18 Mar 1995: The Guardian - Page 28 - (6046 words)
Perspectives: Travels in cyber - reality - We're told that we're part of a technological revolution. We're
told that our old notions of politics, of culture, of humanity itself are dead or dying. We're told that
nothing can be the same again. What can it all possibly mean?
By: By JENNY TURNER
Feed your head, a scruffy poster says, directing us into an oldish building with a cinema attached: this
is the arts part of Derby University, so at least we can be clear about that. Inside, there beckons another
poster. Cybercafe, this way. So up the corridor I go, to what looks very much like an ordinary cafe,
with coffee in styrofoam cups and sandwiches in see-through plastic boxes. Off I go down the corridor
again, stepping neatly over a homily laid in bronze upon the 19th-century terrazzo floor: Today/Is
The/Tomorrow/You Were Promised/Yesterday.
And so I have come to a big, dark room, a bit like a church hall. Except that the air is full of ambient
sounds, the room is veritably stuffed with computers, and already, at 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning,
the room is filling up with people who look like students. For the most part.
'I'm looking for this Head thing,' a woman of about 60 says to me. 'What's it all in aid of, then?' 'I think
it's a sort of open day for the community,' I tell her. 'A chance for people from outside to get to use the
Internet.' 'What's that?' 'An international computer network you can use to get information from all over
the world,' a helpful student butts in.
'A bit like Ceefax, then?' 'No, not really,' says the student, with a patronising smile.
'Oh. So what are all those squares in aid of?' asks the woman, pointing at a big colour Mac with some
jazzy moving-chessboard visuals running on its screen.
'That's our Virtual Reality software. Put on the dataglove and your hand can actually enter the
computer environment.' 'I'm sorry, but I don't see why I'd ever want to,' the woman says, turning to go
home. 'I think I'll leave all this stuff to you young ones,' she adds, patting me on the arm.
'We always see change happening through a rear-view mirror. We assume that the future will be much
the same as the past, only more so that life will go on in much the same way as it has before, give or
take a few gizmos. But we have to ask ourselves the question: what do new technologies allow us to do
that we have never done before? The computer is a machine which injects speed into all activities,
social, economic, scientific. So expect to see change at a rate you have never seen it before.' Thus says
Sadie Plant, cyberfeminist, a tousle-headed woman dressed in jeans, desert boots, and a big plaid
overshirt. A lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, Sadie has recently started
metamorphosing into a media academic: she was a guest on Radio 4's Start The Week with Melvyn
Bragg recently, she has been profiled for the Observer's Cyberspace column, and by the Guardian,
which proclaimed her 'the most interesting woman in Britain'.
Today, Sadie is giving the keynote lecture at this Head thing, which for the course of the afternoon is
given over to instructing members of the local community in the principles of the philosophy of the
future. We are told it is perfectly possible that in the future, we will be able to learn Japanese by
sticking an implant in our brain. So what will happen to our education system then? We are told that
there is no such thing as a right and a left in politics any more. Indeed, when someone asks a question
about politics, Sadie laughs: 'I'm not even sure that word means much any more. We probably need to
invent a new word.' Sadie is followed to the podium by her frequent collaborator, Nick Land, a
philosophy lecturer at the University of Warwick. 'Hello. I work in the field of The Collapse of
Western Civilisation Studies,' is how Land begins his talk. Land has an alarming stage presence. Slight,
dark and anxious-looking, he stalks around the stage, working his hands in strange, balletic
movements. He has a choked, whispery voice which you can actually hear him shove himself against
as he speaks. Physically and, you sense, emotionally, he has the unpredictable vulnerability of an
uncute elf.
Land's text for today is 'complexity': crudely, the recognition that messiness, not order, is the basic
stuff of the universe. According to Land, the widespread belief that our world is or can be orderly is an
illusion which has been fostered by capital. But now, capitalism is in decay, and our world-illusion is
breaking up and, as it does so, we can expect to see 'power' assert itself in a more brutal way than
'power' ever has before. 'No one's trying to persuade you. The system is just driving itself to death.'
Land sees this break up as the inevitable outcome of what he calls 'open systems': information
networks which know no boundaries of nation, law or identity viruses which invade bodies,
institutions, machines, mutating themselves and everything they touch as they go. And there is nothing
those entities which used to think of themselves as human beings can or will ever be able to do about it.
