                               Voices In My Head
                             MindVox: The Overture

          Copyright (c) 1992, by Patrick Karel Kroupa (Lord Digital)
                              All Rights Reserved

       "...just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners; saints"
                      --The Rolling Stones (Jane's Addiction cover(*1))


       Prelude
       -------

            This article has its inception in several dozen people  ask-
       ing the same questions with fairly consistent regularity.  Namely
       those of, "where'd you guys go?", "what's the deal with MindVox?"
       and "what have you been doing for the last five years anyway?"

            Overture does a decent job of tying up all of the above  and
       then some, while providing a general overview about who we are at
       Phantom Access and what we're in the process of doing with  Mind-
       Vox.   Sections  of  this article self-plagiarize heavily from my
       own writings in ENTROPY CALLING, which will be in a form suitable
       for  publication sometime around the first quarter of 1993 at the
       rate things are going right now.  My apologies for the perpetual-
       ly  blown  deadlines  regarding  this  work, but something always
       manages to pop up that requires my full attention, in  this  case
       MindVox itself.

            I've done what I could to make everything understandable  by
       even  those  who  have no prior knowledge of who we are or what's
       going on, hopefully I have  at  least  partially  succeeded.   If
       something  is  briefly  touched upon and you don't understand its
       significance, then it  probably  means  something  to  a  smaller
       cross-section of people and you can safely ignore it.

            While this is in many respects a personal account of my  own
       journey  through  Cyberspace  and  what  it has meant to me and a
       handful of my friends, on a larger scale the underlying theme and
       basic  premise  of  how  the  electronic  universe  began and has
       evolved is reflective of the experiences of countless people  who
       have  been traversing the endless pathways of possibility with me
       for most of their lives.


       First Light
       -----------

       A long time ago, in a thoughtspace far away, an event that  would
       forevermore alter the shape of human interaction took place . . .

       But we're not here to talk about that, instead we're  gonna  dis-
       cuss  computers  and how a couple of guys named Ward Christianson
       and Randy Seuss wrote a program that would allow them to  be  set
       up  as  a  kind of store-and-forward messaging system designed to
       allow their circle of friends to interact with one another by us-
       ing  these  things  called  modems . . . and how this event would
       prove to be the first truly accessible step  into  the  uncharted
       territory of what was to become Cyberspace.

       From this empowering turning point in  the  late  seventies,  the
       ideas,  dreams and fantasies that would transmute and amplify hu-
       man potentials and evolutionary possibilities, broke  loose  from
       the  shackles that primitive technology had imposed upon them and
       began to spin the electronic universe into existence.

       Still in the very early stages of its development, Cyberspace, or
       the  "modem  world" as it is sometimes called, has until very re-
       cently remained a largely untapped forum unique within the histo-
       ry  of our world.  It is a rapidly shifting microcosm that in the
       early part of the 1990's seems poised to engulf the reality  from
       which  it  was born, weaving together the threads of tens of mil-
       lions of diverse dreams, into one mercurial tapestry that  encom-
       passes the collective consciousness of humanity and frees it from
       all constraints.

       The non-space of Cyberspace is a place where global changes  that
       would  take years or even centuries outside of the online domain,
       can occur in weeks or months.  It is a place  where  participants
       from  all  over  the  world share a unique common-ground based on
       nothing less nor more, than a belief in the same vision of possi-
       bility.   It is a land where people who scoff at "The Elements of
       Style" frequently write paragraphs, pages, and even novels,  full
       of big words, huge concepts, and absolutely gargantuan amounts of
       emoting -- while actually saying nothing tangible.  In  a  little
       over a decade, the online microcosm has managed to experience the
       equivalent of hundreds of years of evolution.  Not to mention the
       creation of hundreds of words which have found their way into the
       online lexicon despite the fact that nobody is  quite  sure  what
       they mean in the first place.

       During this turbulent period of rapid change the half-dozen  sys-
       tems  of 1978, had grown to 45 or 50 electronic villages by 1980.
       These were the original outposts of Cyberspace, running on hacked
       together  systems, hooked into industrial 8" drives, and network-
       ing at the blinding speed of  110  baud.   To  be  honest,  there
       wasn't  really  a whole lot of high level philosophizing going on
       regarding the brave new world that had dawned.  Actually, most of
       the  conversation  tended  to focus on things along the lines of,
       "How do you hook an 8" drive onto an Apple ][?"  and  "ANY  idiot
       can  see  that  setting  the  7th bit high on the xdef reg is the
       WRONG thing to do, OF COURSE it'll make the  program  crash,  are
       you  stupid  or  something?"  It was a technological triumph, but
       one that was for the most part, still lacking  many  of  the  key
       participants that would shape the technology into designer reali-
       ties.

       As the seventies drew to a close, the  sterility  and  bare-bones
       functionality that had predominated, began to make way for places
       created by people who truly  wanted  something  unique  and  dif-
       ferent.   The mere existence of the technology was no longer that
       exciting, and as a greater number of people gained access to  the
       hardware  needed to jack in, the first electronic tribes gathered
       and began erecting monuments to their own ingenuity.

       By the time the eighties were upon us,  the  handful  of  systems
       that  had  thrived  during the latter half of the previous decade
       had multiplied rapidly, giving birth to new systems on an  almost
       daily  basis, and by 1982 there were close to a thousand outposts
       on the frontier.  Hardware prices were  falling,  1200bps  modems
       were  actually within the reach of many people who wanted to pur-
       chase them, and the online domain was beginning to attract a wide
       variety of participants from outside the technocratic elite.

       A second pivotal point came during the summer of  1983  when  the
       movie  WARGAMES  was  released.   Within several months the modem
       world literally doubled in size.  An  entire  new  generation  of
       people  were  about to take the plunge into electronic wonderland
       and set off an explosive growth rate that has  not  slowed  since
       then.  It was a major and irreversible nexus point that would be-
       gin the abrupt transition from taking Cyberspace from  the  realm
       of underground sub-culture to the forefront of mainstream media.

       In retrospect the early eighties were the "golden age" of  Cyber-
       space.  There truly was a new frontier just over the horizon, and
       we were standing at the edge.  This period in the history of  the
       electronic universe was unruly and chaotic, the first settlers on
       the frontier wouldn't arrive for another decade or  so,  and  the
       only  people  here  were a small collection of explorers eager to
       embark on the next adventure.

       Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any-
       thing,  is  the  trail that led up to it.  You are there for some
       reason, or usually a very complex series of  reasons,  that  have
       shaped  your  life up until that point in time, and caused you to
       become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa-
       tion  you  are  locked into in the consensual reality that we all
       physically inhabit at present.  In other words, the "real  world"
       isn't making you happy, and you want outta there.

       Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits,  dropouts,  acidheads,
       phreaks,  hackers,  hippies, scientists, students, guys who could
       say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight  face  and  really
       mean  it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many
       of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires
       and kingdoms of Cyberspace.

       As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a  lot  of
       the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this
       new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain  and  dissatis-
       faction.  When I first became an active participant in this elec-
       tronic nervous system that was just beginning to  experience  its
       awakening;  I  was  a little over ten years old.  My early under-
       standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a  handful  of
       people  whose  skills  I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose
       lives I felt great pity and sadness for.

       There were of course exceptions, people who were so high  on  the
       potential  of  this  technology  and  the completely new level of
       reality it could bring, that nothing more than a  love  of  their
       creation drove them onwards.  But these people were pretty uncom-
       mon, most of the pioneers were guys who were simply unhappy . . .
       or to be more exact, so unhappy that they had given up on finding
       joy in the "real world"  and  were  constructing  a  rocket  ship
       called Cyberspace to get them out of here as fast as possible.

       "Peace, love and happiness" was not  exactly  the  driving  force
       behind the rise of the electronic domains.  A more realistic ral-
       lying cry was one of "Gee this technology is neat, and I'm  gonna
       use it to make a whole new world where I can be happy and none of
       you can ever bother me again.  You'll all be sorry, just wait and
       see!"   They  were  building  the  cult of high technology in the
       hopes that it would somehow save them from whatever they  thought
       had prevented them from attaining happiness anywhere else.

       Sadly enough "they" were not THOSE PEOPLE, "they" had become "us"
       and  while the first steps into this place had been made possible
       by the phone phreaks and misfits of yesterday, the  online  world
       was exploding and changing at an incredible velocity, the rest of
       society was about to take notice in a big way, and a  handful  of
       disenfranchised  teenagers  had seized the reigns and were in the
       early stages of walking into the spotlight and taking the  status
       quo for a big ride . . .


       The Fall
       --------

       Everything really was this big beautiful game, and here  we  were
       with an overview of the whole jigsaw puzzle, and the sudden power
       to do anything we wanted to do with it.  For the  first  time  in
       recent  history you COULD reach out and change reality, you could
       DO STUFF that effected EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, and you were sud-
       denly  living  this  life  that was like something out of a comic
       book or adventure story.  In a place filled  with  magical  lands
       and  fantastic  people  who you had only read about, and suddenly
       you WERE actually talking to Timothy Leary,  or  Steven  Wozniak,
       and some guy who was just on the cover of a magazine was speaking
       with you and thought that YOU were cool,  and  then  finally  you
       were  IN  the  magazines  and  at the forefront of an entire sub-
       culture that was being  rapidly  assimilated  into  the  cultural
       mythos.

       It was a VERY interesting time and place in which to grow up.

       Of course the problem is a lot of us didn't grow up.  At  a  cer-
       tain  point in time having power that can have real and immediate
       effects upon all society, can do very strange things to your per-
       spective of the world.  Instead of learning to deal with the nor-
       mal barriers that most teenagers in western  culture  find  them-
       selves  faced  with, you discover that you can blow right through
       all of them without even slowing down.  In this way you miss much
       of the growth and acclimation that people go through during their
       teenage years.  Which is where a lot of old friends  parted  ways
       with  reality  and  ceased to be explorers, becoming caught up in
       the real world implications of the power that was  now  at  their
       disposal.   In  effect,  they  lost sight of the underlying theme
       that all our actions had been based upon, that of exploration and
       pushing  the  boundaries,  and  merely  focused on the short-term
       end-result of what their abilities could bring them;  in the pro-
       cess  becoming  the criminals that the Secret Service and FBI had
       said we all were.

       What had begun with the best intentions, as the  ultimate  exten-
       sion  of  human  curiosity, had devolved into a cultural movement
       that had very little to do with the ideals that had inspired  it.
       The term "hacker" had become synonymous with "criminal", and tak-
       ing a look around at the state of the underground, it  looked  as
       if  much  of  it  had  in  fact  degenerated  into  crime cartels
       comprised of angry teens who  had  little  understanding  of  the
       underlying  mechanisms  they were employing to play with reality.
       It was no longer the exhilaration of knowing that you could actu-
       ally  reach  out  and touch a satellite . . . it had come down to
       the negative power trip of fucking with something for the sake of
       pissing  people  off or just showing the world how much power you
       really have at your disposal if you ever decided to throw a  tan-
       trum.

       By 1988 what had replaced our outlook, was a  mindset  where  the
       new  generation saw two things:  one of them was the potential to
       take advantage of holes in the system for personal  gain.   There
       was  no  longer any quest for knowledge, desire to learn, or need
       to push the boundaries of what was possible for the sake  of  ex-
       ploration.   Instead  there were a lot of people who couldn't get
       past making free phone calls, stealing things, and causing  trou-
       ble  by  following  an already well-established pattern of action
       and reaction.

       The second -- and perhaps biggest -- motivating factor had become
       the   desire   for  personal  attention  in  the  form  of  self-
       aggrandizement: the ultimate hack had become  the  media  machine
       itself.  What was originally a by-product of our experiences, had
       become a goal in and of itself.  And here is where things  became
       REALLY twisted.

       The media in the latter half of the twentieth century has  become
       a very strange distortion of reality instead of the reflection it
       was intended to be.  Since this is not an essay on the  evils  of
       manipulation  through  the use of media, I will stick with a very
       simple outline of how events occur in the real world.

       A reporter, journalist, writer -- SOME PERSON who has  their  own
       desires and ambitions, wants to do an exciting story on something
       that will garner him or her  a  lot  of  attention  and  acclaim.
       Really  they  are operating from a point of view that has much in
       common with the "hacker's," which is the mindset  of  "I'm  gonna
       get  mine."  So this journalist looks around at the headlines and
       realizes that there is a mounting wave  of  hysteria  surrounding
       viruses  and  hackers  and  invasion  of  privacy  and . . . gee,
       wouldn't it be a nice career move to do a  story  that  will  mix
       their  name  into whatever the hot topic of the next five minutes
       happens to be.

       If the journalist is attached to any  even  marginally  important
       publication,  they  will  then  get  their  pick  from one of the
       current four or five "names" doing  the  rounds.   On  the  other
       hand,  if  the  journalist  is just starting out and connected to
       something much smaller, then the chances  are  they  will  simply
       show up at some user's group meeting, find the nearest thing they
       can to a "computer nerd," do an interview, and then write  it  up
       expressing  whatever  the  current  publicly-sanctioned viewpoint
       happens to be (the usual slant has become: hackers are  evil  and
       can look at your credit rating, fear them).

