Escape Velocity Read online

  Even as the computer is revolutionizing our immaterial lives through electronic interconnection, it is irretrievably altering our material lives, as well. “Embedded” microprocessors–speck-sized computers mounted on tiny flakes of silicon–make our car engines, microwave 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).

  The futuristic sheen of virtual reality-a simulation technology that employs TV goggles and quadraphonic sound to immerse users in 3-D, computer-graphic worlds-briefly captured the media’s magpie eye in 1991 with the promise of a tomorrow where virtual thrill seekers, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, roam the red seas of Mars without leaving their armchairs. Today, virtual reality is a fixed landmark on the popscape, from arcade VR such as Horizon Entertainment’s Virtuality games to theme park attractions such as the Aladdin ride at Orlando’s Walt Disney World to the Fox TV series VR.5 to the movie Lawnmower Man. A San Francisco dentist provides his patients with VR headgear and sets them adrift in computer-animated dreamworlds during surgery; medical students operate on bodies of information through a VR training system developed by Cine-Med; and wheelchair-bound paraplegics in the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center escape their confinement for a fleeting hour or two, stalking monsters in the shadowy dungeons of a VR game called Heretic.12

  Other technologies hover below the event horizon. K. Eric Drexler, the founding father of nanotechnology, imagines the creation of self-replicating subatomic engines called nanomachines. In theory, these microscopic devices could slurp up oil spills or suck up toxic clouds; remove diseased DNA segments from the cells of AIDS patients, effectively curing them; or repair the ravages of normal aging at a cellular level, affording near immortality.

  Even further afield, the artificial intelligence theorist Hans Moravec calmly assures us that we are about to enter a “postbiological” universe in which robotic life forms capable of independent thought and procreation will “mature into entities as complex as ourselves.” Soon, he insists, we will download our willing spirits into computer memory or robotic bodies and do away with the weak flesh altogether.

  Clearly, cyberculture is approaching escape velocity in the philosophical as well as the technological sense. It resounds with transcendentalist fantasies of breaking free from limits of any sort, metaphysical as well as physical. Ironically, the very scientific worldview and runaway technological acceleration some say have produced the spiritual vacuum and societal fragmentation that are fertile ground for millenarian beliefs are spawning a technoeschatology of their own-a theology of the ejector seat.

  Increasingly, the musings of scientists, science fiction novelists, and futurologists are inflected with a millennial mysticism. Moravec predicts the creation of human-level machine intelligence by 2010, a development he contends will catalyze quantum leaps in robot evolution, leading ultimately to a universe watched over by godlike machines. For old times’ sake, these cybergods may choose to digitize the human race and preserve it in a computer-generated world-the virtual reality equivalent of the Kryptonian city-in-a-bottle in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. In a similar vein, the mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge maintains that cybernetic evolution will give rise to a “greater than human intelligence” between 2005 and 2030, at which point ultra-intelligent machine life will assume control of its own destiny, producing ever smarter progeny at an ever faster pace. The inevitable result, he argues, will be the ascent of a superevolved, technologically enhanced posthumanity.

  The physicist Frank J. Tipler goes even further, reconciling physics and metaphysics. In The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology God and the Resurrection of the Dead, he offers nothing less than a “testable physical theory for an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God who will one day in the far future resurrect every single one of us to live forever in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian heaven.”13 Tipler posits an Omega Point (a term borrowed from the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) of infinite density and temperature toward which the universe will collapse in a backwards Big Bang called the Big Crunch. The energy generated by this implosion could be used, he theorizes, to drive a cosmic computer simulator (think of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Holodeck) with infinite processing power-enough, certainly, to bring back to (virtual) life every creature that ever lived.

