founders of Sun Microsystems and Apple Computers – to sit on the board and make hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of donations. The EFF began by defending kids who were victims of an FBI crackdown on computer crime, and went on to fight attempts by the US government to impose censorship on the Internet.

With the rhetoric he used and the images he painted, Barlow positioned himself as a kind of cowboy survivalist, armed and ready to defend his cyberspace wilderness from the approaching posse of Federal forces. Barlow’s most grandiose and historic political stand came when he proclaimed himself as the Thomas Jefferson of the new world. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he wrote ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, in which he demanded that governments back off.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

The declaration, which runs to more than a thousand words, was posted on hundreds of Web sites and was a clarion call to regulators, lawyers and courts to leave the Internet community alone. As the Internet became more commercial and the space more contested, various new conflicts erupted between governments and the community and between individuals and corporations. In these it was often the spirit of this declaration – its wilful libertarianism and plea for independence from the laws and courts of the corporeal world – that was invoked.

When etoy heard John Perry Barlow talking at Ars Electronica, they were struck most of all by his question about cyberspace, ‘Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality itself?’ Barlow drenched his answer in the utopianism of the euphoric believers in the Californian technological dream. The new world that he was describing was not just going to be a replacement for the real one; it could, he hoped, be an improvement on it, more humanistic and wonderful. ‘When we are all together in cyberspace then we will see what the human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there … Despite its current (and, perhaps, in some areas permanent) insufficiencies, we should go to cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind that counts.’