       I have been interviewed on many  occasions  and  I  know  roughly
       twenty  people  who  have  done  the interviews that comprise the
       basis of about 90% of all media that exists in  relation  to  the
       underground;  be it in newspaper, periodical, television segment,
       or book format.  WITH *VERY*  FEW  EXCEPTIONS,  there  have  been
       countless  solicitations  to perform illegal acts in the presence
       of journalists, these solicitations move all the way  into  coer-
       cion  in some cases.  There are reports containing sentences that
       were never spoken, quotes taken out of context, information  that
       was  invented  .  .  . there's simply no end to it.  The reporter
       profits first by stroking the hacker's ego  and  giving  him  the
       spotlight that he thinks he wants so badly, and then continues to
       profit as the hacker rides a bigger and bigger wave of  publicity
       that  in  every case leads to a very unhappy ending if the hacker
       in question doesn't have the foresight to get off the ride before
       it derails.

       In any case, whatever happens, the reporter  always  wins.   When
       the  hacker's  ride reaches its date with fate, the journalist in
       question can now write the closing chapter in the  hacker's  saga
       and  tell  the  public how this nefarious evil-doer is being pun-
       ished by the long arm of justice.  This is  followed  up  by  the
       journalist  taking  on  the "official" mantle of "hacker expert,"
       doing the lecture circuit, perhaps writing a book, and then going
       out and finding a new horse to beat to death.

       Obviously nothing can ever be this black and white, there must be
       a need for both parties to play their roles.  The reporter is not
       THE EVIL BAD MAN who has corrupted the INNOCENT  ANGELIC  HACKER,
       nor  does this scenario apply to all journalists equally, off the
       top of my head; Bruce Sterling, John Markoff, and Julian  Dibbell
       come to mind as extremely ethical exceptions to the norm.

       Usually the reporter who isn't quite so ethical is just  somebody
       who  is presented with a situation that can easily be twisted and
       misused if the desire for fame and fortune takes precedence  over
       everything  else.   The  reporter  by  the very nature of his job
       tends to be quite "slick" and worldly-wise, whereas the hacker in
       question  is  usually highly knowledgeable about computer systems
       while managing to retain an oblivious naivety about the  workings
       of  human  beings  in that elusive place called "the real world."
       This sets the stage for what transpires.

       And you see a lot of people who used  to  be  your  friends,  get
       ground  up  in  this  endless cycle as it repeats itself over and
       over again until one day you wake up and  come  to  realize  that
       you're  seventeen  or  eighteen going on 90.  You understand that
       everything in the whole world is comprised of bits and pieces  of
       lies  and  half-truths, everyone is inherently corrupt, including
       you; a lot of kids who used to be your friends are now all  grown
       up  with  no  place  to  go and getting busted for such things as
       fraud and grand larceny; and you have  utterly  lost  touch  with
       anything  even remotely "real."  And yet, you're still a teenager
       and have another 70 or 80 years  left  to  hang  around  on  this
       planet.

       This is right around the time that you're back in the media, only
       this  trip  around you're at the receiving end of law enforcement
       who have been prodded into a state of near-hysteria by the  dawn-
       ing  realization  that  a  bunch of kids really can dismantle the
       building  blocks  of  the  infrastructure  that  makes  most   of
       present-day  society  possible.  Naturally enough they're scared,
       and they're in the process of doing what  people  have  done  for
       ages when they are afraid: going on a witch-hunt.  Guess who gets
       to play witch...

       So one day you find yourself wondering why you should bother buy-
       ing  another  computer  system  and trying to figure out what the
       point of it all was anyway; to glimpse  the  limitless  potential
       and  then  fall  back  and  only  see your own flaws amplified to
       cartoon-like proportions.

       The 1980's were a time that saw the birth and death of the  first
       dynasties  of  Cyberspace.   Travelling  through  the  electronic
       landscape of this period in time, was like traversing  this  sur-
       real  range  of mountains, where amongst the sheer outcropping of
       rock, lush valleys, and snow-capped peaks, a collection of rather
       obsessive  dreamers  had built some of the most beautiful castles
       that were ever created and opened their doors to  a  populace  of
       pioneers.   It was absolutely transporting and timeless . . . and
       unfortunately -- in the short term -- doomed.

       This has been an abbreviated summary of the atmosphere and events
       that  started  a  kind  of mass exodus out of the modem world for
       about twenty of us.  We had spent our  entire  childhoods  jacked
       into  this alternate electronic universe, locked into playing our
       overly-developed personas, and almost no time figuring out who we
       were  and  what  we  wanted  out of life beyond "further, better,
       more."  This is nothing new or unique in and of  itself,  it  was
       however  something  that gained a very tangible and immediate im-
       portance to many of us when we found  that  the  thoughtspace  in
       which we had lived a large portion of our lives had disintegrated
       and the people we had  known  and  called  friends,  had  largely
       disappeared and been replaced by every negative quality they pos-
       sessed.

       A lot of us dumped the remnants of this reality into a  stack  of
       boxes  and  took off for parts unknown.  Whether college, work, a
       new circle of friends that didn't know who  you  were  in  Cyber-
       space, or even know what Cyberspace was; just about anywhere were
       we could start over and try to regain what had somehow been lost.


       Transformation
       --------------

                     "Ya live your life like it's a coma,
                      so won't you tell me why we'd wanna?
                         With all the reasons you give,
                          it's kinda hard to believe;
                      But who am I to tell you I've seen,
                        any reason why you should stay;
                Maybe we'd be better off without you anyway..."
                                             --Guns N Roses(*2)

       After coming to the realization that visiting The Tunnel for  the
       fourteenth  time  in  three weeks was not going to change my life
       for the better, and having no idea what I wanted to do  with  my-
       self,  I  dropped it all and got on a plane for the middle of no-
       where New Mexico.  Where I proceeded  to  cycle  through  all  my
       negative  tendencies  at  an  accelerated  pace,   first becoming
       utterly obsessed with bodybuilding, to the point of five  hour  a
       day  workouts,  insane  diets,  steroids,  and a silly-putty like
       transformation of myself to 6'2" 215 pounds and 6% bodyfat.