The audience is a strange mix. There's a row of student types, all in black with strikingly-razored
hairdos, religiously taping the proceedings on a four-track. A couple of slightly squarer-looking people
- a teacher and a social worker, as they later turn out to be - try hard to persuade Land that there are still
useful things left for human beings to do. My mind, meanwhile, is wandering, to a videotape of The
Terminator running in my head: great hideous black machines, clanking themselves autonomously
across a blasted landscape, squashing all human life, sending Arnold Schwarzenegger from their future
to sow the seeds of destruction in our here and now. Then my mind wanders back, to this very ordinary
lecture-hall in the Midlands, full of creatures who look to me pretty much like very ordinarily unruffled
human beings. Surely there can be no connection between these two worlds? But then again, I have just
proved that there can be. Because I have proved it is possible to think of both of them at exactly the
same time.
For the rest of Feed Your Head, we are supposed to wander around the darkened hall, trying on the VR
dataglove, dipping into the CD-Roms, browsing through virtual-art galleries and nightclubs on the
World Wide Web. But the more interesting stuff is happening in the corridor, where the smokers sit
flicking their ash over the homily in bronze. It is here that Nick Land and Sadie Plant sit hunched for
most of the day, demagogically surrounded by an eager entourage. Both of them - and most of the
entourage, for that matter - smoke like tomorrow will never come.
Sadie Plant and Nick Land are both in their early thirties. Both of them are products of comprehensive
schooling, and both of them started out as philosophy students, he at Sussex University, she at
Manchester. Neither was ever quite conventional. Sadie's first book, The Most Radical Gesture (1992),
was a spirited, un-neutral study of the Situationists, the Sixties French surrealo-political sect. And
Nick's The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille And Virulent Nihilism (1992) was full of bits like
this: 'My detestation for the Christian faith exhausts my being, and more. I long for its god to exist in
order to slake myself as violence upon him.' And so on.
Neither, however, went cyber until they discovered technology - and each other - in 1992. When you
ask Sadie why she made the leap, she talks about starting work at Birmingham and falling in love with
the Macintosh computer laid out for her on her desk. 'It was just so beautifully designed. There were so
many things you could do with it.' When you ask Nick, he mutters something about how 'this area
converges on a zone of question-marks and silence'. The responses are typical of the two.
One day, someone should write a radio play about Sadie Plant and Nick Land. Her writings discuss
computer culture in terms of 'weaving', 'chattering and nattering' and a 'tactile environment' potentially
more hospitable to women than to men. He is interested in viral invasion, the death of modernity and
'the replacement of myotic sex by bacterial transfer' - a process which, in a rare moment of levity, he
says is like 'going from wife-swapping to gene-trading'. She puts an optimistic, cheery, hands-on spin
on things. 'NL is a palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry,
stalking the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism,' runs Land's biog
in a little magazine I would not have dared present such a caricature myself, but as he presumably
approved this one, let us say that it hits a mark. She is a bright, engaging, well-organised talker who
smiles a lot as she speaks. He has a palpable nerviness, and an equally palpable fondness for words like
'zone', 'convergence' and 'contamination', each of which attain in their every enunciation a peculiarly
threatening spin.
And while she drinks orange squash, he is an unflinching and unrepentant snakebite man. Roll over,
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir! No, but seriously. Together, the Land-Plant nexus
personifies our ambivalence about the revolution coming upon us. Will it all be okay after all, and even
quite a positive thing for women, so long as they cyber up a bit? Or are we looking into a future of
technonetworked robotic hell? 'The question,' as both of them say noticeably often in response to my
questions, 'is irrelevant.' Whatever the future is going to look like, it won't shape up as such a simple
either/or.
Sadie and Nick, Land and Plant, are not popular among the academic community. Their work surfs
across disciplines which normally are treated as discrete, too specialised and difficult for outsiders to
understand. Land, for example, is currently obsessed with non-linear dynamics, and pours scorn on the
notion that mathematical concepts are best left to trained mathematicians. As well as writing for
traditional academic publishers, they also contribute to smaller, weirder-looking enterprises: Unnatural:
Techno-Theory For A Contaminated Culture (1994). And ****collapse, a sinister-looking zine of
material trawled from the Net whose first edition was printed out earlier this year. Here is a snatch of
the Plant-Land nexus's contribution to Unnatural: 'Immuno-vulnerability is cyberpositive, and its
viruses are not just infection, but connection continuing to interlock with the matrix even after they are
secreted inside the body.' Not even the wackiest of academic post-modernists ever managed to slither
quite like that.
