Escape Velocity Read Online Free Page A

computer culture.
    "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the opening line of Joan Didion's White Album, is one of Escape Velocitys keystone assumptions. This book is less about technology than it is about the stories we tell ourselves about technology, and the ideologies hidden in those stories-the politics of myth. The cyber-hippies, technopagans, and New Age advocates of "consciousness technologies" in chapter 1 ("Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In: Cyber-delia") invest the new machine with a soul, relocating the Sacred in cyberspace. As well, they join the cultural struggle for ownership of the sixties: Rebooting the transcendentalism of the counterculture in nineties cyberculture, they purge it of its Luddism and consecrate it to technology's promise. On a related note, the cyber-rockers and cyberpunk writers in chapter 2 ("Metal Machine Music: Cyberpunk Meets the Black Leather Synth-Rockers") scuffle over the legitimacy of their mutual claims to the torn mantle of adolescent rebellion. In so doing, they highlight the essentially cyberpunk nature of rock music, a form of low-tech insurrection made possible by human-machine interface. The rogue technologists and

    cyber-body artists mentioned earlier mount techno-spectacles in which amok robots and humans menaced by heavy machinery dramatize popular anxieties over the growling autonomy of intelligent machines, especially "smart" w^eapons, and the seeming obsolescence of humanity. In chapter 5 ("RoboCopulation: Sex Times Technology Equals the Future"), on-line sw^ingers w^ho engage in text sex and hackers who fantasize about anatomically accurate robo-bimbos cast a revealing light on the gender politics of computer culture, and on our national obsession with the mechanizing of sex and the sexualizing of machines. Lastly, there are the postmodern exponents, in chapter 6, of what David Cronenberg calls "uncontrollable flesh": a self-made "morph" whose body, through avant-garde surgery, is her medium; a male-to-female transsexual who fancies herself the "techno-woman of the '90s"; bodybuilders who Nautilize themselves into machine-age icons; plastic surgeons who dream of human wings; prophets of posthuman evolution. These and others in cyberculture spin millennial fables about the transitional state and uncertain fate of the body, late in the twentieth century.
    The subcultures explored in Escape Velocity act as prisms, refracting the central themes that shaft through cyberculture, among them the intersection, both literal and metaphorical, of biology and technology, and the growing irrelevance of the body as sensory experience is gradually supplanted by digital simulation. Each, in its own way, makes sense—or nonsense-of the dialectic that pits New Age technophiles, epitomized by the Wired editor Kevin Kelly, who believes that technology is "absolutely, 100 percent, positive," against doomsaying technophobes such as John Zerzan, the anarchist theorist who contends that technology is "right at the heart of what is so chronically wrong with society."^^ Each subculture plots a course between escapism and engagement, between techno-transcendentalism and politics on the ground, in everyday cyberculture.
    Most important, fringe computer culture relocates our cultural conversation about technology from the there and then to the here and now, wiring it into the power relations and social currents of our historical moment. It keeps us mindful of Donna Haraway's admonition that any "transcendentalist" ideology that promises "a way out of history, a way of. . . denying mortality" contains the seeds of a self-fulfilling apocalypse. What we need, more than ever, she argues, is a

    deep, inescapable sense of the fragility of the lives that we're leading-that we really do die, that we really do wound each other, that the Earth really is finite, that there aren't any other planets out there that we know of that we can live on, that escape velocity is a deadly fantasy. ^^
    The rhetoric of