       This was good for about ten months, before I found myself in  the
       same mindset I had thought I could escape.  Looking in the mirror
       and seeing a parody of who I used to be, wondering  where  to  go
       from  there.  The answer was obviously to buy a Porsche and begin
       re-stocking my wardrobe with everything by  Armani  and  Versace,
       yes  I  had it now, this WAS the right answer, I only had to look
       around at all the people I knew doing just this to see that . . .
       well,  actually  they  were  all  pretty miserable, but again, it
       lasted for about nine or ten months.

       Around this time I realized that aside from the fact that I was a
       pretty  fucked  up person who probably needed a lot of therapy --
       which had never quite worked out the right  way  when  I  had  it
       thrust  upon  me  as a teenager -- I had become completely out of
       touch with my feelings.  Not out of  touch  that  I  didn't  have
       them,  I  had  over a thousand pages of them sprayed across mega-
       bytes of disks where I wrote out all the things inside of  myself
       driving  me crazy;  but out of touch in the sense that when I be-
       gan taking things apart and  analyzing  reality,  I  had  stopped
       listening  to  anything  I  felt inside and just tuned in to what
       seemed logical.

       The problem being that the more you try to act out of logic,  the
       more you find yourself applying logic to utterly emotional issues
       in an completely crazed and  self-destructive  way.   When  logic
       should  be  asking: "Why do I want to weigh 215 pounds of muscle?
       What the hell am I doing?" it suddenly finds itself in the  posi-
       tion  of  contemplating "Ok, so if I want to gain 5 pounds in the
       next 2 weeks, how many CC's of Deca do I mix with X mg.  of  Ana-
       var,  with what ratio of carbs/fat and what is the minimum PER of
       the protein I am going to consume in order to remain in an  anti-
       catabolic state?"

       Welcome to real-life Alice in Wonderland, taking  place  in  your
       head.

       At the age of twenty-one I had managed to attain a place where  I
       possessed everything that I ever thought I wanted.  Life is funny
       that way, you really do get whatever you desire.   Endless  hours
       spent  reading  thousands  of books; the mix and match regimen of
       combinations of new nootropics and longevity agents; and the  fi-
       nal  combination  of steroids and obsessive workouts had resulted
       in my achievement of the goal I had subconsciously  been  working
       towards  for  most  of my life.  I had succeeded in my efforts to
       become absolutely untouchable by anyone or anything.

       When you are no longer in the middle of a situation and have  the
       comfort of hindsight it's very simple to deduce what the underly-
       ing problems behind anything happen to be, and why you are acting
       in a way that is physically, mentally and spiritually destructive
       to yourself.  While there is nothing inherently  wrong  with  any
       action  I  might have taken, it all comes back to the question of
       why are you doing something?  And looking back upon  my  life,  I
       had actually lived very little of it in an attempt to make myself
       happy.  Almost everything had been some sort of reaction to those
       around me, and how I felt I had to respond to them.

       Despite my intellectual understanding of  how  brief  moments  of
       stimulus-response  can  shape  a person's existence, like so many
       endlessly-referenced frames  of  film  forever  etched  in  their
       brain.   Long-gone  fragments  of  time that refuse to relinquish
       their hold on the present, telling people who they  are,  setting
       their limitations, and defining the boundaries of what they allow
       their lives to mean.  In truth I had never managed to  apply  any
       of  this knowledge to myself and had lived most of my life in ac-
       cordance with the patterns of self-destructive  programming  per-
       petually repeating a loop in my head.

       From childhood onwards I have been through  a  seemingly  endless
       variety of extremes in my life; moving from levels of comfortable
       opulence, to near-poverty and back again, more times than I  care
       to  count.   What  I  had  learned  from this was that being poor
       wasn't that much fun, and could really suck, therefore logic dic-
       tates  that  I must always have a lot of money and do whatever it
       takes to get it.  In fact I'm going to be so unconcerned with mo-
       ney  that  I will start to feel anxious if I'm not wearing a $300
       dollar haircut and a $400 dollar shirt.  I have  felt  controlled
       by  situations  beyond my reach in the past, therefore I am going
       to learn as much as I can about everything, so that  nobody  will
       ever  be  able  to  fuck  with  my head and attempt to control me
       through misrepresentation of the  truth.   I  have  been  out-of-
       control  with  various  addictions and done such stupid things to
       myself that through combinations of downers and alcohol I have at
       one  point  weighed  over 300 pounds; therefore I will understand
       every fucking piece of biochemistry that is known about the human
       body,  I  will  do  whatever it takes to look into the mirror and
       gain my own approval even if it means working out with such  fre-
       quency that a pleasant sport becomes a daily torture session that
       leaves me nauseous and physically incapable of performing  simple
       movements  because  everything  hurts  all the time.  I will look
       like someone has spray-painted skin onto a statue no  matter  how
       difficult  it  is to maintain this state constantly, I will force
       myself to eat 6,000 calories of protein and 400 calories of  car-
       bohydrate,  and  if I can no longer think or move and my ultimate
       fantasy has become sleeping 18 hours a day, then that's what caf-
       feine and amphetamines are for.  I live in hell therefore I shall
       use drugs to escape my hell by taking week-long vacations on opi-
       ates,  but  I will never be controlled by anything, so on the 8th
       day I will walk away from heaven and live  through  a  couple  of
       days  of  pain  that  hurt  a little bit more than the rest of my
       life, but I will never be some fucking junkie, because I not only
       can  do  anything,  I  WILL  do  it,  and I just dare the fucking
       universe to try and prove otherwise, because I can quit anything,
       I  can  conquer  anything, I can do anything to prove anything to
       anyone and you can't stop me, because the entire world is full of
       weak,  soft and stupid motherfuckers who talk much and do little;
       praise George Bernard Shaw and pass the Nietzsche.

       Coming down off the adrenalin and testosterone rush the  memories
       I  used  to write that paragraph with have triggered, I'd like to
       take this moment to borrow a  quote  from  one  of  the  greatest
       poet-philosophers of our time: "Happy happy! Joy joy!"

       After endless repetitions of this cycle I had finally  reached  a
       state  in  which  my  internal  programming ceased to function --
       there was simply nothing left I could  apply  it  to.   Over  the
       years  I  had  overcome most of my psychological barriers through
       direct mental or physical actions, that  had  brought  with  them
       physical  rewards  that I was utterly incapable of applying to my
       life at that time.  Welcome to oblivion.

