Escape Velocity

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Through its long, laborious birth, Escape Velocity had many midwives.

My editor, Anton Mueller, hacked his way through the polysyllables to produce a book that was lighter by many pages, and the better for it.

Gareth Branwyn was my virtual Virgil in the trackless wilds of cyberspace; my chapter on sex and technology benefited greatly from his meticulous reading. In our many exhaustive, exhilarating conversations, Scott Bukatman spurred me on to new insights, admonishing me, always, to beware the dreaded "cyberdrool" that turns so much writing about cyber-culture to mush. Chris Grigg vastly improved my chapter section on performing robots with his sharp-witted, often hilarious critique. Additionally, the unpublished manuscript for his anti-guidebook, "Negativland Presents the Rex Everything Guides, Volume 1: Disneyland," proved a mother lode of inside information about the Magic Kingdom. My chapter on cyberdelia was the better for Erik Davis's Kurtzian forays into the dark heart of technopaganism. My analyses of Pat Cadigan's novels profited from her keen-eyed reading. Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp were my Johnny Mnemonics when I was in pursuit of SF trivia; both shared generously of their encyclopedic knowledge and prodigious libraries. Others opened their Rolodexes, rendered assistance in practical matters, or simply offered words of encouragement, foremost among them Mark Pauline and D. A. Therrien, followed closely by William Barg, Sioux Z. of Formula public relations, Kiyo Joo, Jan E. Willey, Christian Waters, Jonathan Shaw, Dr. Burt Brent, Bart Nagel, and Rich Leeds. I am forever grateful to the WELL and ECHO for online press passes that proved invaluable, and to electronic correspondents too numerous to name (although Tiffany Lee Brown, Maxwell X. Delysid,

Richard Kadrey, Jon Lebkowsky, Paco Xander Nathan, Rodney Orpheus, Howard Rheingold, R. U. Sirius, Darren Wershler-Henry, Erika Whiteway, and the legions who responded to my electronic questionnaire deserve special mention).

I owe a debt of gratitude to the photographers whose work graces these pages, many of whom accepted far less than their usual rates.

And I am indebted, more generally, to Bill Mullen, a gifted critic, friend of many years, and foeman worthy of the sturdiest steel; my analysis of Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" and my chapter on sex and technology were sharpened by our thrust and parry. As well, conversations with Mike Davis, Stuart Ewen, Claudia Springer, and Andrew Ross helped shape my thinking about culture in general and cyberculture in specific; the echoes of their ideas can be heard throughout these pages.

Finally, this book would have remained a virtual reality were it not for the Herculean labors of my untiring, uncomplaining agents Laurie Fox and Linda Chester, of the Linda Chester Literary Agency.

But it is with Margot Mifflin-sounding board, sparring partner, soul mate, and so much more-that these acknowledgments must close. Her slashing red pen saved me, time and again, from my worst excesses; her unsinkable optimism buoyed me during dark nights of the soul; her support in countless everyday but all-important ways enabled me to attain escape velocity.

INTRODUCTION: ESCAPE VELOCITY

Reprinted with per mission from winter 1995 Adbusters Quarterly

warning: in case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.

—born-again Christian bumper sticker

Escape velocity is the speed at which a body-a spacecraft, for instance-overcomes the gravitational pull of another body, such as the Earth. More and more, computer culture, or cyberculture, seems as if it is on the verge of attaining escape velocity. Marshall McLuhan's 1967 pronouncement that electronic media have spun us into a blurred, breathless "world of allatonce-ness" where information "pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously," sometimes overwhelming us, is truer than ever.'

The giddy speedup of postwar America is almost entirely a consequence of the computer, the information engine that has wrenched us out of the age of factory capitalism and hurled us into the postindustrial era of transnational corporate capitalism. In America, manufacturing is undergoing what Buckminster Fuller called the "ephemeralization of work"-the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process. The engines of industrial production have given way to an information economy that produces intangible commodities-Hollywood blockbusters, TV programs, high-tech theme parks, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions that flicker through fiber-optic bundles to computer terminals a world away. "Only 17 percent of working Americans now manufacture anything, down from 22 percent as recently as 1980," wrote Robert B. Reich in 1992.^ According to the New York Times, American films "produce the second largest trade surplus, after airplane sales, of any American industry"^ Immaterial commodities dominate the domestic market

as well: A recent Business Week feature reported that "entertainment and recreation-not health care or autos-have provided the biggest boost to consumer spending" since 1991/ We are moving, at dizzying speed, from a reassuringly solid age of hardware into a disconcertingly wraithlike age of software, in which circuitry too small to see and code too complex to fully comprehend controls more and more of the world around us.

Although the genealogy of the computer can be traced to Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a steam-powered, programmable mechanical computer designed (but never built) in 1833, Colossus was history's first working electronic computer and the immediate ancestor of today's machines. A hulking monstrosity powered by two thousand vacuum tubes and programmed with punched paper tape. Colossus was developed in 1943 by the British to decrypt enemy messages encoded by the German Enigma machine; its success proved invaluable to the Allied war effort.

The runaway pace of postwar innovation has seen room-sized, vacuum tube-powered behemoths such as ENIAC-the first fully electronic programmable computer, officially switched on in 1946-shrink to a transistorized machine in the fifties, a box full of integrated circuits in the sixties, and a chip-driven microcomputer in the seventies, all the while growing exponentially more powerful.

