"It's not just a question of worrying or of hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons." 

                       - Guy Deleuze "Postscript on Control Societies"

I purchased my first personal computer in 1984, the year that the first Apple MacIntosh hit the market and changed everything about the way we related to the world behind the screen. There were only two programs that ran on the machine, MacWrite and MacDraw, but you could plug into a modem and then to your telephone jack and using a code called you could reach people on the other side of the world almost instantaneously. It was all very mysterious and underground and science fictiony at first. There was no capitalism involved. You could only transmit and receive text so the only limit to your vision was your imagination. We were just a bunch of geeks, mostly researchers and college professors and students full of dreams of future possibilities based on some rhapsodic sense of technological utopia. 

The first time someone tried to make money on the net, a couple of lawyers I think sent out a mass mailing soliciting clients. They were viciously trashed for their audacity from one end of the internet to the other. Soon after, the first graphical interface came out of Switzerland accompanied by a rapid rise in the use of personal computers, and with the ensuing graphics explosion the net overnight switched from a whispering revolutionary underground to the grande epicenter for every kind of marketing. Nowadays internet addictions like web browsing and fantasy gameplay have emerged as ever new permutations of the act of obsessive shopping. We now have thousands of novel ways to become consumers, not even of real goods, but of their images. 

So much for technological solutions to human problems. 

We all stand on a precipice. Our technological future has gone awry and there appears to be no way to stop or turn or slow it down. We are asked only to keep up. As a culture Americans are slaves to innovation, so that every new gadget or bit of software is embraced, although neither generally improves the quality of our lives, only alters it. Every time I'm invited to join a new social network site I feel the cords and bindings of the digital prison enfolding and tightening. 

So much for the engines of commerce that Americans appear to equate with freedom.  

I've taken to canceling almost all online participation outside of emails. I ignore most requests for political involvement via the net. The email lists I can't cancel I'm diverting to the junk box. An exception is lists that do not in any way require me to respond. I will not Twitter. I will only reluctantly Facebook. I haven't attended to my web site in more than two years. I accept all emails addressed to me by actual people. I will answer all such emails.

My choice is to narrowcast. 

Americans have essentially converted the near infinite mazes of the subconscious into an electronic shopping mall. I learned early on never to go 'out there' in the imaginary world without either a clear objective or a clear trail of corn to mark the way back home. That said, there's everything to be discovered, both good and bad, although the majority of what's valuable is still in the form of text, mostly crowded between columns of advertising. 

"Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction."

               -   Richard K. Morgan  Altered Carbon

"Put it up on the viewscreen." - Captain Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise

Star Trek marked our full entry as a culture into the realm where reality is not apprehended directly, but through an intermediate electronic interface. There are no windows on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The control room duplicates the reality of the television viewer. As we sit in our living rooms and switch the channels on various monitors displaying representations of a world beyond our particular location in space and time we are absorbed by the culture of simulacra.

Here are two pieces that further illuminate these observations. The first is a short story by George Saunders who writes frequent fiction for the New Yorker. I was recently turned on to this guy and, instantly addicted, have begun exploring his archives on the The New Yorker website. 

"Jon" by George Saunders

The second is an essay by artist Chad Scoville that was narrowcast recently over the ctheory.net mailing list. It's a little bit crazy but hits many essential points. 

Media Dopplers by Chad Scoville 

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"(The Pirate ship is) a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea; and from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens...In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."  

- Michel Foucalt

"The pirate ship's very excess of closure detaches it from its initial context, and gives it an unlimited freedom to wander and explore."  

 - Doom Patrols 1995-1997 Steven Shaviro

Enormous thunderheads hover slowly above the high plain. Standing at the boundary, leaning on a fence that skirts the edges of this old ranch property I gaze across the eroding border between the developed outskirts of the city and the open spaces of desert and pinon. Soon, I know, these long rolling ridges that meet the horizon under threatening clouds will be covered with human habitations and newly paved asphalt streets. I look forward to catch a glimpse of the future world my son will inherit. I can't adequately guide him on his path through that world, any more than my parents could guide me through the one I faced growing up. In the words of Stephen King in his Dark Tower cycle, the world has "moved on." What my parents, coming out of the Great Depression and World War Two, wanted for me was a path though high school and then to college and on to a better paying job as a professional something or other. My generation was raised by the GI Bill and taught lessons from the Great Depression and the Great Conflict; how to struggle and climb out of a life that always threatens scarcity, to find and take whatever advantage one can aquire, to succeed, to win the race, to be the victor in an eternal battle against chaos. These are the lessons imprinted on my genes, no matter where I find myself or how much I strive to change the rules.

In the context of a world where technological revolutions arrive with relentless frequency, every generation is transitional. Each successive generation struggles to hold the line at what is familiar while the next generation is forced to integrate entirely new modes of discourse and forms of organization. Our parents learned of the larger world from books and newspapers and the radio. My generation learned from television. My son is plugged into a network of independent nodes of information and discourse based not on the religious, national or ideological interests that have driven civilizations for centuries, but on the unique exercise of individual expression distributed across networks that transcend spacial and temporal boundaries

"They're coming at us." - Al Swarengin in Deadwood

The rules, nevertheless, keep changing. The excesses of World War Two left a generation stunned into a strange balance between hope and cynicism, entrepreneurial zeal and deep fearful distrust of the world "out there." At the same time the technological advances of the war kicked the world into the age of electronic media. The cultural centerpiece of family and society, portrayed nostalgically in all of those Norman Rockwell paintings of small town gatherings and boy scouts and people who radiate a physical sense of place, was replaced by the virtual world of radio, television, and the World Wide Web. 

Prophets and visionaries like Tielhard de Chardin with his evolutionary spirituality and Buckminster Fuller with his Spaceship Earth predicted the benign effects of this inevitable advance. They didn't predict the level of chaos through which the old world would have to pass in order to arrive at the new. 

What images drive my son's world? Star Trek went on to become the perfect metaphor for the board room and the collective as a corporate military cooperative. My generation entertained the utopian notion of attaining a better world through technological superiority, but in the end it was 9/11 that pulled the final curtain on the Trekkie universe as remotely attainable in our lifetimes. The final franchise of that long running series devolved into warfare and paranoia and finally, cancellation. 

We now live in an age of pirates. 

We are past the point where we forge our primary identity out of affiliation with nation, state, social class or religion. We are like wanderers on the seas of fate, liberating the artifacts of identity, persona, profile, personal history, assembling all of these fragments as we travel between stations and information nodes on the grid. We live mostly in our imaginations, telling and retelling the narratives of our pirate journey until it approximates more or less the myth we've manufactured and chosen to inhabit. Personal identity is fluid, another form of commodity, trapped in the cage of a collapsing civilization always seeking a way out beyond the boundaries of commerce. Yet, the only way out appears to be forward, to move more quickly than the machine, so we move faster, breaking the rules or using the rules against the mechanism, until the machine finds a way to incorporate our audacity into new forms of business. 

When I was very young my friends and I watched the interstate highways built through our neighborhoods. Thousands of households were displaced. Huge swaths of the city resembled war zones. We wandered through the wastelands, exploring abandoned blocks of buildings, empty factories and warehouses, watching the meandering urban parkland creeks of our childhood explorations converted into straightened concrete ditches, and whole blocks full of houses pushed by bulldozers into enormous bonfires. Like soldiers in some guerilla war we stalked the enormous mechanical monstrosities that roared back and forth, scraping flat the woods and valleys of our playground. At night we sabotaged construction equipment and dodged the bright headlights of lumbering earth movers. Thus the artifacts of apocalypse were at the center of our childhood play. Our parents worshipped progress while the things that gave us a sense of place were run over by it.  

Many grew up to be outcasts, having no particular allegiance to place or time, living in a world of constant flux and altered currents, disrespectful of borders, traditions, restrictions, continually at odds with those who took the lesson of fear and made it truth. We wandered among the sacred symbols, stealing whatever we wished and making it the fuel for our adventures.  

Once upon a time society was a widely dispersed network of communities, tenuously connected by roads and trade routes. Each node in the network defined itself apart from all other nodes and every node had a distinct center and a periphery that ended at the boundary of what was sometimes called 'wilderness'.

With the rise of electronic culture the world became one enormous city, without circumference or center, strung like a net through the electronic ethers and extending far out into space. The world of tribal media culture transcends the boundaries of nation states and so the long slow dissolution of nationality begins in the cauldron of globalization. The world becomes a city and the city becomes an ocean. 

Oppression has a new face, captured most accurately by the Wachowski's in their films depicting The Matrix, an environment composed entirely of simulacra, that is, simulations of life generated for the sole purpose of providing fuel for the machineries of consumption. What had been a network of geographical centers is in electronic space just one continuous membrane, one enormous urban environment in which identity is derived through the interaction of images, as in a mirror. 

"As a child I believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was nothing more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change."  

                          - Robert Morgan, "Altered Carbon"

My friends and I had an abandoned city to wander in and to play out our fantasies. Today's children have whole evolving universes in which to roam and interact. Electronic culture is a constantly cycling feedback mechanism, where commerce fosters the creation of imaginary worlds and these worlds in turn effect the way individuals regard themselves and society. Mythical landscapes expand and intersect, spawning connections as people wander between realms exploring the geometry of imagination and fabricating relationships across vast distances compressed instantaneously in time. Fantasy mirrors politics, philosophy morphs into code, and the separation of human thought and machine language is erased in an instant of choice and decision inside of virtual space. We approach identity like liquid sculpture, ephemeral and permeable, evolving in a constant dance within the data stream. 

Technology both unites and isolates. The nervous system we've thrown over the world brings us instantaneously into each other's presence while the overwhelming power of visual imagery separates us from sensual contact with other bodies in space. Individually and collectively, when we gaze into screens and through lenses, the world recedes into a perception of unreality and distance. The precipice at which we find ourselves is one of choice and discretion. The only way to wrest control from the machine is to find a way to see our real face reflected in the faces of real people. Freedom is a direct function of our ability to unplug.