'They're just careerists and self-publicists, aren't they?' a Warwick academic complained to me. 'And
the writing is utter nonsense. Silly, solipsistic bilge.' 'She thinks she's very radical, but really, her work
is so right-wing. It's just a paean to market economics,' was the comment of another off-the-record
prof. Jealous? Threatened? Justified? It is difficult to tell. Whatever else they are or may stand for,
Plant and Land have in their work made change itself their thing. That universities, that the concept of
knowledge itself, will be changing along with everything else is very much part of their theme. Their
work is both cause and symptom of the very sense of crisis it is setting out to describe.
'So,' I ask cleverly of Sadie. 'What do you think you'll be doing in 20 years' time? Doesn't it worry you
that you might be arguing yourself out of a comfortable career?' 'I think whether I'm arguing myself out
of a job or not is irrelevant, if institutions are going the way I think they're going,' is her cool reply. 'Of
course, there's something so solid about universities, you can't imagine they would somehow collapse .
. . But there is still something untenable about them.' I try the same trick question on Nick. 'We-ell,' he
says, with a deep breath. 'The signs indicate that a really big upheaval is coming in 1996. The
convergence between computers, broadcasting and telecommunications is going to be functional from
about that date. And if you look around the world, just about every country on the planet has a general
election coming up - the US, Russia, Japan - and Deng Xiaoping in China is about to die. It will be a
key threshhold. It's going to change everything just as much as 1989 did . . . ' So Land, presumably,
does not see himself collecting his university pension. Does this bother him? 'Oh, I pretty well
wholeheartedly welcome it. I'll have to find another way to fund my nicotine habit. But the state
education system is basically dead.' BACK IN JULY 1992, Cliff Stanford, a smalltime designer of
accountancy software based in Finchley, north-west London, decided he wanted access to the
burgeoning networks of online chat and chaos he had heard were growing up in the US - up until then,
only universities and big corporations could afford to be on the Net. So he posted an ad called tenner. a
month on a local computer bulletin board, desperately seeking 200 fellow computer enthusiasts willing
to help him raise the pounds 20,000 necessary to buy a share in a 'pipe' running under the sea to a
machine called EUnet in Holland. Why Holland? Because EUnet was the nearest site to Finchley that
offered a way into IP, Internet Protocol, the format in which messages must be packaged if they are to
switch with computers in the US. Stanford's software outfit was called Demon, so this new enterprise
became Demon Internet. From tiny imps enormous monsters of change and confusion grow.
'Actually, Cliff only got 120 replies to his original tenner. a month,' Steve Kennedy, now business
development manager at Demon, confides. 'And I'd've been second on the list, only my credit-card
details went astray, so I ended up 63rd . . . 'From 120 techy-heads stumping up pounds 10 each, Demon
has grown in the space of 30 months to having '26,000-plus' subscribers, a figure which, on current
trends, is growing at 15 per cent a month.
The columns of the mainstream press were, until last summer, practically empty of cyberreportage.
Since then, they have been filling up at ever-redoubling rates. There's cyberbusiness on the business
pages. Cybernightclubs, cyberfashion, cyberdrugs, in the style press. Cyberlaw on the legal pages.
Features pages are full of knotted-brow think-pieces about the coming of an 'information
superhighway', which is what apparently we will have when the whole world goes online, and the
concomitant 'multimedia revolution', when it will, oh joy, be possible to book a pizza, buy stocks, vote
Newt Gingrich in as president of the world, chat on the vidphone and snog Clark Gable in a simstim
version of Gone With The Wind, all from the selfsame user-friendly box in the corner of your livingroom. Thus, in a recent Cosmopolitan: 'Future Sex And Shopping. Our brilliant guide to cyberspace'.
Online, the Guardian's weekly science-and-new-technology supplement - itself a symptom of this
general netty-techy explosion - recently estimated Net 'connectivity', as hipsters call it, at around
50,000 networks, four million computers, 30 million-plus users, worldwide. These figures represent
only educated guesses. The Net is a decentred, sprawling structure. There is no supercomputer sitting
like a queen bee to keep its activities in check. Nevertheless, projections of current increases in Net
usage indicate - we are told - that the entire world could in theory be connected by the year 2003.
