Cyberspace, the future, who better to consult than the younger generation, the ones who have to recreate the future, rather than foresee it, as St. Exupery noted. They are the ones who have to deal with issues like freedom, privacy and the erosion of cultural and intellectual diversity in a world dominated by what internet has spawned, not a brave, but a digitized, homogenizing behemoth of a virtual world.
The generation that has facilitated and created this repository of the public and increasingly also private data that now creeps back into our lives and makes us ever more dependent on externalized information, now needs to listen to those who are now the ‘netizens’, the citizens of this monster machine.
It is far too early to predict what cyberspace will bring in the future and what the effect of all this new technology will be on things like ethics, health and consciousness, but it does make sense to survey and explore what is going on, hence the title of this book. Recon, for reconnaissance is a military term for gathering information, and that is what this project was all about.
This book is the result of a month-long Summer Campus project at Myster, a villa and spiritual center near Venlo on the Dutch-German border.