published in 1994
Data Trash is one of the most insightful books on the post-human future
being manufactured by the virtual class. By Arthur Kroker and Michael
Weinstein.
The Theory of the Virtual
Class
Wired Shut
Wired intends to profit from the Internet. And so do a lot
of others. "People are going to have to realize that the Net is another
medium, and it has to be sponsored commercially and it has to play by the rules
of the marketplace," says John Battelle, Wired's 28-year old managing
editor. "You're still going to have sponsorship, advertising, the rules of
the game, because it's just necessary to make commerce work." "I
think that a lot of what some of the original Net god-utopians were
thinking," continued Battelle, "is that there was just going to be
this sort of huge anarchist, utopian, bliss medium, where there are no rules
and everything is just sort of open. That's a great thought, but it's not going
to work. And when the Time Warners get on the Net in a hard fashion it's going
to be the people who first create the commerce and the environment, like Wired,
that will be the market leaders."
-Andrew Leonard, "Hot-Wired"
The Bay Guardian
The twentieth-century ends with the growth of
cyber-authoritarianism, a stridently pro-technotopia movement, particularly in
the mass media, typified by an obsession to the point of hysteria with emergent
technologies, and with a consistent and very deliberate attempt to shut down,
silence, and exclude any perspectives critical of technotopia. Not a wired
culture, but a virtual culture that is wired shut: compulsively fixated on
digital technology as a source of salvation from the reality of a lonely
culture and radical social disconnection from everyday life, and determined to
exclude from public debate any perspective that is not a cheerleader for the
coming-to-be of the fully realized technological society. The virtual class is
populated by would-be astronauts who never got the chance to go to the moon,
and they do not easily accept criticism of this new Apollo project for the body
telematic.
This is unfortunate since it is less a matter
of being pro- or anti-technology, but of developing a critical perspective on
the ethics of virtuality. When technology mutates into virtuality, the
direction of political debate becomes clarified. If we cannot escape the
hard-wiring of (our) bodies into wireless culture, then how can we inscribe
primary ethical concerns onto the will to virtuality? How can we turn the
virtual horizon in the direction of substantive human values: aesthetic
creativity, social solidarity, democratic discourse, and economic justice? To
link the relentless drive to cyberspace with ethical concerns is, of course, to
give the lie to technological liberalism. To insist, that is, that the
coming-to-be of the will to virtuality, and with it the emergence of our
doubled fate as either body dumps or hyper-texted bodies, virtualizers or data
trash, does not relax the traditional human injunction to give primacy to the
ethical ends of the technological purposes we choose (or the will to virtuality
that chooses us).
Privileging the question of ethics via
virtuality lays bare the impulse to nihilism that is central to the virtual
class. For it, the drive to planetary mastery represented by the will to
virtuality relegates the ethical suasion to the electronic trashbin. Claiming
with monumental hubris to be already beyond good and evil, it assumes perfect
equivalency between the will to virtuality and the will to the (virtual) good.
If the good is equivalent to the disintegration of experience into cybernetic
interactivity or to the disappearance of memory and solitary reflection into
massive Sunstations of archived information, then the virtual class is the
leading exponent of the era of telematic ethics. Far from having abandoned
ethical concerns, the virtual class has patched a coherent, dynamic, and
comprehensive system of ethics onto the hard-line processors of the will to virtuality.
Against economic justice, the virtual class practices a mixture of predatory
capitalism and gung-ho technocratic rationalizations for laying waste to social
concerns for employment, with insistent demands for "restructuring
economies, public policies of labor adjustment," and "deficit
cutting," all aimed at maximal profitability. Against democratic
discourse, the virtual class institutes anew the authoritarian mind, projecting
its class interests onto cyberspace from which vantage-point it crushes any and
all dissent to the prevailing orthodoxies of technotopia. For the virtual
class, politics is about absolute control over intellectual property by means
of war-like strategies of communication, control, and command. Against social
solidarity, the virtual class promotes a grisly form of raw social materialism,
whereby social experience is reduced to its prosthetic after-effects: the body
becomes a passive archive to be processed, entertained, and stockpiled by the
seduction-apertures of the virtual reality complex. And finally, against
aesthetic creativity, the virtual class promotes the value of
pattern-maintenance (of its own choosing), whereby human intelligence is
reduced to a circulating medium of cybernetic exchange floating in the
interfaces of the cultural animation machines. Key to the success of the
virtual class is its promotion of a radically diminished vision of human
experience and of a disintegrated conception of the human good: for
virtualizers, the good is ultimately that which disappears human subjectivity,
substituting the war-machine of cyberspace for the data trash of experience.
Beyond this, the virtual class can achieve dominance today because its reduced
vision of human experience consists of a digital superhighway, a fatal scene of
circulation and gridlock, which corresponds to how the late twentieth-century
mind likes to see itself. Reverse nihilism: not the nihilistic will as
projected outwards onto an external object, but the nihilistic will turned
inwards, decomposing subjectivity, reducing the self to an object of
conscience- and body vivisectioning. What does it mean when the body is
virtualized without a sustaining ethical vision? Can anyone be strong enough
for this? What results is rage against the body: a hatred of existence that can
only be satisfied by an abandonment of flesh and subjectivity and, with it, a
flight into virtuality. Virtuality without ethics is a primal scene of social
suicide: a site of mass cryogenics where bodies are quick-frozen for future
resequencing by the archived data networks. The virtual class can be this
dynamic because it is already the after-shock of the living dead: body
vivisectionists and early (mind) abandoners surfing the Net on a road trip to
the virtual Inferno.