  Techno-transcendentalist ruminations from the far fringes of physics and artificial intelligence overlap with the millenarian prophecies of New Age visionaries, many of whom speak a sci-fi language appropriate to our age. Timothy Leary’s heir apparent, the cyberdelic philosopher Terence McKenna, has produced a software package called Timewave Zero that illustrates his vision of the end of history–on December 12, 2012, to be exact-with the arrival of an ineffable mysterium tremendum that he calls “the transcendental object at the end of time.” A cross between the enigmatic monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point (an evolutionary epiphany that marks the arrival of an “Ultra-Humanity”), McKenna’s transcendental object is, in his words, a “cosmic singularity”–a term from chaos theory that refers to the transition point, in a dynamical system, between one state and another. He speculates that the coming of this cosmic singularity may usher in a cybernetic Garden of Earthly Delights where

  all of the technological appurtenances of the present world have been shrunk to the point where they have disappeared into [nature] and are scattered as grains of sand along the beaches of this planet and we all live naked in paradise but only a thought away is all the cybernetic connectedness and ability to deliver manufactured goods and data that this world possesses.14

  As the millennium draws near, we are witnessing the convergence of what Leo Marx has called “the rhetoric of the technological sublime” -hymns to progress that rise “like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions”–and the es-chatology that has structured Western thought throughout history, in one form or another: the Judeo-Christian Second Coming, the capitalist myth of never-ending progress, Marxism’s predestined triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.15

  America, to which this book confines its scope, is the fountainhead of this techno-eschatology. Since its beginnings, the United States has been Utopia’s home-the “city upon a hill” envisioned by John Winthrop, where Christian teleology, free-market visions of boundless expansion, and an abiding faith in technology have intertwined in a secular theology. The machine-age artist Charles Sheeler, famous for his meticulously realistic paintings of American industry, once observed, “Our factories are our substitutes for religious expression.”16

  Here at the end of the twentieth century, the rhetoric of escape velocity seduces us with its promise of deliverance from human history and mortality. Who can resist hoping that McKenna is right when he assures us that we will have front-row seats at doomsday, elevating our brief lives to cosmic significance? “We are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos,” he predicts. In our transmigration from the mundane world into “hyperspace,” “we will be privileged to see the greatest release of concressed change probably since the birth of the universe.”17

  But as Thomas Hine reminds us in Facing Tomorrow: What the F
uture Has Been, What the Future Can Be, futures like McKenna’s are stories we tell ourselves about the present–“an attempt to invest our lives with a meaning and a drama that transcend the inevitable decay and death of the individual. We want our stories to lead us somewhere and come to a satisfying conclusion, even though not all do so.”18 Placing our faith in an end-of-the-century deus ex machina that will obviate the need to confront the social, political, economic, and ecological problems clamoring for solutions is a risky endgame. The metaphysical glow that increasingly haloes the high-tech tomorrows of cyberdelic philosophers, corporate futurologists, pop science programs such as the Discovery Channel’s Beyond 2000, or even ads such as AT&T’s “You Will” campaign, blinds us to the pressing concerns all around us.

  In AT&T’s corporate brand TV spots, all is sweetness and light. “Have you ever opened doors with the sound of your voice?” asks a familiar voice, over a countrified jingle that conjures the wide, open territories of the electronic frontier. “You will.” A young woman steps out of an elevator, her arms full, and her apartment door unlocks at her command. The elevator landing bears a striking resemblance to Rick Deckard’s in Blade Runner, but this is a kinder, gentler future; Tom Selleck’s friendly rasp has replaced Harrison Ford’s numb, monotonic voice-over, and Blade Runner’s Wagnerian twilight has been thinned out and brightened up.

  Brought to you by the mother of all communications companies, AT&T’s future is, in the best tradition of technological Utopias, a luminous place, not far off. “I can see the future and it’s a place about 70 miles east of here, where it’s lighter,” intones Laurie Anderson in her song “Let X = X.” The golden glow that suffuses the spacious interiors in the spots-light made gauzy with the aid of fog machines-sentimentalizes corporate dreams of electronic interconnectedness by premisting the viewer’s eyes. Moreover, it lends AT&T’s vision of things to come an almost metaphysical air, drawing on the long-standing equation of the luminous with the numinous-an equation that is at least as old as the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan’s evocation of that ultimate virtual reality, the afterlife (“They are all gone into the world of light!”) and as recent as the radiant aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Finally, it reminds us that technology is being etherealized, transformed into what the cultural critic Donna Haraway calls “machines made of sunshine . . . nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves.”19 Even now, information flashes through fiber-optic cables, coded as pulses of light, and Bell Lab researchers are laying the groundwork for a computer technology based on photons, the particles of zero mass that make up light.

