Cyberspace Psychosis and The Virtual Reality Blues

Cyberspace Psychosis & The Virtual Reality Blues is a thirteen-movement cultural critique of how digital life distorts attention, attitude, truth, identity, and meaning.Hickey diagnoses what he calls the Psychosis: the mass distortion produced when we mistake the digital map for the lived territory. The book traces the mechanism through media, money, virtue, generative AI and AI-induced psychosis, mental health and the 'inner critic industrial complex,' credential collapse, and the experience of the Virtual Reality Blues, the disillusionment of recognizing one’s own complicity in the system.Underneath the diagnosis sits an offer: Hickey’s AAA framework, Attention, Attitude, Action, leading to Agency. It is a practical loop for reclaiming what the Empire (his term for the diffuse complex of platforms, institutions, and incentives that capture and direct attention) is built to extract. Paired with the FAFO sequence, a vernacular causality model tracing actions through their consequences, the framework gives readers a working vocabulary for the territory the screen obscures.Throughout, Hickey writes from an 'infected participant' stance, situating himself inside the systems he critiques rather than positioning above them. The voice is direct and at times profane. The citations are Chicago-format and rigorous.The book is intended for general readers, students of media studies and contemporary philosophy, and clinicians and educators working with neurodivergent populations or technology-related distress. It draws on traditions including general semantics, recovery literature, media criticism, and contemporary cultural analysis.Hickey is the founder of PathWays Collective LLC, a consultancy specializing in Applied Neurodivergence. He is the author of two previous books on spiritual practice and recovery, and hosts the podcasts Path of the Sober Seeker and The Sight Side.