       Hitting absolute nothingness was the beginning of a very personal
       catharsis  for me that finally led to turning inwards to see what
       was wrong, since externally, everything looked okay.  I  had  at-
       tained  a  physical state that "corrected" everything my subcons-
       cious had said was "wrong" with me, yet for some bewildering rea-
       son  I  was  not  deliriously  happy.  A series of steps followed
       which eventually led to various experiments in the world of thea-
       tre and film, where I had the chance to re-connect with emotions,
       and get them back into some kind of perspective from the comfort-
       able vantage point and attitude of: "they're not really mine, I'm
       only playing them."  All of which reached a pinnacle when I began
       experimenting with LSD for the first time.

       If you have never experienced what it is like to be  on  an  acid
       trip,  it  will  be  difficult for me to convey the kaleidoscopic
       depth of experience you are presented with.  It does nothing less
       nor more, than strip away every preconceived notion that you have
       ever had regarding what "reality" is.   Beyond  the  special  ef-
       fects,  intellectual  realizations,  and  creative opportunity it
       presents, it leaves you imbued with one very basic truth  of  the
       universe:   No  matter  what  the actual outcome of your actions,
       what matters is your intent.  If what you are doing  --  whatever
       it  may be -- is being done out of any reason other than a desire
       to bring happiness to people; to help humanity as a  whole  reach
       some greater level of understanding; to uplift and inspire people
       to reach for something that is within everyone's grasp . . . then
       you are wasting your time.

       This is not exactly news, I mean it is the  basic  belief  system
       that every religion on earth is founded on (with the possible ex-
       ception of Satanism, and a few other offshoots of this system  of
       thought).   The problem with religion getting such a bad rap most
       of the time is largely due to the fact that most people  who  act
       as  spokesmen  for  any  given religious cause, are only mouthing
       words they comprehend on an intellectual level.  They are not ac-
       tually  living  in this state of internal alignment, so what they
       have to offer can be very suspect . . . how is  someone  who  has
       not  attained  what  he speaks of, supposed to help you attain it
       for yourself?  While dogma may help a limited few, it will  never
       reach  most  of  those  who posses the ability to think for them-
       selves.  Nor is standing at a pulpit or in front of a camera  and
       ranting  about  damnation, going to help anyone reach any kind of
       positive state.

       I obviously cannot speak for everybody, but from my own  perspec-
       tive  I had read the holy books of most religions on earth when I
       became interested in psychology and the theories of Carl Jung  --
       who  crosses  over into mysticism and religious experience, going
       as far as the concept of "karma" with his theory of  Synchronici-
       ty.  Yet I never got anything from them other than an intellectu-
       al high of understanding how groups of people could be programmed
       to behave in certain ways . . . which isn't what it's about.  The
       EXPERIENCE is what all religions are based on, how you choose  to
       interpret it is entirely up to you.  But a very simple thing that
       becomes apparent is the basic truth that wherever  your  inspira-
       tion  is  coming  from, if it fills you with the need to motivate
       large groups of people to do SOMETHING, be that something in  the
       name  of  "God" or anybody else . . . then somewhere, you got the
       wrong message.  Because there really isn't all that much  to  say
       beyond  the  very simple and obvious, "give love and you will get
       it."  The only thing that needs to be changed  is  your  attitude
       and outlook on life.  Making group_of_people(x) move twenty paces
       to the left while wearing black hats and reading  from  the  Holy
       Book  of  the  Arboreal  Tree Sloth, isn't gonna make the world a
       better place.

       While this discourse is tangential to some of the issues at hand,
       in  a  great  sense  it  is the underlying cause for all of them.
       Once you have seen the light as it were, or understood the bigger
       picture . . . it becomes very hard to go back to living life with
       blinders on regarding your  own  actions.   Until  it  eventually
       reaches  the  place where I found myself.  The point at which the
       only things I'm going to talk about are those that matter to  me,
       things  I  believe  in . . . things I believe will help people in
       some manner.  Along with the realization that I cannot do  a  lot
       of  things  I  used  to  do  anymore.  I cannot lie to people and
       present them with some image they want to see  in  order  to  get
       something  from  them  --  because I mean, WHAT is there to "get"
       anyway?  I can no longer be a politician or figurehead for causes
       that I do not believe in, and I will no longer waste my time tak-
       ing part in meaningless drivel that serves to do nothing but  en-
       trench me in bullshit without end; I had already spent most of my
       life taking apart the rules and winning at whatever game I  tried
       to  play.   What  I never bothered to examine was the fact that I
       didn't "win" anything that ever brought me any happiness  .  .  .
       what is the point in playing if you don't want the "prize?"


       Stagnation of the Electronic Frontier
       -------------------------------------

       Moving forward in time by about two years, this was the  attitude
       that  I  had managed to retain as I returned to New York.  Every-
       thing was the same, yet completely different.  What had been per-
       vaded  by  Nihilism  and vacuity only a short time ago, was now a
       pathway of infinite potential and limitless possibility.  For the
       first  time  in  almost  six years I actually felt completely in-
       spired and excited by the possibilities that life in general  and
       Cyberspace in particular had to offer.

       The summer of 1991 was a kind of "class reunion" for many of  us.
       For  the  first  time  in almost half a decade we found ourselves
       back in New York City, the place where all of  this  had  started
       for us such a long time ago.

       What happened was pretty much the expected; an endless stream  of
       jokes  and  self-depreciating  humor regarding who we used to be,
       the three-letter acronyms we used to affiliate with  or  have  in
       revolution around us, the state of the universe and everything in
       it, and a general time of catching up on who had done  what.   It
       was  a strange situation, since we really had disappeared, to the
       extent that most of us had not talked with one another in  years,
       it  was almost as if picking up the phone and speaking with some-
       one from back then would bring back all the bad things  you  were
       trying to get rid of.

       Out of this gathering, I found about a  dozen  people  who  I  no
       longer  knew.   People who had become submerged in drugs, and be-
       come lost in different sub-cultures where  they  could  live  out
       reasonable facsimiles of their childhoods forevermore; people who
       had completely lost touch with what they used to be,  and  become
       stereotypical  examples  of  what  people  tend to term "computer
       geeks," the sum total of their interest in life having been  nar-
       rowed  down  to that new bug in X windows client-server architec-
       ture and what it would mean to the future of the OSF; people  who
       hadn't  changed  at all and were still busy "getting over" on so-
       ciety   in   general;  but   perhaps  most  surprising,  I  found
       that about ten people I used to know had gone  through  a  growth
       process very similar to my own, and actually succeeded in solving
       their quest and winning the prize we had all sought so badly.

       The correct solution to the "quest," is of course, that there  is
       no  solution.   There  is nothing you are looking for, except for
       you, and once you realize this, you win the big prize,  you  find
       yourself, and get to live happily ever after.

