Interview - What ever happened to Wendy Sue Noah?

Listen Now to Wendy Sue Noah 

Back in the exciting early days of the Internet, Wendy Sue was a rising star of the newly minted Digerati ofWendy Sue in the early days the San Francisco Cyberculture, a generation destined to change the world with the web, computers and interactive multimedia. As a director for building the online community of Match.com, now the largest relationship site on the web, and educator for Fujitsu’s World’s Away, one of the earliest online Virtual Worlds, she was going places, helping to shape the very idea of what is now known as social media today.

But around the time of her 30th birthday, Wendy Sue felt something in her life was missing. It wasn’t a boyfriend, or money, or friends. No, it was something else, something spiritual, a deeper connecton with the divine that her exciting life was not delivering.  So she asked the universe to help her with this most important issue. And boy, did it deliver, in spades…Wendy Sue showing Martin Scorsese his fan email for the first time.

After giving an exciting demo of social virtual worlds at the world-renowned SIGGRAPH conference in LA in 1997 with Bruce Damer, who had just written the definitive book on the topic, “AVATARS!,” she met a mysterious man who wanted to build a spiritual virtual world to be called “Celestia.”  Recognizing his face from a recent dream, she felt Kalifa was the answer to her prayers for a spiritual guru.  

Shortly thereafter, she disappeared from the San Francisco cyberculture, cutting all contacts with friends family and associates. She had disappeared into the cult of Kalifa, becoming his 5th wife, bearing five children in a highly abusive and disempowering relationship with him and his multiple wife-based spiritual family.  

After a harrowing escape from this hell world, where she was keep penniless, and later homeless and childless, she has emerged with her children and psyche intact, and has recently published the memoirs of her experiences, “Real Eyes Faith.”

This is a story of the strength of human spirit in confronting serious adversity, and the transition from blind to real faith, and coming home with lessons of life that can enrich us all.  Enjoy!  

Wendy Sue today with her five children

Guest - Michael Gosney

Listen Now to Michael Gosney

Michael Gosney is a veteran “new edge” media producer and impresario whose productions and events have defined the emergent integrative culture for 25 years – from holistic health to deep ecology to small press publishing to new science to desktop publishing and multimedia to eco-cities to cyberculture to electronic music to the “transmodern tribalism” evolving in festival culture, intentional communities and new social and economic networks across the planet.