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Is Red Hat becoming Linux's Microsoft?
Hardly. But as the lovey-dovey Linux business matures, elbows are beginning to fly.
By Andrew Leonard
[07/14/99]

Silicon Follies
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[07/14/99]

They got game
Talented players make good money selling characters on eBay. Are they denigrating gaming -- or turning it into a profession?
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[07/13/99]

The overtime stigma
Plenty of tech workers could rightfully demand fatter paychecks, but fear that asking for overtime could be a costly faux pas.
By Alicia Neumann
[07/12/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 34: Candy's Comdex freakout
By Thomas Scoville
[07/10/99]

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Margaret Wertheim's "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace" is a timely, often brilliant investigation into whether these folks are on to something or they've just gone barking mad. It's also, ultimately, an ambiguous sort of effort that succeeds best as a book about the history of our conceptions of physical space, while raising more questions than it answers about spirituality and the Internet. It's a good first book on the topic; there's yet room for another.

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet By Margaret Wertheim W.W. Norton & Company 336 pages Click here to check out the latest Technology books at BARNES & NOBLE

Wertheim's book is about virtual reality as a return to the medieval concept of non-physical space (like the "virtual" realms of heaven and hell), and about the possibility of interpreting computer technology in traditionally religious terms. But by failing to deliver a conclusion on the topic, Wertheim invites widespread disagreement about the book's message.

Even its blurbists can't agree on what line of thinking she advocates. On the back jacket alone, you have John Horgan, author of "The End of Science," praising Wertheim for discerning "profound analogies between cyberspace, Dante's 'Paradiso,' and Einsteinian physics" -- while just underneath, skeptic David Noble ("The Religion of Technology") chuckles that Wertheim's insightful analysis "cuts through all the gibberish about the supposed transcendent potential of cyberspace." But which is it?

Is Wertheim a sort of low-key Net-prophet, or a debunker?

Actually, she's both. "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace" is a book for everyone: Wired-type futurists can use their copies to whop skeptics over the head; skeptics can bonk the optimistic futurists with theirs. That's because Wertheim manages to give credence to some fantastical interpretations of cyberspace early in the book (like the notion of disembodied beings cavorting in the virtual world), but sharpens her thinking later on.

Still, everyone gets a riveting account of the evolution of the idea of space (from the Greeks through the Renaissance, and up to the current 10- or 11-dimensional theories of space-time), and a revealing survey of the history of physics -- but nobody has to close the back cover offended. In the final analysis, Wertheim's opinion is that cyberspace raises interesting issues of identity and community, but that she "cannot imagine a worse fate than being downloaded into immortality in cyberspace."

Next page | Dante as a medieval hacker