"Adapt or You're Toast"
The virtual class has driven to global power
along the digital superhighway. Representing perfectly the expansionary
interests of the recombinant commodity-form, the virtual class has seized the
imagination of contemporary culture by conceiving a techno-utopian high-speed
cybernetic grid for travelling across the electronic frontier. In this
mythology of the new technological frontier, contemporary society is either
equipped for fast travel down the main arterial lanes of the information
highway, or it simply ceases to exist as a functioning member of technotopia.
As the CEOs and the specialist consultants of the virtual class triumphantly
proclaim: "Adapt or you're toast."
We now live in the age of dead information,
dead (electronic) space, and dead (cybernetic) rhetoric. Dead information?
That's our co-optation as servomechanisms of the cybernetic grid (the digital
superhighway) that swallows bodies, and even whole societies, into the dynamic
momentum of its telematic logic. Always working on the basis of the illusion of
enhanced interactivity, the digital superhighway is really about the full
immersion of the flesh into its virtual double. As dead (electronic) space,
the digital superhighway is a big real estate venture in cybernetic form, where
competing claims to intellectual property rights in an array of multi-media
technologies of communication are at stake. No longer capitalism under the
doubled sign of consumer and production models, the digital superhighway
represents the disappearance of capitalism into colonized virtual space. And dead
(cybernetic) rhetoric? That's the Internet's subordination to the predatory
business interests of a virtual class, which might pay virtual lip service to
the growth of electronic communities on a global basis, but which is devoted in
actuality to shutting down the anarchy of the Net in favor of virtualized
(commercial) exchange. Like a mirror image, the digital superhighway always
means its opposite: not an open telematic autoroute for fast circulation across
the electronic galaxy, but an immensely seductive harvesting machine for
delivering bodies, culture, and labor to virtualization. The information
highway is paved with (our) flesh. So consequently, the theory of the virtual
class: cultural accommodation to technotopia is its goal, political
consolidation (around the aims of the virtual class) its method, multi-media
nervous systems its relay, and (our) disappearance into pure virtualities its
ecstatic destiny.
That there is an inherent political
contradiction between the attempt by the virtual class to liquidate the
sprawling web of the Internet in favor of the smooth telematic vision of the
digital superhighway is apparent. The information highway is the antithesis of
the Net, in much the same way as the virtual class must destroy the public
dimension of the Internet for its own survival. The informational
technology of the Internet as a new force of virtual production provides
the social conditions necessary for instituting fundamentally new relations
of electronic creation. Spontaneously and certainly against the long-range
interests of the virtual class, the Internet has been swamped by demands for
meaning. Newly screen-radiated scholars dream up visions of a
But, of course, for the virtual class,
content slows the speed of virtualized exchange, and meaning becomes the
antagonistic contradiction of data. Accordingly, demands for meaning must be
immediately denied as just another road-kill along the virtual highway. As
such, the virtual class exercises its intense obsessive-compulsive drive to
subordinate society to the telematic mythology of the digital superhighway. The
democratic possibilities of the Internet, with its immanent appeal to new forms
of global communication, might have been the seduction-strategy appropriate for
the construction of the digital superhighway, but now that the cybernetic grid
is firmly in control, the virtual class must move to liquidate the Internet. It
is an old scenario, repeated this time in virtual form. Marx understood this
first: every technology releases opposing possibilities towards emancipation
and domination. Like its early bourgeois predecessors at the birth of
capitalism, the virtual class christens the birth of technotopia by suppressing
the potentially emancipatory relations of production released by the Internet
in favor of the traditionally predatory force of production signified by the
digital superhighway. Data is the anti-virus of meaning - telematic information
refuses to be slowed down by the drag-weight of content. And the virtual class
seeks to exterminate the social possibilities of the Internet. These are
the first lessons of the theory of the virtual class.
Information Highway/Media-Net:
Virtual Pastoral Power
The "information highway" has
become the key route into virtuality. The "information highway" is
another term for what we call the "media-net." It's a question of
whether we're cruising on a highway or being caught up in a Net, always already
available for (further) processing. The "highway" is definitely an
answer to "Star Wars": the communications complex takes over from the
"military-industrial complex." Unlike "Star Wars," however,
the "highway" has already (de-)materialized in the world behind the
monitors: cyber-space. For crash theory there is an irony: the highway is a trompe
l'oeil of possessive individualism covering the individual possessed by the
net, sucked into the imploded, impossible world behind the screen - related to
the dubious world of ordinary perception through cyber-space.
Chapter 1
(Part 2)
Information Highway vs.
Media-Net
The prophet-hypesters of the information
highway, from President Bill Clinton, USA, to President Bill Gates, Microsoft,
proclaim a revolution to a higher level of bourgeois consciousness. The highway
is the utopia of the possessive individual: the possessive individual now
resides in technotopia.