Is this really likely, given that enormous parts of the world still are not connected to clean running
water? Still, it is difficult to read such a statistic without seeing, for a split second, the image of a
utopian world communications network flash before your eyes. Computers, at a certain level of
abstraction, are but machines which transform the stuff of our past and present into the stuff of possible
futures. Yet computers are completely unable to discriminate between what is true and what is false,
what is useful and what is pointless or misleading information. The more our culture becomes a
cyberculture, the more the distinction between factual present and hypothetical future, reality and
fantasy, becomes blurred.
'You think to yourself, hey, I'm surfing on the worldwide superhighway. Actually, IRL, what you're
doing is keyboarding on a computer and creating a message which is communicated in machine code
down copper wires. You are on a primarily text-based medium on which spatial relationships have to
be conveyed in letters, encrypted on silicon and then beamed down. But it's easy to forget that
sometimes.' Thus says James Bloom, computer-whizz: 19 years old, and a big cheese on Wired, a
beautifully-designed, glossy-advertisement-heavy, cyberglossy magazine, hitherto available on import
from the US.
From the end of this month on, Wired will appear in a British version, produced by none other than the
Guardian. 'Why Wired?' reads a manifesto from the mag's US editor, Louis Rossetto. 'Wired is about
the most powerful people on the planet today - the Digital Generation. These are the people who not
only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications and the media is transforming life at
the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.' And so on and so on and so on. As you can
see, the philosophy of the future is not the only sort of discourse which makes its points by being
insistent about things which have yet to happen. This is exactly what the language of advertising is all
about as well.
James Bloom's big Internet interest is in MUDs, multi-user dimensions, on which as many people as
have the right privileges all log on into a gigantic database at the same time, under any identity, and
with any gender they like. There are MUDs for pretending to be furry animals in. There are MUDs for
discussing post-modern culture in. And there is the magnificent LambdaMOO. When you subscribe to
LambdaMOO, you get given your very own room, yours to write up in any way you like. You can
invite any new friends you make into your room with you. You know these friends only by what they
write. Men write as women. Women write as spivaks, whatever that may be. Anything can happen:
transfiguration, transsexuality, cyberviolence, cybersex. Not that James ever indulges in such
dangerous and transgressive pursuits. He says he doesn't see the point.
'It's just text, but it's so well-written, you feel you actually inhabit it as you move around. It's like a
novel, except that you're writing it. And the strange thing is, different users all seem to have much the
same conception of the environment. It's lovely stuff,' James says. 'Sharing a virtual reality teaches you
a lot about, I suppose, subjectivity. And projection: how much you think you know what someone else
is feeling just because of how you're feeling. It used to be impossible to relate to anybody without the
body coming into it somewhere, even if just as your handwriting or your voice. But in these
dimensions, you can relate to people in all sorts of ways just by using your mind.' The prefix ' cyber '
first arrived in the English language just after the second world war, when mathematician Norbert
Weiner coined the concept of cybernetics, the study of systems of communication and control. 'We, as
human beings, are not isolated systems,' Weiner writes in The Human Use Of Human Beings (1954).
'We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger
world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in
information through our sense organs, and we act on information received.' So the notion that human
beings are not really as different from machines as once upon a time they had thought they were was
born.
Cyberspace arrived 30 years later, in Neuromancer, William Gibson's visionary novel of 1984. The
hero of Neuromancer, the burnt-out Case, is a cybercowboy who jacks his laptop straight into his brain.
When he does so, he sees, and interacts with the Matrix, 'a graphical representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system'. He hacks through layers of digitally-encrypted
information like a bank-robber of yore hacked through safes and walls. He experiences data as a
parallel reality , with its own dimensions of time and space, and its own ability to wreak stupendous
harm.
Cyberspace has no mass or extension. So it cannot be exactly physically 'real'. But neither is it entirely
fantastic. William Gibson has defined it as 'a consensual hallucination': something not real, but which
appears so because it is socially shared. But then again, this is more or less how philosophers since
Kant have been defining the sense of reality within which human consciousness traditionally lives.