       After re-discovering that a group of us seemed to thoroughly  en-
       joy  each other's company, we eventually ended up having a weekly
       meeting where we'd  get  together  and  discuss  various  topics.
       Foremost  amongst them was one that sprung up with increasing re-
       gularity as the weeks went by:  getting back  onto  the  frontier
       from  a  completely different angle.  As years went by many of us
       had started completely different lives;  some  were  in  college,
       others  had  started companies or gone to work for companies they
       had once laughed at, and still more had started careers complete-
       ly unrelated to anything they had been doing in the past.  But it
       had became clear that what we really wanted to do  was  take  the
       incredible  promise  that  had  been shown to us during our youth
       when we had walked along the edge of a new reality unfolding, and
       channel  it  into  a positive direction that would benefit every-
       body.

       As we found out, the hacker underground had  continued  with  its
       headlong  dive  into  oblivion.   The  underground  had basically
       ceased to exist after the Operation Sun Devil sweep.  Just  about
       the  only "hacker systems" still in existence were those catering
       to the teenagers whose priorities focused on  ripping  off  phone
       companies, collecting VMB codes and pirating software.

       While this was slightly depressing, it was also a  foregone  con-
       clusion  and  didn't  cause too much surprise.  The main focus of
       our interest was what had become of the mainstream telecommunica-
       tions nets -- given half a decade to evolve, something really ex-
       citing must have happened by now.  The hardware that we ended  up
       sitting  in  front  of,  would have made possible an undreamed of
       variety of possibility when taken  into  context  with  what  was
       available in the past.  We were used to 64K Apple ][+ systems, or
       maybe tricked out //e's with 128K and PC's with 640K, and now  we
       were  sitting  at  a friend's house in front of a NeXT and an SGI
       Indigo.  When you thought about the fact that 7 years ago you had
       paid about $8,500 for a 4.5megabyte Corvus hard disk, and now you
       could buy an entire NeXT with that . . . it was, fantastic.

       Before taking off on our expedition of present-day Cyberspace, we
       had  spoken  with  some of our friends who were familiar with the
       terrain, and received somewhat  tepid  responses  and  a  general
       dismissal  of what was going on right now.  Thinking the attitude
       was one of standard arrogance which we had all gone  through,  we
       didn't  pay  too  much attention to it and set out to explore the
       new electronic nervous system of the world.

       A couple of hours later it became shockingly apparent  that  most
       of  the potential of the bright new technology that now existed .
       . . that could have been used to create and house an infinite ex-
       panse  of  innovation, communication, and pooling of thought, lay
       dormant.  Thus far it had seemingly been  utilized  to  construct
       gigantic file servers that advertised their existence by digitiz-
       ing porno magazines and  editing  their  dialup  lines  into  the
       resulting scan.

       All those wonderful places that we had travelled in the past, and
       had  dominated  the landscape only half a decade before . . . had
       indeed been razed, paved over, and replaced by an  endless  elec-
       tronic  expanse  of  snap-together tract houses that littered the
       landscape with numbingly identical  systems.   The  frontier  had
       packed  up  and moved back into labs where people like our friend
       with the workstations were working on applications that  wouldn't
       see  the light of day for another decade.  And what was out there
       right now, was strikingly similar to a generic suburb of AnyTown,
       USA.

       Objectively a suburb is not a bad thing, it's planned out,  logi-
       cal, it works, it doesn't need to be any different from any other
       suburb . . . in short, it's functional.  It's also very different
       from  the  environment we had grown up in, where everything was a
       new step further out into the unknown, where anything could  hap-
       pen, and nobody had ever been there before.

       From our vantage point it looked as if the explorers  had  indeed
       gone  back to their ivory towers (or haunted dungeons as the case
       may be), and a lot of used car salesmen had set up shop  cranking
       out the snap-together tract houses, when they realized they could
       make more money doing that, than say, selling used cars.

       It was truly a mind blowing experience to witness for  the  first
       time,  systems that actually advertised themselves based upon how
       many lines they had, or how much storage.  Attitudes  that  would
       have  garnered  a great deal of scorn and derision -- and in gen-
       eral made your advertisement the brunt of a lot of jokes --  were
       suddenly the accepted way in which systems chose to differentiate
       themselves from one another.  Looking at them, it  came  down  to
       the  fact  that the only difference between system (A) and system
       (B) was that one might have 16 lines while the other had 24,  and
       system (C) was inherently superior to both (a) and (b) because it
       had 32 lines and 4 gigabytes of storage  (used  to  house  10,000
       programs,  out of which the same 200 are downloaded over and over
       again, as the rest of the junk sits there gathering dust).

       Even more frightening, on a system that had  10,000  messages  on
       it,  an  average  of  9,800  will be echoes of FidoNet or RIME or
       whatever-net, leaving a grand total of about  200  messages  from
       the  actual members.  And frequently those 200 messages date back
       a year and a half . . . a couple of years ago a BAD one line sys-
       tem  had that many messages in a week.  A good one in a couple of
       hours.

       To a lot of people Cyberspace has become one big file server .  .
       .  strikingly  similar  to what television has devolved into.  An
       entirely passive place where you press  buttons  and  get  enter-
       tained, no thought required, no input necessary.

       Realizing that we were merely skimming the surface, and might not
       know  the  whole story, we spent a couple of weeks becoming fami-
       liar with what had happened, and what the situation  really  was.
       Based  upon several hundred conversations with various people who
       were involved with the current scene, we arrived at a  couple  of
       very basic conclusions.

       In order to run a system in the  present  environment,  and  have
       users,  you  needed to have a pile of hardware, many phone lines,
       some sort of marketing and bookkeeping ability, a  lot  of  spare
       time, coupled with infinite patience to put up with people, since
       they are now your customers, not just your friends, and  if  they
       call  you  up asking the same goofy questions you cannot take the
       phone off the hook or tell them to go away.

       Where running a system in the  past  had  meant  giving  up  your
       second phone line, it presently involved a great deal of interac-
       tion with the department of Red Tape, and  Bureau  of  Tasks  You
       Really  Aren't Interested In.  This opened the door to the "used-
       car salesmen" people, since these were things they were  used  to
       doing  every day.  Conversely, it has almost universally been our
       experience that the guy who is a Unix wizard and can  work  magic
       with networking and programming, lives in deathly fear of signing
       paperwork, filling out his tax returns, or figuring out where  he
       parked  his car.  And finally, the creative person whose main in-
       terest is making fantastic places, lacks the time and patience to
       write  the  code, and certainly has no interest in administrative
       duties.

