Early internet culture imagined cyberspace as a utopian realm transcending bodily and everyday limits.

Evidence

Cyberdelic subculture was a mishmash of electronic music, “neopaganism,” ecstasy and LSD, “smart drugs,” online communities, computer hacking, and freewheeling theories about universal consciousness linked together by fractals and memetic theory. It advocated a do-it-yourself approach to altering consciousness and reality, using immersion in “cyberspace” to achieve psychedelic bliss. … Leary famously stated, “The PC is the LSD of the 1990s.” Radical theorists surmised that the internet would allow participants to tap into a cyber-consciousness, creating a post-human body that was stronger, better, and more evolved than the meat-space self. While these theories ran the gamut from William Gibson– esque extremism to the more practical “virtual homesteading” accounts of Howard Rheingold, they shared an ideal of the internet as a utopian space where people could overcome the difficulties of everyday life. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to cyberutopianism critiques (Barbrook & Cameron ‘California Ideology’) and to the aspirational self-transformation later sold through personal branding. — connects to: Early internet use felt like entering a separate fantasy world under a made-up name — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 984; Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability; Early techno-utopians dismissed structural inequality as a non-issue — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 121 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Early internet use felt like entering a separate fantasy world under a made-up name #exemplifies (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 984
• Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability #complicates (0.80)
• Early techno-utopians dismissed structural inequality as a non-issue #qualifies (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 121