You can see why philosophers are currently going cyber at a rate of knots.
And you can also see why, for traditionally-minded thinkers, cyberphilosophy is such a disturbing
thing. It is bringing science and the arts, the cosily-delineated 'two cultures' beloved of C P Snow, into
all sorts of bizarre collisions. It is confusing science-fiction, in the shape of William Gibson and the
other quaintly-labelled 'cyberpunk' novelists, with philosophy and science fact. Above all, it blends the
same weird mixture of rigorous-sounding hypothesis and stuff that sounds like adspeak that seems to
be endemic to all talk about the future. 'Connectionism . . . 'Sadie Plant writes in a recent essay, 'is less
a matter of being taught the old than a process of learning the new. It is not a new theory, but fatally
disturbs the role of theory itself. It is not an answer, but a question.' Is this sort of thing really that
different from the designer ideas-surfing of Wired? William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, once said
in an interview: 'What's most important to me is that Neuromancer is about the present. It's not really
about an imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me
by the world in which we live.' I wonder, I say to Sadie Plant, do you not think that all this stuff about
the future is really just projections of the way different people feel about the here and now? 'No I don't,'
she replies. 'I think the future has a way of leaking backwards, into the present.' What on earth does she
mean by that? 'I remember visiting Mexico a few years back, and I saw these kids selling these weird
little gizmos on the beach. They were the sort of Made In Taiwan thing you'd think nothing about if
you saw them here, but in the context of Mexico, it seemed really strange. They were little packets
from the future dropped into the present.' No, no, I say. That's just what our present is actually like. All
sorts of different levels of technological advancement coexist in the same place at the same time. Sadie
falls silent. Later, when I am transcribing the conversation, I realise that this is exactly what she meant.
NICK Land has been working as a 'scum-level' - as he puts it - philosophy lecturer at the University of
Warwick since 1991. 'Dr Nicholas Land' it says on the door of his room in the Social Science Building,
the Land wittily amended, in pencil, to Blank. As well as the usual typed and tattered lists of office
hours and essay-assignments, the door carries a gothic-looking advertisement for ****collapse, a
magazine of 'spe(w)ed text' produced by someone with an e-mail address that goes PYUDO@warwick.
ac. uk.
Nick Land, it turns out, has decided that what I really need to do is to talk to a few of his favourite
students, the cybercr. . .eme de la cr. . .eme. This few turns out to mean a dozen student cyborgs,
arranged around a table like a diligent, well-ordered seminar group. I sit down smiling gamely, waiting
for the spectacle to begin. Expectant silence. Oh, I see. This afternoon's spectacle is going to be me.
Students, love them or hate them, live on the cutting edge of cyberculture. Janet, the Joint Academic
Network, has been using the Internet Protocol since 1990, and is financially supported as it does so by
all the British universities together. So whatever use a university makes of its Net connection after that
costs it essentially nothing.
There are 3,000 points of access to the Internet scattered around the Warwick campus, in libraries,
offices and open-access labs, on a mixture of mainframe terminals and PCs. Every student is given a
logon with their matriculation card. So long as they don't clutter up the keyboards by fooling around
when other users have serious work to do, students can spend as long as they like on the Internet,
absolutely free.
In Surfing On The Internet, 'a net-head's adventures on-line', a book shortly to be published in this
country, one J C Herz writes about sitting in front of a computer terminal for six hours a night for
weeks and months at a stretch, until she claps out and joins the Online Internet Addicts' Support Group
('please tell me all the clocks are wrong and it isn't really 4.30am, and I haven't been on for three days
straight . . .') As J C Herz's book makes clear, it takes that degree of immersion, that much time, really
to get to know the stranger corners of the cyberexperience as presently available to humanity: the
heavyweight newsgroups, the MUDs and the MOOs. How did J C manage to waste so much time and
bandwidth? 'I'm just goofing in the Science Center basement. Procrastinating - anything to keep from
writing the Term Paper From Hell for that stupid jerk-off seminar . . . I put it away for a minute and
start fooling around on the computer, just wandering, fishing though the shell . . . ' It might have been
sex or drink or drugs or MorrisDanceSoc. But for increasing numbers of modern students, cyberculture
is the time-wasting, device of choice.
