It has about 8000 sq ft. of space available for conferences, lectures and workshops, right in the center of Amsterdam and with multimedia facilities and Internet and ISDN connections.
I am Luc Sala, and since 1982 I publish computer magazines for the Dutch market, including - once - an MSX-devoted magazine and lately an Internet magazine NET-INFO and this web-site, which contains about 4000 pages of original text.
From the early '80's I was involded in many computer shows and events, like the first New Edge Ritual in 1993 and I wrote a book about Virtual Reality (in Dutch) with John Perry Barlow, published in september 1990.
Since the end of the eighties I am more and more looking for the relationship between people, society and the computer.
This has led to a company called Egosoft specialising in brainmachines, mindware, smart drinks and hypnotic audio/video.
Together with Catharina Ooijens I set up Myster in march 1995, as it became clear - through my experience with several magazines like Computer Info and Net-INFO, that people needed a place to actually meet in the flesh, but more important I wanted a kind of laboratory to see what people were actually doing with e-mail, internet, videophones etc. You can try anything at your editorial office, but you need real people if you want to know what they want.
We already had two large (5000 page) operational web-sites (net.info.nl and mind.lift.nl) and wanted to get in touch with our customers.
As Myster is pretty large, we can have some 250 people there, the place is also suitable for conferences and lectures.
We use the Internet and the web, because it seemed the logical choice, in Europe the alternatives like Compuserve are more expensive and less applicable and geared towards the situation here.
Financially this is a dog, we don't make money, but gain lots of experience, as a cybercafe is not really such a good business, most customers are from overseas (USA, many scandinavian) and just come to do email. That is in fact my observation after a few months, the web has no appeal for experienced people, they do mostly e-mail, send electronic postcards from Amsterdam, but very little web-surfing.
This has led to my belief, that the Web is actually in danger, unless we find real interesting applications and ways to make it a mass-medium.
Maybe at this moment one expects that the net-population will continue to grow, but I doubt that we will see another doubling. Microsoft and other bet that W'95 (or the Planet Internet site) will draw massive crowds to the Internet, but this seems to me over-optimistic.
Until now we have seen mostly freeloaders using the net-facilities, with their companies or universities etc. footing the bill. However, with W'95 one has to subscribe by credit-card and this is not something for the poor and underprivileged. The rich ones are already on the Net or don't care anyway.
We hope that notably artists and scholars will come and help us to actually work with the new technology in order to expand the universal awareness. Cybertechnology has many aspects, and our Mystery School approach to chart the hidden and magical depths of that space is fascinating one.Luc Sala
