I just can’t see cyberspace as anything but entirely other. A set of dimensions where you travel by thinking, where distance and time do not exist (and no, I don’t mean those 15-hour browsing sessions) and where connections are formed by association, not location or proximity.
The closest parallels I can find are in accounts of out-of-body experiences, or of disembodied life in classic occult literature like A Dweller on Two Planets or Life in the World Unseen. The Theosophist’s astral plane, a region supposed to exist at a higher frequency of vibration beyond the reach of our physical senses, is where much of this is held to take place—a realm where like attracts like, where nightmares, fantasies and ideals are multiplied through the collective power of all who are capable of imagining. Above all, the astral plane is a place of illusion, of entire landscapes created from our visions, and where connections are forged through common interest with no ethical or ideological restraint. Sound familiar?
After all, Mark Pesce’s Gibson-inspired VRML was meant to give form to this fantastic web of connections. Take a look at Mark’s essay Proximal and Distal Unity, which quotes the Noosphere as predicted by Teilhard de Chardin, the visionary who wrote - in around the year 1950 - of people (students, actually) “functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community”.
circa 2006