By the late seventies, computers were a fixture in most businesses, and growing numbers of consumers were buying home computers such as the Apple II, the TRS-80, and the Commodore PET. Even so, it has been just over a decade since the computer revolution moved beyond the esoteric subcultures of researchers and hobbyists to become a mass culture phenomenon with the debut of the IBM Personal Computer in late '81 and the Apple Macintosh in early '84. It was only in January '83, when the PC's sales figures had skyrocketed from a mere twenty thousand machines sold during its first year on the market to five hundred thousand, that a Time cover story pronounced the personal computer the "machine of the year."^ Otto Friedrich wrote, "Now, thanks to the transistor and the silicon chip, the computer has been reduced so dramatically in both bulk and price that it is accessible to millions. . . . The 'information revolution' that futurists have long predicted has arrived."^

Likewise, the on-line world now frequented by an estimated seven and a half million households was all but unknown to mainstream America

Escape Velocity 5

as recently as the early nineties. Media awareness of the Internet reached critical mass in 1993: "Suddenly the Internet is the place to be," wrote Times Philip Elmer-Dewitt; the New York Times's John Markoff confirmed that the global network was "the world's most fashionable rendezvous," a trendy "on-line gathering spot for millions of PC users around the world."^

The Internet was born of ARPANet, a decentralized computer network developed at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969 by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to ensure military communications in the event of a nuclear attack. By using a technique called packet-switching to disassemble data into addressed parcels, blip them over high-speed lines, and reassemble them just before they reach their destination, ARPANet rendered itself invulnerable to conventional attack; if a portion of the network went down, traffic would automatically be rerouted. In 1983, ARPANet was divided into military and civilian networks (Milnet and Arpa Internet, respectively); shortly thereafter, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) took charge of the administration and maintenance of the lines and equipment that made up the Arpa Internet "backbone." Whereas the Defense Department restricted system access to institutions receiving Pentagon or NSF funding, the NSF made the network available to all faculty and students at member institutions. As universities, R and D companies, and government agencies connected their computers to the NSF's system, what had once been the Arpa Internet mutated into an anarchic global network of networks known, increasingly, as the Internet (from "internetworking").

By 1990, ARPANet had ceased to exist as a discrete entity; the kudzulike growth of the Internet, or Net, as netsurfers have come to call it, had engulfed it. The global metanetwork of today's Net embraces some ten thousand networks, among them nationwide commercial services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and America Online; the private, academic, and government institutions interwoven by NSFNET (the NSF's network); and esoteric regional BBSs (bulletin board systems) such as the Sausalito, California-based WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and New York's ECHO. Mind-bogglingly, the Internet is itself part of a still larger complex of interconnected networks commonly called the Matrix, which also includes UseNet (a buzzing hive of discussion groups called "newsgroups"), FidoNet

6 Mark Dery

(a constellation of more than twenty thousand BBSs, scattered over six continents), and BITNET (Because It's Time Network, an academic system), among others.

As this is written, an estimated thirty million Internet users in more than 137 countries traverse the electronic geography of what the science fiction novelist William Gibson has called "cyberspace"-an imaginary space that exists entirely inside a computer-and their ranks are growing by as many as a million a month.^ Based on the rate at which computer networks are building on-ramps onto the Internet, a 1993 estimate put its growth rate at a staggering 2 5 percent every three months-a delirious pace that shows no sign of abating.^

The ephemeralization of labor and the evanescence of the commodity, in cyberculture, is paralleled by the disembodiment of the human. In growing numbers, we are spending ever greater amounts of our lives in cyberspace; like the sagely cyborg in Bruce Sterling's SF novel Schismatrix, we are convinced that "there's a whole world behind this screen.'"^ The electronically disembodied are zapping E-mail around the world, typing messages back and forth in real-time "chat," and flocking to BBS discussion topics and UseNet newsgroups. They're lurking and flaming and ROTFLOL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing Out Loud). They're swapping pornographic .GIFs (digitized photos) and swinging in anonymous "text sex" trysts. They're mousing around the Net's latest addition, the World Wide Web, a hypertext-based system that enables users around the globe to point and click from one multimedia site to another, bouncing from digitized video clips to snippets of sound to screenfuls of text without end.

Overwhelmingly, they're convinced that there is a "there" there, after all. As I observed in my introduction to Flame Wars, a collection of essays on cyberculture.

Those who spend an inordinate amount of time connected by modem via telephone lines to virtual spaces often report a peculiar sensation of "thereness"; prowling from one [electronic] conference to another, eavesdropping on discussions in progress, bears an uncanny resemblance to wandering the hallways of some labyrinthine mansion, poking one's head

Escape Velocity 7

into room after room. "One of the most striking features of the WELL," observed a user named loca, "is that it actually creates a feeling of 'place.' I'm staring at a computer screen. But the feeling really is that I'm 'in' something; I'm some 'where.'""

Even as the computer is revolutionizing our immaterial lives through electronic interconnection, it is irretrievably altering our material lives, as w^ell. "Embedded" microprocessors-speck-sized computers mounted on tiny flakes of silicon-make our car engines, microw^ave ovens, Stairmasters, and sewing machines markedly "smarter" than their precursors. And as those who live the wired life know, the incredible shrinking computer now accompanies the user virtually anywhere, as a laptop, palmtop, or pocket-sized computer/communicator such as the beleaguered Apple Newton Message Pad. Any day now, we are told, such devices will come alive, animated by "intelligent agents"-software programs that act as personal assistants, scheduling meetings, answering E-mail, trolling the Net in search of information.

The computer revolution has made a host of mind-jarring technologies at least theoretically possible. Celebrated in Sunday supplements or Omni articles, some exist as hardware or software; others are pure vaporware (Silicon Valley slang for products announced far in advance of a release date that may or may not ever arrive).