This is how the higher level of bourgeois
consciousness comes to be in grades of perfection. Firstly, we enter an
information highway which promises the "individual" access to
"information" from the universal archive instantly and about
anything. The capacity of the Net to hold information is virtually infinite and,
with the inevitable advances in microprocessors, its capacities to gather,
combine, and relay information will be equal to any demand for access. Are you
curious about anything? The answer is right at your fingertips. More seriously,
do you need to know something? A touch of a button will get you what you need
and eventually your brain waves alone (telekinesis fantasy) will do it. Here is
the world as information completely at the beck and call of the possessive
individual (the individual, that is, who is possessed by information). Here,
everyone is a god who, if they are not omniscient all at once, can at least
entertain whatever information that they wish to have at any time they wish to
have it. Information is not the kind of thing that has to be shared. If
everyone all at once wanted to know who won the Stanley Cup in 1968 they could
have the information simultaneously: cyberspace as the site of Unamuno's
panarchy, where each one is king.
At the next grade of perfection, the highway
not only provides access to that which is already given, but allows the
"individual" to "interact" with other
"individuals," to create a society in cyber-space. The freedom to
access information will be matched by the freedom to access individuals
anywhere and at any time, since eventually everyone will be wired. The
hybridization of television, telephone, and computer will produce every
possible refinement of mediated presence, allowing interactors an unprecedented
range of options for finely adjusting the distance of their relations. Through the
use of profiles, data banks, and bulletin boards people will be able to connect
with exactly those who will give them the most satisfaction, with whom they
share interests, opinions, projects, and sexual preferences, and for whom they
have need. Just as "individuals" wilt be able to access the realm of
"information" (anything from their financial and insurance records to
any movie ever made), they will also be able to access the domain of
"human" communicators to find the ones who are best suited to them.
As Bill Gates of Microsoft puts it: "The opportunity for people to reach
out and share is amazing." [1]
The information highway as technotopia is the
place where "individuals" command information for whatever purposes
they entertain and find others with whom to combine to pursue those purposes.
As Gates puts it, it is empowering stuff." Technotopia is the seduction by
which the flesh is drawn into the Net. What seduces is the fantasy of
"empowerment," the center of the contemporary possessive individualist
complex. By having whatever information one wants instantly and without effort,
and by being linked to appropriate associates one saves an immense amount of
time and energy, and is more likely to make better decisions for oneself. Who
can complain about having more information, especially if it can be accessed
easily and appropriately by a system of selectors that gives you what you ask
for and nothing else, or even better, that knows you so well that it gives you
what you really want (need?) (is good for you?), but did not even realize that
you wanted?
The information highway means the death of
the (human) agent and the triumph of the expert program, the wisdom that the
greatest specialist would give you. Expert programs to diagnose you. Medical
tests performed at home while you are hooked up to a computer that are
interpreted by an expert program. In order to serve you, the
"highway" will demand information from you. The selector systems will
have to get to know you, scan you, monitor you, give you periodic tests. The
expert program will be the new center for pastoral power. This is, of course,
still enacted under capitalism. You will have to pay for information with money
and there will be plenty of restrictions on its accessibility. Leave that as a
contradiction of the virtual class between the capitalist organization of the
highway and its technotopian vision: a contradiction within possessive
individualism. More importantly, you will pay for information with information;
indeed, you will be information.
The highway becomes the Net. What appears as
empowerment is a trompe l'oeil, a seduction, an entrapment in a
Baudrillardian loop in which the Net elicits information from the
"user" and gives it back in what the selectors say is an appropriate
form for that user. The great agent of possibility becomes the master tool of
normalization, now a micro-normalization with high specificity... perhaps
uniqueness! Each "individual" has a unique disciplinary solution to
hold them fast to the Net, where they are dumped for image processing and image
reception. The information highway is the way by which bodies are drawn into
cyber-space through the seduction of empowerment.
Bourgeois masculinity has always been
pre-pubescent: the thoughts of little boys thinking about what they would do if
they controlled the world, but now the world is cyber-space. The dream of being
the god of cyber-space - public ideology as the fantasy of pre-pubescent mates [males? (ron)]:
a regression from sex to an autistic power drive.
Against the Virtual Class
The virtual class holds on to its worldview
with cynicism or with vicious naiveté. It is a compound of late
nineteenth-century Darwinian capitalism (retro-industrial Darwinism) and
tech-hype. After what has happened so far in the twentieth-century and is still
going on in the way of technological carnage, it is amusing to realize that
there are still technofetishists filled with enthusiasm about how technology is
going to fulfill their pre-pubescent dream, which they assume unthinkingly that
everyone inevitably shares with them. Why? Is it so clear that technology
cannot serve anything else than the last man as the pre-pubescent boy who would
like nothing else but to play video games forever?
The retro-child. The virtual class is in its
utopian visionary phase, filled with cyber-worlds to conquer. What will it be
in its consolidation phase when we are fully entrapped in the Net and it starts
tightening around us? Normalization will come here too. Radically empowering
computer land is the utopia of a rising class identifying its peculiar
occupational psychosis with (a wired) "humanity." When we are
immersed in the Net the fiction of the "possessive individual" will
be discarded from the virtual class's ideology in favor of some sort of defense
of cyber-slavery, in which the virtual class affirms its own slavery, along
with that of all the rest, to the Net. This will be the culminating moment of
the ascetic priests (Nietzsche). One can only think of Jonestown. The virtual
class ushers itself and everyone else into the Net to serve it as
image/information resources and as image/information receptors. Wired into the
command functions at work and wired into the sensibility functions when off
work: the body as a function of cyber-space.
Panic
Organizations are in a panic stampede to get
on the "information highway," to be players in cyber-space. Everyone
wants in on the exploitation of the new frontier and even more they don't want
to be killed in the real world, which will be managed ever-increasingly from
cyber-space; not to mention the efficiencies of the Net. For the moment the
advantages of the Net are not that obvious once you get on, but that is only a
temporary situation. The Net is filling up fast with everything imaginable and
it's indefinitely expandable.
There is another kind of panic in process
about the "information highway." This one from the concerned liberals
who are afraid of the power of those who will determine the configuration of
the highway. In his report on Bill Gates, John Seabrook provides an
enlightening glimpse of Gates's character along with cautionary warnings. We
are concerned with the latter, with a specimen of the liberal ideology which
counts as the major ideological resistance to cyber tech-hype.
Seabrook frames his warnings within a bit of
short-range futurology. There is a new kind of computer on the way that will
change our lives in incalculable ways: "The new machine will be a
communications device that connects people to the information highway. It will
penetrate far beyond the fifteen per cent of American households that now own a
computer, and it wilt control, or absorb, other communications machines now in
people's homes - the phone, the fax, the television. It will sit in the living
room, not in the study." [2] The cyber command-machine: the entrance to
the highway: the lip of the Net.
Seabrook notes that Bill Gates's current
ambition is to have Microsoft be the source of "the standard
operating-system software for the information-highway machine, just as it now
supplies the standard operating-system software, called Windows, for the
personal computer." [3] The standard operating-system will be the program
that makes possible specific uses of the Net, all across the Net. Seabrook
believes that by supplying the standard operating-system software for the
"information-highway machine" Gates would gain great power: "If
Gates does succeed in providing the operating system for the new machine, he
will have tremendous influence over the way people communicate with one
another: he, more than anyone else, will determine what it is like to use the
information highway." [4]
Seabrook shows a misunderstanding here of the
"influence" of the virtual class. What is the "influence"
of a standard operating-system? Would there be major differences among possible
alternative competing operating-systems for the information-highway machine
that would alter significantly "the way people communicate with each
other?" Or, as with the phone system, is the object simply to facilitate
entry into the Net? If the latter is so, no power in any conventional sense
accrues to the organizational leader who wins the competition to supply the
system. Gates understands this. He wrote to Seabrook that "the digital
revolution is all about facilitation-creating tools to make things easy."
[5] This is the gospel of the last man, not of the "technology-oriented
dictator" that one of his competitors is afraid that Gates might become.
There is greater power, of a wholly different kind than the conventional power
to order people around, in ushering people into the Net, in being the agent of
technological dependency. This is the power of silent seduction, of giving
accessibility to cyber-space. Bill Gates is not Zeus, casting thunderbolts, but
Charon, taking us across the electronic
Gates, indeed, has no interest in the
conventional politics of the communication revolution. As much as Seabrook
tried to get him to acknowledge the question of power, Gates would resist. He
made his position plain in commenting that the highway would have some
"secondary effects that people will worry about." That is not his
problem, however: "We are involved in creating a new media but it is not
up to us to be the censors or referees of this media - it is up to public
policy to make those decisions." [6]
"Public policy" is what goes on to
get the flesh to adjust to the Net. The greater project is beyond policy,
transcendent to it - that is the project of wiring bodies to the Net. That
everyone will be wired to the information-highway machine is an historical
inevitability that puts politics in its place as a local clean-up activity
around the Net. This is technotopianism in its purest and most cynical form.
Compare it to that other computer entrepreneur, the retro-fascist Ross Perot,
who uses the wealth he has gained from the information industry to finance his
appeal to a nationalistic policy. The technotopian has no such leanings, but
with vicious naiveté depends on liberal-fascist allies in government to protect
the Net. Gates has identified himself with Technology, the greater power, the
one that will finally be decisive. Through the silent seduction of the
operating-system.
The Virtual Class and
Capitalism
The computer industry is in an intensive
phase of "creative destruction," the term coined by Schumpeter and
used by the neo-Darwinian macho apologists for capitalism to refer to the
economic killing fields produced by rapid technological change. The Net is
being brought into actuality through the offices of ruthless capitalist
competition, in which vast empires fall and rise within a single decade (Big
Blue/Microsoft). Under the disciplinary liberal night watchman's protection of "private"
property rights, capitalist freebooters destroy one another as they race to be
the ones who actualize the Net, just like the railroads of the nineteenth
century racing across the continent. This means that the virtual class retains
a strict capitalist determination and that its representative social type must
be a capitalist, someone who is installing the highway to win a financial
competition, if nothing else. If one is not so minded in today's computer
industry they will be eaten alive. You will only be able to get personal kicks
and pursue your (ressentiment-laden) idealistic views of computer democracy in
this industry if you sell. So you hype your ideas and your ideals become hype -
that is the twisted psychology of the virtual class: not hyped ideology, but
something of, by, and for the Net: ideological hype.
There are pure capitalists in the cyber
industry and there are capitalists who are also visionary computer specialists.
The latter, in a spirit of vicious naiveté, generate the ideological hype, a
messianic element, that the former take up cynically. It's the old story of the
good cop and the bad cop. How come the good cop tolerates the bad cop? So much
for the computer democracy of cyber possessive-individualists. The economic
base of the virtual class is the entire communications industry - everywhere it
reaches. As a whole, this industry processes ideological hype for capitalist
ends. It is most significantly constituted by cynicism, not viciously naive
vision. Yet, though a small group in numerical proportion to the whole virtual
class, the visionaries are essential to cyber-capitalism because they provide
the ideological mediation to seduce the flesh into the Net. In this sense the
cynical capitalists and the well-provided techies are merely drones, clearing
the way for the Pied Piper's parade.
A frontier mentality rules the drive into
cyber-space. It is one of the supreme ironies that a primitive form of
capitalism, a retro-capitalism, is actualizing virtuality. The visionary
cyber-capitalist is a hybrid monster of social Darwinism and techno-populist
individualism. It is just such an imminently reversible figure that can provide
the switching mechanism back and forth between cyber-space and the collapsing
space of (crashed) perception.
The most complete representative of the
virtual class is the visionary capitalist who is constituted by all of its
contradictions and who, therefore, secretes its ideological hype. The rest of
the class tends to split the contradictions: the visionless-cynical-business
capitalists and the perhaps visionary, perhaps skill-oriented, perhaps
indifferent techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer
scientists, video-game developers, and all the other communication specialists,
ranged in hierarchies, but all dependent for their economic support on the
drive to virtualization. Whatever contradictions there are within the virtual
class - that is, the contradictions stemming from the confrontation of
bourgeois and proletarian - the class as a whole supports the drive into
cyber-space through the wired world. This is the way it works in post
late-capitalism, where the communication complex is repeating the pattern of
class collaborationism that marked the old military-industrial complex. The drive
into the Net is one of those great capitalist techno-projects that depends upon
a concert of interests to sustain it, as it sucks social energy into itself.
The phenomenon of a collaborationist complex harboring a retro-Darwinian
competition is something new, but is stabilized, in the final analysis, by a
broad consensus among the capitalist components of the virtual class that the
liberal-fascist state structure is deserving of support. Indeed, in the
The Hyper-Texted Body or
Nietzsche Gets a Modem
But why be nostalgic? The old body type was
always OK, but the wired body with its micro-flesh, multi-media channeled
ports, cybernetic fingers, and bubbling neuro-brain finely interfaced to the
"standard operating-system" of the Internet is infinitely better. Not
realty the wired body of sci-fi with its mutant designer look, or body flesh
with its ghostly reminders of nineteenth-century philosophy, but the
hyper-texted body as both: a wired nervous system embedded in living
(dedicated) flesh.
The hyper-texted body with its dedicated
flesh? That is our telematic future, and it's not necessarily so bleak.
Technology has always been our sheltering environment: not second-order nature,
but primal nature for the twenty-first-century body. In the end, the virtual
class is very old-fashioned. It clings to an antiquated historical form -
capitalism - and, on its behalf, wants to shut down the creative possibilities
of the Internet. Dedicated flesh rebels against the virtual class. It does not
want to be interfaced to the Net through modems and external software black
boxes, but actually wants to be an Internet. The virtual class wants to
appropriate emergent technologies for purposes of authoritarian political
control over cyberspace. It wants to drag technotopia back to the age of the
primitive politics of predatory capitalism. But dedicated (geek) flesh wants
something very different. Unlike the (typically European) rejection of
technotopia in favor of a newly emergent nostalgia movement under the sign of
"Back to Vinyl" in digital sound or "Back to Pencils" in
literature, dedicated flesh wants to deeply instantiate the age of technotopia.
Operating by means of the aesthetic strategy of over-identification with the
feared and desired object, the hyper-texted body insists that ours is already
the era of post-capitalism, and even post-technology. Taking the will to
virtuality seriously, it demands its telematic rights to be a functioning
interfaced body: to be a multi-media thinker, to patch BUS ports on its
cyber-flesh as it navigates the gravity well of the internet, to create
aesthetic visions equal to the pure virtualities found everywhere on the now
superseded digital superhighway, and to become data to such a point of violent
implosion that the body finally breaks free of the confining myth of
"wired culture" and goes wireless.
The wireless body? That is the floating body,
drifting around in the debris of technotopia: encrypted flesh in a sea of data.
The perfect evolutionary successor to twentieth-century flesh, the wireless
body fuses the speed of virtualized exchange into its cellular structure.
DNA-coated data is inserted directly through spinal taps into dedicated flesh
for better navigation through the treacherous shoats of the electronic galaxy.
Not a body without memory or feelings, but the opposite. The wireless body is
the battleground of the major political and ethical conflicts of
late-twentieth- and early- twenty-first-century experience.
Perhaps the wireless body will be just a
blank data dump, a floating petri-dish where all the brilliant residues of
technotopia are mixed together in newly recombinant forms. In this case, the
wireless body would be an indefinitely reprogrammable chip: micro-soft flesh where
the "standard operating-system" of the new electronic age comes off
the top of the TV set, flips inside the body organic, and is soft-wired to a
waiting vat of remaindered flesh.
But the wireless body could be, and already
is, something very different. Not the body as an organic grid for passively
sampling all the drifting bytes of recombinant culture, but the wireless body
as a highly-charged theoretical and political site: a moving field of aesthetic
contestation for remapping the galactic empire of technotopia. Data flesh can
speak so confidently of the possibility of multi-media democracy, of sex
without secretions, and of integrated (cyber-) relationships because it has
already burst through to the other side of technotopia: to that point of brilliant
dissolution where the Net comes alive, and begins to speak the language of
wireless bodies in a wireless world.
There are already many wireless bodies on the
Internet: Many data travelers on the virtual road have managed under the weight
of the predatory capitalism of the virtual class and the even weightier
humanist prejudices against geek flesh, to make of the Internet a charmed site
for fusing the particle waves of all the passing data into a new body type:
hyper-texted bodies circulating as "web weavers in electronic space.
Refusing to be remaindered as flesh dumped by
the virtual class, the hyper-texted body bends virtuality to its own purposes.
Here, the wilt to virtuality ceases to be one-dimensional, becoming a doubled
process, grisly yet creative, spatial yet memoried, in full violent play as the
hypertexted body. Always schizoid yet fully integrated, the hyper-texted body
swallows its modem, cuts its wired connections to the information highway, and
becomes its own system-operating software, combining and remutating the
surrounding data storm into new virtualities. And why not? Human flesh no
longer exists, except as an incept of the wireless world. Refuse, then,
nostalgia for the surpassed past of remaindered flesh, and hyper-text your way
to the (World Wide) Webbed body: the body that actually dances on its own data
organs, sees with multi-media graphical interface screens, makes new best
tele-friends on the MOO, writes electronic poetry on the disappearing edges of
video, sound, and text integrators, and insists on going beyond the tedious
world of binary divisions to the new cyber-mathematics of FITS. The
hyper-texted body, then, is the precursor of a new world of multi-media
politics, fractalized economics, incept personalities, and (cybernetically)
interfaced relationships. After all, why should the virtual class monopolize
digital reality? It only wants to suppress the creative possibilities of
virtualization, privileging instead the tendencies of technotopia towards new
and more vicious forms of cyber-authoritarianism. The virtual class only wants
to subordinate digital reality to the will to capitalism. The hyper-texted body
responds to the challenge of virtualization by making itself a monstrous
double: pure virtuality/pure flesh. Consequently, our telematic future: the
wireless body on the Net as a sequenced chip microprogrammed by the virtual
class for purposes of (its) maximal profitability, or the wireless body as the
leading-edge of critical subjectivity in the twenty-first century. If the
virtual class is the post-historical successor to the early bourgeoisie of
primitive capitalism, then the hyper-texted body is the Internet equivalent of
the Paris Commune: anarchistic, utopian, and in full revolt against the
suppression of the general (tele-)human possibilities of the Net in favor of
the specific (monetary) interests of the virtual class. Always already the past
to the future of the hyper-texted body, the virtual class is the particular
interest that must be overcome by the hyper-texted body of data trash if the
Net is to be gatewayed by soft ethics.
Soft ethics? Nietzsche's got a modem, and he
is already rewriting the last pages of The Will to Power as The Will
to Virtuality. As the patron saint of the hyper-texted body, Nietzsche is
data trash to the smooth, unbroken surface of the virtual class.
Chapter 1
(Part 4)
Soft Ideology
So then, some road maps for following the
digital route taken by the virtual class across the landscape of the body
recombinant.
Map 1: The Digital Superhighway
as Ruling Metaphor
The high-speed digital superhighway is the
ruling metaphor of the virtual class. As the class that specializes in
virtualized exchange, the information superhighway allows the virtual class to
speak in the language of encrypted data, circulate through alt the capillaries
of digital, fibre optic electric space, and float at hyper-speed to the point
where data melts down into pure virtualities. The information superhighway is
the playground of the virtual class. While defining the virtual class, it is
also the privileged monopoly of global data communication.
As the language of the virtual class, the
information superhighway is where the virtual class lives, dreams, works, and
conspires. Not accessible to all, the information superhighway with its
accelerated transfers of data, voice, and video is open only to those
possessing the privileged corporate codes. And not evident to everyone, the
information superhighway is also a site of global power because it remains an
invisible, placeless, floating electronic space to the un-virtualized classes,
to those, that is, who have been abandoned by the flight of the virtual class
to the telematic future. Here, virtual power is about invisibility: the
endocolonization of the unwired world of time, history, and human flesh by the
electronic body.
A space-binding technological medium of
communication, the information superhighway invests the electronic body of the
virtual class with a new language, fit for twenty-first-century simu-flesh and fibrillated
nerve tissue. Neither the late twentieth-century language of cyberspace (with
its romantic invocation of pure electronic space as the site of a
"consensual hallucination") nor the traditional laboratory language
of recombinant genetics, the information superhighway speaks the digital
language of the world's first post-flesh body. Post-flesh? That is the
electronic body of the virtual class: accessed by serial arrays of BUS ports,
animated by its 3D graphic interfaces, coded in its Web by its designated URLs
(Uniform Resource Locators), energized by the telematic dream of instantly
disposable cybersex machines, and reduced in its bodily movements to a
twitching finger (on the cyber-dial). The electronic body is equipped with a
surfer's consciousness, and is obsessed with its own disappearance into the
inertial gridlock of high-speed. A pure virtuality, the electronic body is
always in flight (from itself): it constitutes a sampler spectrum of the media
force-fields which it navigates with the assistance of communication satellites
parked in deep-space orbital trajectories. Certainly not a cyber-body, a
"pure virtuality" is where the electronic body is reborn as a living,
(telematically) breathing simu-flesh: a specimen of evolutionary implosion where
technology merges with biology, the result being the post-flesh body of the
virtual class. Not a passively engineered product of recombinant genetics, the
electronic body as a pure virtuality has its neural synapses coded with an
instinctual drive to cut, clone, and retranscribe the genetic strips of new
media culture. Multi-media by nature, space-binding by instinct, and driven by
an obsession compulsion towards its own disappearance down the information
superhighway, the electronic body of the virtual class is the first mutant-body
type to appear on the long-range scanners of the awaiting twenty-first-century.
Map 2: The Information
"Superhighway" Does Not Exist
Or maybe it is just the opposite? If the
information superhighway can be the ruling sign of the virtual class it is
because it has no existence other than that of an old modernist metaphor
concealing the disappearance of technology into virtuality, information into
data, and the highway into space-binding electronic circuitry. In this case, the
concept of the information superhighway simultaneously performs a revealing and
concealing function with respect to the virtual class. It reveals the deep
association of this class with high-speed virtualized exchange, but it conceals
the drive to global power on the part of the virtual class in favor of a
comforting, romantic myth of outlaw travel across the electronic frontier.
Take apart the dense ideogram of the
information superhighway to see what is inside and all the political tactics of
the virtual class suddenly spill out: its promotional rhetoric, its policing
methods, its doubled strategy of an ideology of facilitation and an actuality
of virtualization, its ruling illusions of immersion and interactivity, and its
missionary commitment to technotopia. The opposition to the virtual class also
emerges: a growing political critique based on hyper-nostalgia ("Back to
Vinyl"), reinforced by an alternative aesthetic refusal of the virtual
class based on over-identification with the electronic body (Data Trash).
Map 3: Seduce and
Virtualize
Functioning as the political ideology of the
virtual class, the information highway delivers up the body to virtualization.
While its promotional rhetoric is cloaked in a seductive ideology of
facilitation, in actuality the ruling metaphor of the information superhighway
is a policing mechanism by which human flesh is gripped in the cyber-jaws of
virtualization. The ideology of facilitation? That is the promotional culture
of the virtual class which speaks eloquently about how the expansion of the
high-speed data network wilt facilitate every aspect of contemporary society:
heightened interactivity, increased high-tech employment in a "globally
competitive market," and a massive acceleration of access to knowledge.
Not a democratic discourse but a deeply authoritarian one, the ideology of
facilitation is always presented in the crisis-context of technological
necessitarianism. As the CEO's of leading computer companies and their
specialist consultants like to say: We have no choice but to adapt or perish
given the technological inevitability associated with the coming to be of
technotopia. Or, as the virtual elite summarizes the situation: We will
be jettisoned into the history dump file if we don't submit to the imperatives
of digital technology.
Map 4: The Information
Elite
Monarchs of the electronic kingdom, the
information elite rules the digital superhighway. Having no country except
digital-land, no history but for their passing electronic traces, and no future
other than the conquest of cyber-culture, the information elite is a global
fraternity (mostly male) of data hounds flying the virtual airways. Fueled by
missionary enthusiasm for the emergent technologies of technotopia, it is at
the empty centre of virtual power.
But like all high priests before them, from
the ancient Egyptian ecclesiastics and the Christian Cardinals to the Soviet
Commissars, the information elite are practioners of a dead power. A
precondition for operating at the centre of any power is the sacred knowledge
that power is dead, that its signs are always cynical, and that the price for
revealing this secret is expulsion or even death. The information elite lives
under the double sign of cynicism and an eternal law of silence. If it should
reveal the cynicism within or betray the secret of dead power to the
uninitiated its offending member would be executed immediately (or in the
twentieth-century version dumped from the virtual class in a classic buyout).
Information is a dead sign, and the information elite is the priestly keeper of
the eternal flame of the nothingness within.
Map 5: Soft Ideology
[Nickelodeon's] expansion
into preschool territory was part of a larger, marketing strategy for the
company... "We recognize that if we start getting kids to watch us at this
age, we have them for life,"... "That's exactly the reason why we're
doing it." In its fifteen years, Nickelodeon has conquered the marketplace
for children between 6 and 11 years old.
-New York Times, March 21,1994
Soft TV is the new horizon of the electronic
body. An integrated multimedia world where the networks of cyberspace and
television suddenly merge into a common telematic language. Cablesoft,
Videoway, Smart TV: these are the futuristic (CompuTV) collector points for
accessing, harvesting, and distributing the remainders of the virtual body.
Soft TV expresses perfectly the ruling
ideology of the virtual class. When the networked world of the information superhighway
is finally linked to TV, then the will to virtuality will be free to produce
fully functioning networked bodies: cybershoppers, cyberbankers, and cybersex.
Soft TV is an electronic televisual space populated by body dumps where human
flesh goes to be virtualized. Itself a product of the will to virtuality, soft
ideology is necessarily virtual: a series of ruling illusions about the
efficacy and inevitability of the virtualization of human experience. Here, the
future of the hyper-human body is translated into the language of public policy
for immediate circulation through the international networks of political
power. Consequently, the soft ideology of the virtual class is based on three
key illusions.
The Illusion of Interactivity: Consider Microsoft's newest corporate venture,
Cablesoft, which is actively promoted under the sign of enhanced interactivity.
