But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that's left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

One of the things that's attractive about cyberspace is that it can be construed as no threat. If you see it through the video game keyhole, the amusement keyhole, the entertainment keyhole, it is no threat. If you see it through the LSD keyhole, the consciousness-expanding keyhole, it's like electronic drugs: it is a threat.

The thing of being able to share somebody's reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know. Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody's reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically. The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go? If you go into a complete, like a cyberspace model of some type, in which... you know the discussion about the mind and the interaction between the mind and the universe as a holographic phenomenon.

What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.