  Oddly enough, the transformation of industrial capitalism’s dark satanic mills into postindustrial “machines made of sunshine” seems not to have lightened our burden as workers. In a world where “we’re all connected,” to quote New York Telephone, the office intrudes on our vacations, the workday stretches into our evenings: Video screens, phones, and laptop jacks convert every seat in the new Boeing 777 into an airborne office; the pagers and cellular phones provided by one resort in Vail, Colorado, turn downtime on the ski lifts into worktime.

  “If you don’t close the door to your work,” says Peter G. Hanson, the author of Stress for Success, “it spills over into other areas of your life, making it hard to give anything your full attention-particularly leisure.”20 In the “You Will” spots, a young male executive links up with a videoconference from what appears to be a seaside cabana: “Have you ever attended a meeting in your bare feet? You will. And the company that will bring it to you . . . AT&T.”

  AT&T has already brought us the videophone and the wireless personal communicator (a combination computer, fax/modem, and cellular phone); the dashboard navigator, automated tollbooth, and voice-recognizing lock are supposedly only a few years away. But the promised Tomorrowland of eternal leisure that was supposed to follow in the wake of these marvels has faded into history, supplanted by a corporate future where we are always at the beeper’s beck and perpetually in motion, too pressed for time to stop for directions or decelerate for tolls. A yuppie mother on a business trip coos at her baby on a videophone screen: “Have you ever . . . tucked your baby in from a phone booth? You will.” The “time famine” from which today’s sleep-deprived workforce suffers reaches new heights of absurdity in a future where the quintessential maternal act-tucking baby in–is performed via videophone, with Ma Bell as the surrogate mother.

  Something as flimsy as a TV commercial might seem to creak under weighty analysis, but the grassroots response to the AT&T campaign suggests that others have divined similar meanings in the ads. The imperious “You Will,” whose peremptory tone forecloses any alternatives to AT&T’s corporate brand future, has clearly hit a raw nerve. Adbusters, a Canadian magazine of media criticism, recently ran a deft parody of one of the “You Will” ads. Its satirical copy reminds us that monitoring technologies such as the global positioning system in AT&T’s dashboard navigator, which can tell you where you are anywhere on Earth, could also enable direct marketers or government agencies to pinpoint your location. “Have you ever felt oppressed or manipulated through technology?” smirks the parody. “YOU WILL. In the near future, no matter where you are, marketers, pollsters, and infobots will be close at hand.”21

  On the WELL, users voiced their misgivings about AT&T’s wired world. The cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling fired the first round in a fusillade of well-aimed wisecracks:

  HAVE YOU EVER . . . had your nattering co-workers pursue you, without mercy, to the *beach*, where they insist on your making vitally important business decisions even though you’re blitzed on kamikazes?? YOU WILL!22

  Ross Stapleton-Gray quipped,

  Have you ever had your . . . babysitter reroute the house inter-video-com into her school’s local net and broadcast your “afternoon delight?” Had a bit error cause a turnpike crossbar to come down on the windshield of your [Mazda] Miata at 100 [miles per hour]? YOU WILL!23

  And Mitch Ratcliffe added:

  HAVE YOU EVER tried to live in a world imagined by a major corporation? If you call that living, YOU WILL.24

  In their tart send-ups of the “You Will” ads, Sterling and his fellow WELL-dwellers restore the missing critical dimension to AT&T’s misty future. Vital issues are nestled inside their throwaway one-liners, among them the alarming ease with which 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.25

  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, t
he 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 determined 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”), who 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.