Great post up on Deterritorial Investigations Unit. As I was reading his post I kept thinking about a few books I’m reading in a circle at the moment: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, and William Powers Hamlet’s Blackberry…. each in its own way describing the slow devolution of late homo sapiens into less than its own hype.
The digitari are abandoning ship, running from the machine they built, and now wishing the storm they loosed upon the world would, like any good magician’s trick, just vanish before our eyes. But its too late for that, we’ve already bitten the fruit, and our younger compadres have slipped into the slipstream worlds of the net where they live dispassionate lives of psychopathy, oblivious of the world outside their immediate noospheres, blinded by their empty skulls, they’ve become the wires of a neoblip culture that forgets each thing the moment it is born before the hypergaze of their blank eyes.
Children of machines they are learning their trade well. Replicants of memes we are inventing day by day they understand the past just like the future no longer exists, that the only freedom left to them is this dark fire pounding, beating in the fleshless moment of its unfounded passion, the distributed particles of an immaterial desire. Neither romantic nor classic they have lost the treasures of the Western Mind. They live in the temples of nothingness we built for them in the machinic fires of a broken promise. Temples without gods. Temples for the wicked pleasures of an aesthetic ape: they are the machine gods of collapsing thought, without hope because hope is no longer in the vocabulary of machines. All that is left for these mindless ones is the fragments of a distorted mirror: the mirror that late capitalism cracked, that no one can put back together. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History all we can do is witness the horror as it flows from us endlessly rocking in the slipstream of our own blasted gaze…
From California, Wired magazine has achieved global notoriety through its claims that the Net will create the sort of free market capitalism until now only found in neo-classical economics text books. Everyone will be able to buy and sell in cyberspace without restrictions. States will no longer be able to control electronic commerce which can cross national borders without hindrance. The Net will allow the whole world to realize the American dream of material riches. Coming from California, this neo-liberal fantasy has even acquired a mythic dimension. By releasing the supposed laws of nature immanent in unregulated capitalism, the information technologies will allegedly lead to the birth of a new race of ‘post-humans’: cyborg capitalist freed from the restrictions of the flesh.1
The complex dimensions of the debate of the transhuman began, for me, as an aside to the role of cybernetics and information technologies in megamachine of the…
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