Escape Velocity Read Online Free Page B

escape velocity crosses cyberpunk science fiction w^ith the Pentecostal belief in an apocalyptic Rapture, in which history ends and the faithful are gathered up into the heavens. Visions of a cyber-Rapture are a fatal seduction, distracting us from the devastation of nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, and the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses. The weight of social, political, and ecological issues brings the posthuman liftoff from biology, gravity, and the twentieth century crashing down to Earth.
    As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, we would do well to remember that-for the foreseeable future, at least-we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The misguided hope that we will be born again as "bionic angels," to quote Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus. It pins our future to wings of wax and feathers.

    1 / TURN ON, BOOT UP, JACK IN
    C J herdelia

    Ravers. Photo: SKID

    Flashback to the Future: The Counterculture, 2.0
    "The '90s are just the '60s upside down," says the comedian Philip Proctor.' LSD is in vogue again. The "classic rock" of the sixties rules FM radio. Jimi Hendrix has been trance-channeled by the retrorocker Lenny Kravitz, whose flowered shirts and squalling wah-wah guitar pay devoted homage to Hendrix's style and sound. Oliver Stone has refought the Vietnam war (Platoon), resurrected Jim Morrison {The Doors), and obsessed on the blurred phantoms of the Zapruder film and the hermetic meanings of the Warren Report (JFK). On August 13, 1994, hordes of Generation Xers and an attendant army of hucksters and roving reporters descended on Sauger-ties, New York, for Woodstock '94, a hyped-to-death attempt to regain paradise at $135 a head.
    As with all revisionist fads, the sixties redux is largely a fashion statement, skinning the look of the decade and leaving its stormy politics and troubling contradictions behind. A bell-bottomed naif gambols across a 1993 Macy's ad: "don't worry, be hippie," counsels the caption.^ A Details pictorial from the same year reconciles boomers and Gen Xers in images of longhaired, love-beaded models in fringed vests and paisley-printed jeans: "Counterculture style returns to where it once began. . . . [TJhese hippie-inspired clothes bridge the gap between grunge and glamour."^ Time travel is a snap and decades can be mixed and matched when history is reduced to a series of frozen poses and kitschy cliches. The politics of style supplant the politics of the generation gap.
    But the superficial faddishness of bell-bottoms and baby-doll dresses belies a deeper cultural tug-of-war over the meaning of the sixties. This

    pitched battle was a subplot of the 1992 presidential campaign. In his campaign ads, Bill Clinton positioned himself as a grown-up exemplar of John F. Kennedy's idealistic "new generation of Americans." Flushed with his Gulf War exorcism of the ghost of Vietnam, George Bush turned Clinton's sixties exploits-dodging the draft, protesting the war, smoking (but not inhaling) dope-into campaign issues. "[T|he GOP has found a new all-purpose enemy: the '60s," observed the Newsweek writer Howard Fine-man. "The critique is that in a mad, 'permissive' decade the nation threw away its will, its discipline, its faith in the family and the military, in moral absolutes and rightful authority.'"*
    The return of the sixties, and the culture war raging around the memory of that turbulent decade, is at the heart of the cyberdelic wing of fringe computer culture. Not surprisingly, many of cyberdelia's media icons are familiar faces from the sixties: No magazine cover story on the phenomenon is complete without the septuagenarian Timothy Leary, admonishing readers to "turn on, boot up, jack in" and proclaiming that the "PC is the LSD of the 1990s," or Stewart Brand, the former Merry Prankster and creator of the