The Warwick cybergang have been meeting regularly, they say, for about two years. Last year, they
came together to organise a conference, Virtual Futures, to which they invited 'all the big names'
including some weirdo performance artist called Stellarc, who entertained everyone by sticking a fibreoptic cable down his throat and whose current project is to try to grow himself photosynthetic skin.
This year, Virtual Futures II will be happening in May. Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, state-of-the-art
cybernovelist Pat Cadigan, state-of-the-art cyberphilosopher Manuel DeLanda, new-edge cybercouple
Marie Louise and Arthur Kroker of new-edge cyberjournal Mondo 2000 have all agreed to come along
- 'it's a Who's Who of current cyberculture', as someone proudly says to me.
Philosophy is not a sensible subject to study at university. Philosophy graduates tend to suffer the
highest post-university unemployment of all. So why, I asked the students, were they studying it in the
first place? 'Well it's the old story, you know,' says Kath, a mature student and single mother who had
been, she said, a straight-down-the-line reproductive-rights feminist until she discovered cyberculture.
'Why do people go into sociology? Because their family's fucked up. Why do people go into
psychology? Because they're psychologically fucked up. Why do people go into philosophy? Because
there's something fundamentally wrong with the way that they're constructed. Either they just want to
get people to agree with them, or they're really kicking against something at a fundamental level.' 'I
think you become suspicious,' said Paddy, a PhD student with a little red crest slicked on the top of his
shaven head, 'when you're at school and you know full well that large numbers of you are never going
to get a job. Yet you're told that you'll get a job if you follow the rules. You realise pragmatic reality is
not the same as the way it has been characterised.' Only five of these students are being funded through
their education with student grants. The rest study part-time, and work. They don't even bother to
complain about this. Most of them are in their early twenties. They belong to the generation after the
'moaning minnies' Margaret Thatcher complained of in the Eighties. They take it for granted that
whatever they do in their lives they will be doing on their own, aided only by 'local support networks'
and by the relationships they build up on the Net. They see all social relationships in terms of markets:
society is a market, relationships are a market, and the Net, with its vague, decentred, sprawling
structure, is the biggest market of all. I complain that I find this notion depressingly dog-eat-dog. 'But
then again,' someone says, 'it's like that anyway. Except that this phoney humanism we're all supposed
to believe in obscures the fact.' To a cyborg, the Warwick students identify themselves as 'posthumanists'. They look at the human being and see not perfect souls made in God's own image, but
systems of synapses and meat which interact with machines and nature all the time. Clothing and
shelter. Pacemakers and hip-replacements. Physical space and virtual space. From which it becomes an
easy step to contemplate all sorts of wild cyberpunkish visions of organ-swapping and body-part
mutation, bio-engineered smart drugs and gene-transfer, cosmetic surgery and sex-changing. 'I mean,
the idea that we can get pleasure from only one physical configuration, it's ridiculous,' says Kath, who
seems particularly taken with this sort of thing. 'The real problem is the skin, though. Skin as an organ
is just very, very limited. It's all extremely frustrating.' Inevitably, there is also a great deal of talk
about drugs. 'Of course, it's just part of the culture,' I'm told.
For most of our seminar, I am treated like a frail old lady looked after by a bunch of well-brought-up
youngsters. They talk to me very slowly and clearly. They laugh kindly at my feeble jokes. And they
take a solicitous interest in the 'technophobia' and 'discomfort' they worry they may be sparking along
my braincells. 'Does what we're saying continue the terror, or abate it?' Kath gently asks of me at one
point. 'You have to realise,' says a woman called Joan, who teaches political theory to fund her
doctorate, 'that we were never that comfortable anyway. What good did it do you to buy into oldfashioned notions like the job for life? Look back, and you'll see that things were never really what
they were made out to be. When did all that stuff ever really make us comfortable?' But then, a lad
called Robin, who, it seems, doubles as the virtual editor of ****collapse, gets tired of all this softlysoftly stuff. 'People here are being quite nice, but I think it's important to say that life is getting nasty.
We aren't going to turn round and have a nice utopian world. The posthuman is a scary thing to think
about, because people like to be defined and comfortable. but what we're saying is, it's too comfortable.
Life doesn't have to follow the patterns you see on EastEnders! Prepare to be torn apart!' But I don't
want to be torn apart, I object. I find the notion terrifying. 'Then use your fear productively. Find a
niche for it and market it.' I meant to ask Robin later if that was his idea of a joke. But by the time I
escaped from the seminar, I found myself just desperate to get home.
A FEW days later, I nip across the space to meet up with Sadie, in her office high up in the Muirhead
Tower, Birmingham University. Derby, Warwick, Birmingham. Why, I wonder, should philosophical
cyberculture seem to be such a Midlands thing? 'Birmingham is such a strange place,' Sadie says. 'Such
an enormous city, and yet so un-metropolitan, completely different from London. It has no centre,
really . . . ' So it's a bit like California, is it? I suggest. Vast urban sprawls merging into one another, a
decentred network of communications, like computer culture itself . . . 'Yes, maybe,' Sadie says. 'There
must be something in that.' I am preternaturally pleased. Looks like I could get quite handy at this
future-gazing business myself, with a little bit of practice.
Sadie is working on her Mac on an essay about cybersex. 'Cybersex is yet to come, but already seems
like yesterday's news,' she taps. 'An anticlimax before it has begun tinged with disappointment in
advance of the event.' But she takes time off to take tea, and a slab of the head-of-department's slightly
staling birthday cake, with a couple of sympathetic students. One is working on the philosophical
implications of cryonics. Suppose they freeze your head, and work out a way of replicating your brainpatterns on a floppy disk. You could be a head without a body. You could even be a brain without a
head. What does that mean for the way we think about human identity? He's a nice lad he comes from
Brighton. I make every effort possible to turn the conversation round to talking about Brighton instead.
But soon it's time to make the journey from the Birmingham University campus in Sadie's little red
van. For this evening Sadie is contributing to a forum on architecture and cyberspace at the Ikon, a
trendy art gallery right down in whatever city centre the new Los Angeles might turn out to have. The
other panellists talk exactly the same sort of vapid rot panellists in trendy art-gallery forums usually
tend to talk, except that instead of mentioning postmodern culture at least once in every two sentences,
they mention something cyber instead. But Sadie extemporises brilliantly. She may resent those old
fogeys who accuse her of being a self-publicist. She may prefer to see herself as a selfless prophet and
propagandist. But given her analysis of where her university job seems to be going, it is surely only
sensible of her to be doing whatever she can to prepare herself for a future which, however else it may
go, will be increasingly freelance.
BACK at the Head thing in Derby, the nicest part of my day came when I ran into a couple of young
women called Jennifer and Sasha, in the melee of curious bodies hanging around the bank of machines
set up to give us, the community, a shot at the interweaving system of brightly-coloured pages they call
the World Wide Web. Cyberfeminism be blown. It seemed impossible, as newbies and as women, to
get beyond being part of the admiring gaggle who crowded aimlessly round the hardware, watching the
lads running through their hands-on stuff. Jennifer, 22, was a student at Derby, studying something
called Visual Culture. 'What's that?' I asked her. 'Art, film, advertising, multimedia. You know.'
Jennifer said she had no burning interest in cybermatters. She finds them rather boring. But she has to
keep up with multimedia stuff if she hopes to get a job in her chosen field.
Sasha, 18, was Jennifer's sister, a student nurse from Tyneside, down to visit for the weekend. And
Sasha, interestingly, absolutely loathed the technology she saw spread out before her. I asked her if she
thought that has anything to do with being a nurse, spending her days in chatting to people, calming
them when they are in pain, the one job - one hopes - that will never be digitised out of existence.
'Maybe,' she mused. 'I'd have to think a bit about that.' Then one of the big boys decided to show off to
Jennifer and Sasha. He found them a World Wide Web page with the complete filmography of Tom
Cruise on it. To what noble uses this sophisticated hypertext technology appears to be being put! 'The
thing is,' Sasha went on a few minutes later, after her boredom threshold understandably had been
reached. 'Your hands are for writing. Your mouth is for speaking. Your eyes are for seeing, your ears
are for hearing. And that's that. That's the way it should be.' You'd better watch it, Sasha. There are
people out there who think you should be getting ready to be torn apart.
Surfing On The Internet by J C Herz will be published by Abacus on April 13 at pounds 9.99. Wired
UK launches on March 24. For information about Virtual Futures II, write to the Centre for Philosophy
and Literature, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL, or e-mail virtual. futures@warwick. ac. uk.
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