       In effect, most people with the desire to  do  something  better,
       did  not  have  the  necessary $25-30k laying around, and even if
       they did, they would never act on it because they'd be forced  to
       spend  a great deal of their time doing a hundred things they had
       no interest in doing.  So the online world had begun to  be  dom-
       inated by the file servers, who didn't really have much of an in-
       terest in being anything other than file servers, since that made
       the  most  money  with the least effort, and anybody with $25,000
       could toss up a snap-together MeSsyDOS  based  system  with  very
       little technical ability required.

       Thus began the era of the "tract-houses"  where  advertising  and
       atmosphere  consisted  of  rattling  off  hardware statistics and
       number of phone lines, along with the number  of  shareware  pro-
       grams  available  for  downloading (an extremely amusing concept,
       considering that there are literally TERABYTES of  free  software
       available  for  the  taking  on  ftp sites all over the Internet,
       which cost NOTHING to download from).

       With the exception of two of three bright  lights  that  had  the
       right idea and were trying to do something different, most of the
       electronic frontier had indeed vanished.  And it isn't so hard to
       see  where  a couple of years from now the same advertising agen-
       cies that sell brain-dead ads designed to induce you to crave one
       brand  of beer over another, will be pushing SYSTEM X, because IT
       HAS 10,000 phone lines!  Call now and  leave  your  mind  at  the
       door!


       Transcendence
       -------------

       It has generally been our experience that people are neither stu-
       pid,  nor shallow.  Everyone has the potential to think for them-
       selves, to overcome adverse situations, and contribute  something
       to this world.  When placed in situations that offer these possi-
       bilities, people tend to come through with surprising regularity.
       In  a fairly short amount of time you end up with a group of peo-
       ple doing something they themselves would have deemed improbable,
       if  not  downright impossible, if you had asked them at any other
       point in their lives.

       Virtual Reality has the potential to become the single  most  im-
       portant  development  in the history of human evolution.  It is a
       technology that holds the promise  of  absolute  liberation.   It
       also  holds  the possibility of turning the world into the rather
       grim one that is the basis of  much  Cyberpunk  fiction,  a  dark
       place where technology is used to oppress and suppress people.

       By its very nature, it is very  difficult  to  ever  imagine  the
       latter.   In  order  to  have a police state, you need to amass a
       certain amount of power, yet Cyberspace is the ultimate  equaliz-
       er.   It  is  a place where one person can wield as much power as
       100, 1,000, or 100,000 people.   Physical  limitations  are  cast
       off,  and in the event of conflict the playing field becomes that
       of mind vs. mind.  Sheer numbers and a mob rules mentality  cease
       to have any meaning when you can create infinite numbers of elec-
       tronic organisms to do anything you want them to do.

       The hope is that it will never sink to such a level of stupidity.
       Games  are  wonderful,  but  there  is  no need for conflict, all
       struggle tends to be internal conflict that has become  external-
       ized.   When  you  want  to convert the sinners, or prove you are
       right, all you're doing is having an argument with yourself.  The
       beautiful  thing  about  Virtual Reality is the fact that you are
       free to do that, for as long as you need, to work out  that  par-
       ticular set of problems -- without harming anybody.

       There is only one ultimate truth, which is BEING  HAPPY  and  ex-
       periencing LOVE.  How you choose to perceive it is a very indivi-
       dual matter.  While it might mean blue to you, orange to that guy
       over  there,  and  silver to me, it's all the same thing.  In the
       real world if we held fast to those beliefs and behaved as people
       have  been classically shown to behave, then we'd be killing each
       other over who has the right idea about love . . . Cyberspace al-
       lows  everyone  the  freedom  to  co-exist without harming anyone
       else's world-view or belief system.  And if you truly  are  given
       the opportunity to live in an environment conducive to you happi-
       ness, then if that heretic who thinks orange is the  answer  were
       ever to show up at your front door, chances are you would be able
       to tolerate him, and even, "God" forbid,  express  the  love  you
       claim to espouse.


       Phantom Access - The Ethereal Takes Shape
       -----------------------------------------

       There was never any solid dividing line where we decided that  we
       really  wanted  to  put together a system where we could have the
       freedom of expression we wanted, with the  ultimate  goal  really
       being  the  very  simple  one of pushing the envelope further and
       further out there.  All of us had obligations, school,  and  per-
       sonal  commitments that would be difficult to integrate into this
       major change of plans.  But inevitably the  mass  exodus  out  of
       college,  the  avoidance of unnecessary responsibilities, and the
       initial stages of planning were set in motion.

       Six months later we had close  to  a  hundred  thousand  dollars,
       top-down  system  design,  a fully designed multi-user simulation
       engine, a general idea of what we would do and how  we  would  go
       about it, a team of our friends together one more time, only this
       time as a real corporation, and over one  thousand  megabytes  of
       the  collected history of Cyberspace, dating back to systems that
       existed in 1979, that had been laying in dusty boxes filled  with
       old Apple DOS 3.3 disks.

       On April 1st 1992 MindVox  went  into  its  alpha-testing  stage.
       Which  loosely speaking means that we put everything together and
       watched it disintegrate repeatedly as the last 300-400 bugs  were
       worked out of the system.  Since then it has been running in pro-
       tected environment mode with a collection of our friends and  as-
       sociates crash-testing the software, suggesting where rough-edges
       might be smoothed, and generally having a good time creating some
       of  the  atmosphere while trying to destroy the software in every
       conceivable way so that everything is solid upon inception.

       In May of 1992 MindVox will open it's doors to  the  public.   As
       much  as  we'd  like  to say that it's going to completely change
       everything, it will not.  All it can do is allow people who  feel
       in  rhythm  with this vision of the world to converge together in
       one of the most interesting nexus points of Cyberspace.   To  ex-
       tend  their reach, explore new levels of experience, and interact
       with some of the pioneers in the fields of computer science, net-
       working,  science-fiction,  music,  the arts, politics, religion,
       altered states, and future reality.

       Our main priority is to create and  continuously  evolve  an  en-
       vironment  that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, cou-
       pled with access to information and ideas, that present you  with
       a far greater spectrum of possibility than you might otherwise be
       able to access.



       Thanks
       ------

       Nothing of this magnitude could ever take shape  based  upon  the
       merits  of  any  one individual.  The entire Phantom Access Group
       has been a collaborative effort since it  began  some  ten  years
       ago;  the  MindVox  project is merely the first confluence of the
       diverse talents that comprise the core of Phantom Access  Techno-
       logies,  that has been directed towards the electronic and socie-
       tal mainstream.

