Flame Wars, the verbal firefights that take place between
disembodied combatants on electronic bulletin boards, remind us
that our interaction with the world is increasingly mediated by
computers. Bit by digital bit we are being Borged, as devotees of
Star Trek: The Next Generation would have it--transformed into
cyborgian hybrids of technology and biology through our ever more
frequent interaction with machines, or with one another through
technological interfaces.
The subcultural practices of the incurably informed, to borrow the
cyberpunk novelist Pat Cadigan's coinage, offer a precognitive
glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us
will be part-time residents in virtual communities. Yet, as the
essays in this expanded edition of a special issue of the South
Atlantic Quarterly confirm, there is more to fringe computer
culture than cyberspace. Within these pages, readers will encounter
flame warriors; new age mutant ninja hackers; technopagans for whom
the computer is an occult engine; and William Gibson's Agrippa, a
short story on software that can only be read once because it
gobbles itself up as soon as the last page is reached. Here, too,
is Lady El, an African American cleaning woman reincarnated as an
all-powerful cyborg; devotees of on-line swinging, or compu-sex;
the teleoperated weaponry and amok robots of the mechanical
performance art group, Survival Research Laboratories; an interview
with Samuel Delany, and more.
Rallying around Fredric Jameson's call for a cognitive cartography
that seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened
sense of place in the global system, the contributors to Flame Wars
have sketched a corner of that map, an outline for a wiring diagram
of a terminally wired world.Contributors. Anne Balsamo, Gareth
Branwyn, Scott Bukatman, Pat Cadigan, Gary Chapman, Erik Davis,
Manuel De Landa, Mark Dery, Julian Dibbell, Marc Laidlaw, Mark
Pauline, Peter Schwenger, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer
General
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