On one hand sits the thesis that cyberspace is a sociocultural, perhaps even spiritual "empowerment zone" -- a magical social space where the breach between thought and deed is healed and technopagans and other on-line communitarians can conjure virtual "societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital" (Julian Dibbell). On the other, there is the antithesis that those who place their faith in the magical possibilities of computer-generated worlds are abandoning all hope of political change in the world "mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital" as a time when their contributions are desperately needed.
- Mark Dery 



     So much of the debate about
the role of technology in society is either/or, all/nothing, black/white,
etc. Pitted against each other are the technophilic dreamers, whose promise
of a technological utopia is always necessarily deffered, and the
 technophobic doomsayers, whose arguments are often lost in
 Chicken-Little-sky-is-falling hysteria. 
 
It's the
 
 Extropians versus the
 
 Luddites, battling it out for space on the
 Barnes & Noble cultural criticism shelf, extolling the virtues of DigiCash
 or warning against the doomsday implications of the ATM. Each trying to
 outshout the other, the cacophany becomes unbearable and the effect is that
 any significant points either side has to make are often lost in the 
 hyperbole of their proclamations.

 Both sides seem to want to find a way out of the present postmodern 
 predicament. Both sides seemingly recognize the anxiety produced by the
 relatively recently revealed absence of the real. One side wants to recover
 the exact real that has been shown to be absent (returning to the past,
 a seeming impossibility).
  The other wants to produce a real so real we won't even know it's not real.
  (Always waiting for the future, this real can only be produced
  when the technology catches up -- but don't worry, it's just
  around the corner, I promise.) 

  Neither side seems terribly concerned with the present.
 









































[The] siren song of nineties technophilia and sixties transcendentalism
seduces the public imagination with the promise of an end-of-the-century
deus ex machina at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed.



This cyberdelic rhetoric represents what Walter Kirn has called "an eruption
 of high-tech millenarianism
-- a fin de siΦcle schizoid break induced by sitting too long at the screenà
 The sound-and-light show at the end of time,
longed for by these turned-on nerds, seems bound to disappoint." 

-- Mark Dery







[T]he accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of
technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity.
It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines
certain mental processes and social relations that make human life
worth living.



The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them
 where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe.
 The alternative is to live without meaning,
 the ultimate negation of life itself.

 -- Neil Postman






As the millennium draws near, we are witnessing the convergence
of what Leo Marx has called "the rhetoric of the technological sublime
 -- hymns to progress that rise "like froth on a tide of exuberant
 self-regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems,
 and contradictionsà"

 -- Mark Dery






It is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche
or the social but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified.
The body not as a subject but as an object -- NOT AS AN OBJECT OF
DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING.

-- Stelarc 


It's essentially science fiction, a kind of postmodernist view of what
the future person is going to be. In postmodern philosophy you can say,
"Why take anything for granted? Let's question the most basic elements --
 our very biology, for instance." Of course, at the outer limits of this
 ideology, you come up against biology, which is where Stelarc's weakness
 lies.

 -- Neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak