Hello, and welcome to Cytopia. My name is Kevin M. Cowan, and I am the President of Advanced Interface Innovations, LLC., which owns and operates the Cytopia.net domain. I have founded Cytopia with the idea of establishing a community that provided valuable resources from a wide variety of interests, pursuits and lifestyles, and at the same time gave the members of the community a sense that others were 'out there' in the electronic acropolis, carrying on business, creating masterpieces, looking for jobs, lost loves (found and unfound), or just passing time surfing or chatting. Being a developer, I spend a great deal of time on the net (go figure), and I never cease to find amazement at the depth of the content available -- at this wellspring of wealth nothing more than a mouse click or a keystroke away.
It is with this in mind that I have created Cytopia.
The Internet is a collective. I often (jokingly) compare it to the Borg:
Resistance is futile.
Futile in a loving sort of way.
It is futile to resist the the oncoming of Information Age. One of my favorite poets, Richard Brautigan, wrote a poem called "Machines of Loving Grace." To this day it is one of my favorites. He talks about living a 'rural' type of life, a simple type of life, the life of a farmer or the life of a poet, "all watched over by machines of loving grace." I guess that's sort of what I see in Cytopia. It's about art and knowledge and recreation and community. I am developing it to be more of an open forum as far as content and input, and would like to encourage the emergence of a positive and robust global community.
That would be Cytopia, of course.
Cytopia should be a place that provides many levels of reinforcement, just like a community in the physical world. The longer the link pages, the better. The more topics posted on the bulletin board, the more images hanging in the gallery, the more postings of novels and poems, the more people who join the community, the more robust the community becomes. This prosperity reflects back upon all who are a part of the community. The Internet and the Age of Information are both excellent working examples. The meeting of the minds will cause a change in the fundamental infrastructure, in the weltanschuang fabric that binds society. Information is energy. An increase in information in a system will tend to cause an increase throughout the system. As the amount of information available on the Internet increases, and as the amount of people who are exposed to that information increase, so will the resulting energy increase within the system. And the focal point of that energy is the community from which it emulates. Cytopia.net firmly stands behind the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, and support Freedom of Speech, both online and 'out there'. We believe that a healthy community is capable of 'policing' itself and abiding the lines of reasonable conduct. What does this mean? Well, I think the juxtaposition of these two sentences illustrates the rather fine line:

1)>>
"I believe in Ghosts, UFO's, Bigfoot, the Lochness Monster, alternate dimensions, dual civilizations, conspiracy theories, anarchy (ala Bakunin), the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Relativity, Imaginary Time, Inflationary Universes. I believe in my heart that these things are real, viable and useful components of life on planet Earth."

2)>>
"I am going to hunt you down and cut you up into little pieces."

Do you see how these two ideas differ? Yes, yes, I know, it's all well and good until someone winds up in a shallow grave. No, we're going to have to watch out for the bad elements here, and you, as a member of Cytopia, always let the webmaster know if you find people abusing the chat rooms, the e-mail, the bulletin board or the content pages. They are there for you to enjoy and provide you with a way of creating a positive environment for yourself, in cyberspace and the other world, too.
So there's the security statement.
I'm writing this several days before the release of Cytopia.net. I'm very excited, and have spent many hours making it run, and making it enjoyable. I hope Cytopia provides you with the same type of rewarding sense of accomplishment, the same sense of accomplishment I feel from building it. Because you are the reason that it was built in the first place. Use the space provided to you to express your ideas, expand your knowledge of the Internet, explore your spirituality, gain a greater sense of self-worth, or simply learn something new. My mother always told me to try and learn something new everyday. I suppose that's one of the things I enjoy most about working in the IT industry, and the Age of Information, to boot. It's not one thing you have to learn. It's hundreds of things, sometimes thousands. You have to learn them quickly. Information is now doubling every twelve years. In twelve years it will be six and we will once again have to adjust the learning curve.
Personally, it's what I live for.
One of my beliefs is that we're here to learn how not to be here, and still be.
That's in a nutshell.
The point is this: the Internet is the portal from which we take the next great evolutionary step. It's our training wheels for the coming millennium. With the broadening acceptance of Imaginary Time, multiple bounded, but infinite universes, alternate and designer realities, a phase shift will occur at the very underpinnings of things like the Social Contract and the Doctrine of the Rational Man.
Nor political correctness, for that matter.
Albeit it retains an inherently aesthetic quality, information is not always pretty.
I guess what I'm getting at is that as a global community we are going to have to learn to be more accepting of people with attitudes and lifestyles and beliefs that vary from our own. This may sound trite and contrived, but with the current state of events worldwide, one of two things are apparent:
1)We haven't learned the lesson yet; or,
2) We just don't give a damn.
Most days I opt for the first, some days the latter. At some point, however, we're all going to have to get along. We're going to have to get along with our neighbors, we're going to have to get along with our relatives, working associates and so on.
Simply put: A shotgun is not the answer.
The forum for enlightenment is education. The path to salvation lies not in one's ability to execute multiple homicides, massacres, bombings or any number of such unsavory pursuits. No sir, I simply cannot believe that this is the way, unless the way is, in this case, the inroad to annihilation.
Which it very well may be.
In college I was a journalist. I wrote crap for the Arts and Entertainment section, mostly reviews, and later on some short stories, which I actually kind of liked. Then I left journalism to begin writing fiction, because I wanted to tell the truth. Computers have been part of my life since I can remember. I used to write little programs with my father on a Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator. It was pretty cool. I first saw the Internet in a friends basement in 1983. It was a cursor prompt on a small darkly amber screen. I remember being excited at the thought of being in one place connected to computers in another place who were ultimately connected to someone else who was just as enthralled with what was happening as I was. When it blossomed it's first few blossoms in 1995, and subsequently exploded, the connection seemed entirely logical.
There was finally a place where we could all tell the truth.
The truth is out there, and it's name is Information. This is my mission statement for Cytopia.net. Use it to expand your understanding of the world and the world will unfold before you. Use it to create a positive environment, and your life will improve for the better. Expand. Enlighten. Exodus. Those are the words that come to mind. We are in an age of incredible acceleration. We are made of water, sunlight and empty space. It is to those roots that we ultimately seek return.
Well, that's how I feel about it, at least. That's what matters. It matters that we continue to expand and grow and become.
"All watched over by machines of Loving Grace."
Get it?
Now, PC's aren't quite to the 'loving; level yet, but they're working on it, and so should we. Have fun with Cytopia, but don't be a putz.
Keep it real.
Enjoy,
Kevin M. Cowan
President
Cytopia.net
Advanced Interface Innovations, LLC.