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Given its escape from physical constraints, the Web has nurtured a growing movement toward transhumanism: the ideology in which human consciousness transcends our animal limitations. Like many philosophies, transhumanism comes in lots of flavors, including genderfuckers and identity nomads who sidestep conventional social norms, posthumanist flesh-jockeys angling for the next stage of human evolution, and the “escape key” variety that believes that we’ll all be better off when we upload ourselves into Reality 2.0. A thick strain of Gnosticism – that ancient belief that we exist in a corrupt world but can transcend it through arcane knowledge – runs through Digital Web society. From Virtual Adept technomystics to the hard-headed Technocrats of Iteration X, many groups within the Web see it as the back door out of physical reality… a self-booting Rapture, if you will, that leaves the mortal world behind.

As usual, people wind up fighting about doctrine and territory. And predictably, the opening of virtual space sparked a reality race that parallels the Ascension War. Just as mortal mystics and Technocrats battle to decide the fate of Meatspace, so their uploaded counterparts have slugged it out in the Digital

Web – often with more civility and mutual respect, but with no less determination to win the future for their side.

Over the last 50 years, and especially within the last 20, the great race to claim virtual space has picked up speed. Like all wars – and on many levels, it has been a war – that race spurs new technologies. Now, any number of mages will tell you that their faction-of-choice created personal computers, ARPANET, icon-based interfaces, or even Facebook. Whatever. The undeniable truth is that the Digital Web has grown, since the early 1990s, from an elite playground to a foundation of the human world. And like all growth spurts, that has involved a fair amount of pain.