Shambhala is said to be a legendary land, somewhere to the northwest of Tibet, where a hidden power and wisdom waits for the day it must save humanity from inflicting final disaster on itself.
Wiring Shambhala tells a tale of the very old embracing the very new. How the leaders of an ancient civilization, one with a mortal enemy’s boot on its neck, turned to cutting edge technology in their attemps to regain their nation’s freedom.
It is the story of how the Internet came to Dharamsala, India, which has served as home base for the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, and over 150,000 Tibetans, refugees who fled China’s brutal invasion and illegal occupation of Tibet that began in the 1950s. At a time when most even in America did not have access, and India’s entire Internet feed ran off a connection less than one percent as fast as a phone of today, five volunteers went to Dharamsala and built the first Internet-linked network in the Himalayas, wiring the Dalai Lama’s administration and opening a new front in the fight for the survival of the Tibetan people.
Led by reluctant dotcommer and lapsed academic Dan Haig, the project was made possible by the rise of Cyborganic, a primal online community experiment in San Francisco, whose presence and influence were so integral to the Web explosion that in 1995 it was dubbed “Ground Zero” by Rolling Stone. Initially a story of his own survival, the tale begins with Haig’s arrival in California to start a new life. As an old dog himself, trying to learn new tricks, his participation in Cyborganic, and begrudging acceptance of his role in seminal startups like Organic Online and CNET, rewards him with allies and capabilities he never could have dreamed of in graduate school.
It also underscores the follies of material pursuit that he learned from his Tibetan doctoral advisor, ultimately driving him to re-engage with his Buddhist studies. A visit to study in Dharamsala provides the chance meeting that ignites a years-long campaign of technological developments with the Tibetans so aggressively advanced, and so effectively coordinated with the concurrent explosion of the international Tibetan freedom movement, that it provokes a request from the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington to come and explain just what he is up to.
Haig’s account looks back to the world at the moment it entered the age of the Internet. From his perspective, as he grows into this unforeseeable role, you will travel from the heights of the Himalayas to the trenches of the Dotcoms, from the Dalai Lama’s audience chambers to the mosh pits of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. On foot and by boat and by plane, Wiring Shambhala takes you along on an unexpected journey that connects the ancient past and a recent future that may yet lie before us.