Cablesoft is a multimedia world linking the programming language of computers
with television screens to produce fully integrated media. Cyber-Interactivity
is, however, the opposite of social relationships. The human presence is
reduced to a twitching finger, spastic body, and an oversaturated informational
pump that surfs the channels, and makes choices within strictly programmed
limits. What is really "inter-faced" by Cablesoft, is the soft matter
of the brain. It is a standard operating system for melting previously
externalized technologies of communication into the human nervous system. And
what is the Cablesoft brain? It is multi-platform, multi-media, and
multi-disciplinary: a hyper-mind that has its neuro-synapses fired by directly
accessed signals drawn from passing data storms on the big bandwidth. The
hypermind creates tele-consciousness in its wake. Imagine Star Trek's image of
the Borg stepping out of the television screen and patching into the Cablesoft
mind. Not the interesting ("You will be assimilated") Borg of the
early episodes, but the smarmy Borg of the latter episode. The "good
Borg" has a veneer of individual consciousness, but an inner reality of
suburban consciousness that just wants to do good for the human race.
Cablesoft, then, as that point where the individual mind embedded in spinal
nerve tissue disappears, and is replaced by our circulation as phasal moments
in a new medium of cybernetic intelligence. Under the entertainment cover of
the ideology of facilitation, Cablesoft promises to mind-meld (our) brains into
a circulating process of cyber-intelligence: a total human mind scan for the
body electronic.
The Illusion of (Cyber) Knowledge: Soft TV is also sold under the sign of the
"knowledge society." Techno-hype has it that wired culture delivers
us to a vastly expanded range of human awareness. What is not said, however, is
that for the virtual class, true knowledge is cold data, and the very best data
of all is the willing read-out of the human sensorium into the info-net. That
is why there is such an immense social pressure today for everyone to get on
the Net. Unlike the 1950s, with its promotion of technology under the sign of
"good industrial design" for consumer society, the 1990s is typified
by the glorification of virtual technology under the banner of "good body
design" for the cyber-culture of tomorrow. In virtual culture, knowledge
is literally vacuumed from all the orifices of the body, society, and economy,
downloaded into data storage banks, and then sampled and resampled across the
liquid media-net, and all this in perfect synch with the expansionary momentum
of the recombinant commodity-form. When knowledge is reduced to information,
then consciousness is stripped of its lived connection to history, judgment,
and experience. What results is the illusion of an expanded knowledge society,
and the reality of virtual knowledge. Knowledge, that is, as a tightly
controlled medium of cybernetic exchange where thought has a disease, and that
disease is called information.
The Illusion of Expanded Choice: Soft TV has a veneer of expanded (consumer) choice,
but an inner reality of growing desensitization and infantilization. A
multi-channeled world driven by the need for information by all the drifting
cyber-minds projects itself perfec tly by the promise of 500 channel
television. A channel for every firing synapse, a data stream for every
retro-mood. If there can be such intense demand for quantum leaps of televisual
information ports for the hungry cablesoft brain it is because the cyber-mind
has already patched to a new emotional territory. Not expansive minds for
expanded (Soft TV) choice, but a fantastic infantilization of the televisual
audience, with its fever pitch connections between (emotional) primitivism and
(multi-media) hypertech. Why the charismatic appeal today of scandal TV and
talk-show formats privileging the deterioration of the public mind?. It is
because virtual culture has already evolved into a new, more insiduous phase of
nihilism: that moment where self-hatred and self-abuse is so sharp that we
willingly deliver ourselves up as the butt of the TV joke. The cultural
condition that makes this possible is that, like the training programs for CIA
assassins with their repeated exposure of agents to brutal scenes of torture,
Soft TV functions on the basis of desensitization. Floating corpses, live
executions, rape TV: all delivered under the sign of media fascination, and all
with the intent of desensitizing the soft mass of the cyber-audience to the
point of its humiliated complicity in the evil of the times.
Map 6: The Red Guard Meets
Generation X
The editors of AXCESS magazine, published in
The 1990s, therefore, are typified by the
rapid decline of the hard ideologies of capitalism and communism, and by the
ascendancy of the soft ideology of the virtual class. Soft ideology? That's the
will to virtuality as the common language of the new managerial elites of the
post-capitalist, post-communist, and also post-technological society.
Itself a product of the will to virtuality,
soft ideology is necessarily virtual; a series of ruling illusions about the
efficacy and inevitability of the virtualization of experience. Here, the
future of the hyperhuman body is translated into the language of public policy
for immediate circulation through the international networks of political
power. When the Red Guard meets the (technotopian) members of Generation X on
the common ground of missionary enthusiasm for pan-capitalism, they insert
themselves into the political economy of virtual reality as its leading elites.
As the young entrepreneurs of Generation X, the virtual class finally has a
name. Under the sign of the Red Guard gone technotopian, it also has an
historical destiny creating a new global "cultural revolution" on
behalf of unimpeded virtualized exchange. Finally, in the fusion of the young
entrepreneurs of Generation X and the Red Guard, it has a grisly political
method; sacrificing human rights at the altar of virtual (economic) expediency.
We're living in the new morning of a big (ideological) sign-switch. The Cold
War of hard ideology may finally be over, but the new Cold War of soft
ideology, the one that pits the virtual class against all barriers to its
global sovereignty, is just beginning.