From Amazon.com
The story of bad behavior--fanaticism about small debates, gender-disguised "Netsex," the spending of other people's money on vast phone bills--has been told by others. In
The Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier, Indra Sinha tells the same story in a British context where the poverty and uncertainty of the Thatcher era made everything that much more intense and obsessive. This is also the story of the near collapse of the author's marriage: he withdrew from his wife or dragged her off to meet Net chums who never showed up--or showed up and never introduced themselves.
These were also the years of his growing political commitment--a highly paid copywriter, Sinha started using his skills for good causes like exposing the use of chemical weapons by Saddam against the Kurds. He writes well about his discomfort with his Net friends' games of expensive verbal sadomasochism in the face of real evil. This is a moving and wise book about a man who loved games and came to feel that he could no longer, in good conscience, play them; there is real pain here, in his rejection of a sort of beauty. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
The Internet circa 1984 was a far cry from the placid swaths of corporate real estate surfed by many netizens today. Home to a hard-core online elite dialing into BBSs (bulletin boards) and MUDs (multi-user dungeons), it was an anarchic terrain where the virtual risks and rewards were so potent that, for the handful of users chronicled by Sinha, the sight of a modem jack slipping into a port was like a heroin-juiced needle to a junkie. Sinha, who was a copywriter at a London advertising agency, got hooked on multi-user role-playing games from his very first logon, ecstatic at the thought that in cyberspace he could create and share new worlds. As he relates how he started neglecting his "real" life to the point that his wife called herself a "modem widow" and he began speaking a garbled language of keyboard commands, he likens his exploits to those of Coleridge and de Quincey on opium. Along the way, however, Sinha used the Internet to spark political change in the off-line world, leveraging the online community to raise funds for Kurdish refugees and conveying the horrors of the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India. Narrated with wit and moments of literary flair in the nonlinear style of the Internet itself, this book amounts to a sort of architectural dig, excavating bits of data and random-access memories from "that peculiar world of ours which has all but vanished" into the comfortable protocols of America Online. As today's techies struggle against the malling of the Net, Sinha offers an important reminder of the radical freedoms that defined the early age of cyberspace exploration. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
