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back-to-the-land hippie bible, the Whole Earth Catalogue (whose prescient motto was "access to tools"). Other prominent cyberdelic spokespeople, such as the Mondo 2000 founders Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius; Howard Rheingold, the author of books on virtual reality and on-line communities; John Perry Barlow, an advocate of computer users' rights; and the virtual reality innovators Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier, are steeped in the Northern California counterculture of the sixties.
    Rooted in Northern California and rallied around the Berkeley-based quarterly Mondo 2000, the cyberdelic phenomenon encompasses a cluster of subcultures, among them Deadhead computer hackers, "ravers" (habitues of all-night electronic dance parties known as "raves"), techno-pagans, and New Age technophiles.
    Cyberdelia reconciles the transcendentalist impulses of sixties counterculture with the infomania of the nineties. As well, it nods in passing to the seventies, from which it borrows the millenarian mysticism of the New Age and the apolitical self-absorption of the human potential movement. As the cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling points out.

    Today, for a surprising number of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between bohemian and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog w^ith a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours. ^
    In his cyber-hippie travelogue, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyper-space, Douglas RushkofF uses the "trippy fractal simulations" Sterling mentions-intricate, involuted abstractions generated by computers using complex mathematical formulae-as a root metaphor.^ To Rushkoff, the fractal is emblematic of the cyberdelic subcultures he collectively calls Cyberia (a coinage borrowed from the Autodesk company's Cyberia Project, a virtual reality initiative). It serves as a cyber-hippie yin-yang symbol, signifying the union of the "tw^o cultures"-the scientific and the nonscientific-into which society has been split by the scientific advances of the twentieth century, to use the scientist and essayist C. P. Snow's famous phrase.
    In cyberdelia, the values, attitudes, and street styles of the Haight-Ashbury/Berkeley counterculture intersect with the technological innovations and esoteric traditions of Silicon Valley. The cartoon opposites of disheveled, dope-smoking "head" and buttoned-down engineering student, so irreconcilable in the sixties, come together in Sterling's hippie techno-phile and RushkofFs cyberians. Increasingly, the media image of the Gen Xers who predominate in high-tech subcultures is that of the cyber-hippie or, in England, the "zippie" ("Zen-inspired pagan professional"). Toby Young, the associate editor of England's Evolution magazine, defines zippies as "a combination of sixties flower children and nineties techno-people."
    Like his or her sixties predecessor, the archetypal cyber-hippie featured in Sunday supplement articles is largely a media fiction, synthesized from scattered sightings. He or she sports jewelry fashioned from computer parts by San Francisco's Famous Melissa and dresses in "cyberdelic softwear" from the San Francisco designer Ameba-op-arty T-shirts

    printed with squirming sperm, leggings adorned with scutthng spiders, belled jester caps popular at raves. He or she meditates on cyberdelic mandalas like the New Electric Acid Experience video advertised in Inner Technologies, a mail-order catalogue of "tools for the expansion of consciousness." "Recreate the Summer of Love with this '90s version of a '60s light show," the blurb entreats.
    There's something for everyone here: soft swatches of moving color, hypnotic, pulsating mandalas, psychedelicized fractals, surreal film imagery,