Escape Velocity (3 page)

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 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 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 back-to-the-land hippie bible, the Whole Earth Catalogue (whose prescient motto was "access to tools"). Other prominent cyberdelic spokespeople, such as the Mondo 2000 founders Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius; Howard Rheingold, the author of books on virtual reality and on-line communities; John Perry Barlow, an advocate of computer users' rights; and the virtual reality innovators Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier, are steeped in the Northern California counterculture of the sixties.

Rooted in Northern California and rallied around the Berkeley-based quarterly Mondo 2000, the cyberdelic phenomenon encompasses a cluster of subcultures, among them Deadhead computer hackers, "ravers" (habitues of all-night electronic dance parties known as "raves"), techno-pagans, and New Age technophiles.

Cyberdelia reconciles the transcendentalist impulses of sixties counterculture with the infomania of the nineties. As well, it nods in passing to the seventies, from which it borrows the millenarian mysticism of the New Age and the apolitical self-absorption of the human potential movement. As the cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling points out.

Today, for a surprising number of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between bohemian and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog w^ith a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours. ^

In his cyber-hippie travelogue, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyper-space, Douglas RushkofF uses the "trippy fractal simulations" Sterling mentions-intricate, involuted abstractions generated by computers using complex mathematical formulae-as a root metaphor.^ To Rushkoff, the fractal is emblematic of the cyberdelic subcultures he collectively calls Cyberia (a coinage borrowed from the Autodesk company's Cyberia Project, a virtual reality initiative). It serves as a cyber-hippie yin-yang symbol, signifying the union of the "tw^o cultures"-the scientific and the nonscientific-into which society has been split by the scientific advances of the twentieth century, to use the scientist and essayist C. P. Snow's famous phrase.