Escape Velocity Read Online Free

privacy is invaded in the digital age and the disastrous consequences of software "bugs" and data entry error in an increasingly computerized culture. Percolating through these comments is a simmering resentment at the tacit assumption that the future will be-is being, even as you read this-hardwired by multinational corporations rather than collectively imagined by everyone who will one day inhabit it.
    As the credibility gap widens between the virtual world of light and the palpable facts of economic inequity and environmental depredation.

    many have begun to question the trickle-down theory of technological empowerment. As Gary Chapman, a former executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, points out.
    Zealots of the computer revolution usually explain that they are exploring the leading edge of the most significant transformation of society in our time, and that everybody else will eventually catch up as the results of technological tinkering filter down to the general public in the form of mass-produced commodities or social and economic reorganization . . . [but] there is an obvious disjuncture between the Panglossian pronouncements of people well rewarded or inspired by the computer revolution and the actual adjustment of society to the impact of this technology. ^^
    Simultaneously, the theology of the ejector seat, which preaches a seat-of-the-pants escape into an archaic Paradise Lost or a futuristic Paradise Regained, grows more untenable with each passing day. The Arcadias of the eighteenth-century Romantics or the sixties counterculture are not a viable option for the vast majority in cyberculture, who have no desire to return to a pretechnological life of backbreaking labor, chronic scarcity, and unchecked disease. Simultaneously, the gleaming futures of technophilic fantasy-from Norman Bel Geddes's streamlined Futurama at the 1939 New York World's Fair to Disney's space-age Tomorrowland to the techno-eschatology currently in vogue-look increasingly like so much unreal estate.
    Taking it as a given that technology is inextricably woven into the warp and woof of our lives, nearly all of the computer-age subcultures profiled in Escape Velocity short-circuit the technophile-versus-technophobe debate that inevitably follows that assumption. Most of them regard the computer-a metonymy, at this point, for all technology-as a Janus machine, an engine of liberation and an instrument of repression. And all are engaged in the inherently political activity of expropriating technology from the scientists and CEOs, policymakers and opinion-shapers who have traditionally deter-

    mined the applications, availability, and evolution of the devices that, more and more, shape our lives.
    Some subcultures, such as the underground roboticists and the cyber-body artists profiled in chapters 3 ("Waging a Tinkerer's War: Mechanical Spectacle") and 4 ("Ritual Mechanics: Cybernetic Body Art"), enact this dynamic literally, reanimating cast-off or obsolete technology in perverse, often subversive performances that turn a critical eye on the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Others, such as the postmodern primitives examined in chapter 6 ("Cyborging the Body Politic"), w^ho sport "biomechanical" tattoos of machine parts or microcircuitry, retrofit and refunction the signs and symbols, myths and metaphors of cyberculture.
    Wittingly or not, all of them constitute living proof of William Gibson's cyberpunk maxim, "the street finds its own uses for things" -a leitmotif that reappears throughout this book. Whether literal or metaphorical, their reclamation of technology and the complex, contradictory meanings that swirl around it shifts the focus of public discourse about technology from the corridors of power to Gibson's (figurative) street; from the technopundits, computer industry executives, and Senate subcommittee members who typically dominate that discourse to the disparate voices on the fringes of