       Looking back over the years, there are very few of my friends who
       have not in some way contributed to the genesis of Phantom Access
       and the creation of MindVox, and I'd like to take this opportuni-
       ty to express my gratitude to all of them.

       People I would like to specifically thank, and without whom Mind-
       Vox  could  not  have  been launched in the manner we wanted, in-
       clude:

            First and foremost, my fiance Delia, who has  made  much  of
       the last several years possible; who never knew about "Lord Digi-
       tal" when she met me; who has  gone  from  "computers,  uh,  ugh,
       that's  so  . . . um, dull" to not only seeing the potentials in-
       herent in the capabilities the technology  presents  to  all  so-
       ciety,  but actually extending many hundreds of hours of her time
       to scripting sections of the project and designing human interac-
       tion  POV's  based  upon her lifelong experience with theatre and
       film.  She has also shown remarkable grace by retaining  a  sense
       of  humor  when  dealing  with  2am anonymous calls from computer
       dudes who feel compelled to ask "so, what does Lord Digital do in
       bed?" questions.

            The second person to whom I owe a great deal is Bruce Fanch-
       er,  my  partner in this endeavor, as well as half a hundred pro-
       jects that have spanned over a decade.  Without you  many  things
       would not have been possible, and those that were would have been
       a lot less fun.  It has been an interesting  experience  watching
       someone  grow  into  an  adult who has retained all the qualities
       that made them so much fun to hang out with  in  our  youth,  yet
       managed  to temper that childlike glee with responsibility, humor
       in the face of adversity, and that elusive quality called charac-
       ter.  Here's to another couple of decades of Lord & Lord.

            I would like to thank every member  of  the  Phantom  Access
       Group  for  the  thousands of hours spent designing, implementing
       and de-bugging the programs  that  make  MindVox  come  to  life.
       Respective   of  some  people's  desire  to  remain  out  of  the
       spotlight, I will leave it at that.  You know who you are &  any-
       one  who really cares to find that out can do so at any time they
       desire.

            Phiber Optik:  For applying his considerable skills in a po-
       sitive  direction  and  helping  us make MindVox a very difficult
       fortress to lay siege to, while at the same time adding a tremen-
       dous  amount  of versatility to our networking and communications
       interface options.  Most of all, thank you for having the courage
       to  realize  that the world is not always a logical or fair place
       and that no matter how intelligent you are or how noble your  in-
       tentions,  you  can  be dragged down by the stupidity and fear of
       those around you if you associate with people who  do  not  share
       the same qualities you possess.

            Charles:  For a great deal of assistance in updating many of
       us regarding the current status of new technology and what's just
       over the horizon, as well as providing tremendous aid by  showing
       us  functional  examples  of  the state of the art in distributed
       electronic networking, and taking us  on  a  fast-forward  cruise
       through  a  wide  variety  of  hardware platforms and development
       tools.  Your friendship, advice, and persistent belief in our vi-
       sion, has been invaluable.

            Len Rose:  For being a good friend over the years and always
       giving  assistance  with  anything  we  have needed.  Most of all
       thanks for coming out of everything you've been through with  op-
       timism about the future and an intact belief system.  Peace.

            George Gleason:  For being a person who has become one of my
       close friends faster than anyone else ever did.  For possessing a
       really beautiful outlook on life & everything in it, and for  al-
       ways  being  a calming voice when things are completely crazy and
       the moon is full.

            Bruce Sterling:  For his encouragement, support, and a real-
       ly  funny  talk  at CFP-2.  Most of all, the deepest appreciation
       for doing an admirable job of presenting the unbiased truth while
       chronicling some of the events that have taken place on the fron-
       tiers of Cyberspace.

            Mike Godwin:  For putting up  with  many  long  and  strange
       phone calls regarding a wide variety of topics; for helping us to
       avoid potential pitfalls and difficulty; for providing encourage-
       ment  and  advice, and in general, for being a really cool person
       who has gone out of his way many times to provide us with  assis-
       tance.

            Thomas Dell:  For writing code full  of  obscure  jokes  and
       weird  ramblings that do wonders to wake you up and get your full
       attention when you are changing things at 3am, and for  being  an
       exceptionally  gracious  guy who is one of the limited handful of
       people that have maintained their sense of vision in the face  of
       impending mediocrity and industrialization.

            Special thanks to Dan, SN, SR, D00f and everyone in DPAK and
       cDc,  who  comprise some of the very few who managed to grasp the
       obvious, and in turn make use of this knowledge in an  entertain-
       ing and lucid manner.  Additional accolades to DPAK for being the
       only eL!te duDeZ to use a four letter acronym instead of a  three
       letter one.  The vision, the sheer wow!

            Mega-Supra-Surfin-the-Ozone Thanks to  Mondo  2000.   Beyond
       the  sea  of  screaming  fluff  and  designer hyperbole contained
       within the covers of any issue of Mondo, there is  also  a  great
       deal of truth to be found about Cyberspace, music, art, film, and
       life in general.  Mondo has thus far shown itself  to  be  beyond
       reproach  as  far  as journalistic ethics and presentation of the
       facts are concerned.  It is also to be commended as a publication
       with  a  sound  belief in typing words at random and letting them
       fall where they may.

            Finally, tremendous gratitude goes to Jim Thomas.  A  person
       I  do  not  know  and have never spoken with, yet someone who has
       done an exceptionally important  service  to  all  of  Cyberspace
       with  the  forum  presented  by Computer Underground Digest.  Ir-
       respective even of CuD, I  have  heard  nothing  but  praise  and
       well-wishing from the many you have helped.  Thank you.




            Additional thanks to:  Paul, Yuri, Eric & Eric, Ken & every-
       one who has made the move to Phibro Energy, Drowned Fish, Andrew,
       Randy, Carl, The Plastics, TV, Eric Madeson, Richard,  Harlequin,
       Dane,  Jeff,  The Galactic Knight, Laszlo Nibble, Colleen, Cereal
       "I live to be annoying" Killer, the cast  &  crew  of  LightStorm
       lighting and Manny "huh?" Riggs at Record Plant.



       Patrick K. Kroupa                             digital@phantom.com

               Phantom Access Technologies, Inc. +1 212 988 5987
       _________________________________________________________________

       *1  Lyrics are (c) Copyright, some year or another by Mick Jagger
       & Keith Richards, otherwise known as  the  Rolling  Stones.   The
       version   I  was  listening  to  is  a  cover  version   done  by
       Jane's Addiction.

       *2  Lyrics  are   (c)   Copyright,   1991  by  Guns N Roses music
       Uzi/Suicide Records.



