His Holiness looks around the room at each of us and says, “Here I think computers can help, so the timing is critical.” Then he speaks in swift Tibetan, his words Englished to us as: “Thru your professional assistance for the Tibetans, you will enable us to spread the true situation of the Tibetans to all the people of the world, so they will have greater awareness.”
“That is why we have come,” I reply.
“So thank you very much,” he says.
Wiring Shambhala: The Dotcoms & The Dalai Lama 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 were not online, 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 to build 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. Its 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 and dangers of material pursuit that he learned from his Tibetan doctoral advisor, ultimately driving him to re-engage with his pursuit of Buddhism. A visit to study Tibetan Medicine 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. As Haig’s warnings to the D.C. establishment become emergent realities in today’s world, the need for Shambhala’s wisdom and strength in the face of anti-humanist forces grows greater.
Shambhala is said to be a legendary land, somewhere to the northwest of Tibet, where a hidden power and wisdom waits for the prophesied day it must emerge to save humanity from inflicting final disaster on itself. Wiring Shambhala tells how the leaders of Tibet’s ancient civilization, with a mortal enemy’s boot on its neck, sought cutting-edge technology to modernize the fight for their nation’s survival. It is the memoir of the volunteer who brought it to them at the dawn of the Internet age, for the sake of Tibet’s freedom, but also to bring the endangered wisdom of Tibet out into the world, to spread the Dalai Lama’s methods of waging peace to all nations before it is too late.
Following Haig’s struggles to overcome adversity on this path, Wiring Shambhala offers courage and motivation to those confronting personal, social and political challenges standing in the way of our collective survival. From his perspective, as he grows into this unforeseeable role of tech Sherpa for the Tibetans, you will travel from the trenches of the Dotcoms to the heights of the Himalayas, and from the mosh pits of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts to the Dalai Lama’s audience chambers. On foot and by boat, by plane and by train, Wiring Shambhala takes you along on an unexpected journey that connects the ancient past with a recent future that may yet lie before us.