Access Flame Wars: The Discourse Of Cyberculture Rendered By Mark Dery Presented As Mobi
pretty dated collection, but with a few gems, Some essays I had to skim or skip too heavy on the feminist artspeak, but the few good ones made it worth my while, YMMV. I picked it up specifically for the essay by de Landa, "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 ittransformed 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 Cadigans coinage, offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us will be parttime 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 Gibsons "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 allpowerful cyborg devotees of online swinging, or "compusex" 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 Jamesons 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
Contents:
Flame wars / Mark Dery
New age mutant Ninja hackers : reading Mondo/ Vivian Sobchack
Techgnosis, magic, memory, and the angels of information / Erik Davis
Agrippa, or, The apocalyptic book
/ Peter Schwenger
Gibson's typewriter / Scott Bukatman
Virtual surreality : our new romance with plot devices / Marc Laidlaw
Chapter, Synners / Pat Cadigan
Feminism for the incurably informed / Anne Balsamo
Sex, memories, and angry women / Claudia Springer
Black to the future: interviews with Samuel R.
Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose / Mark Dery
Compusex: erotica for cybernauts / Gareth Branwyn
Virtual environments and the emergence of synthetic reason / Manual de Landa
Survival Research Laboratories performs in Austria / Mark Pauline
Taming the computer / Gary Chapman.
From sitelink Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and book author who has taught at NYU and Yale, He coined the term “Afrofuturism,” popularized the concept of “culture jamming,” and has published widely on American mythologies and pathologies, His books include Flame Wars, a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, which has been translated into eight languages The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a study of cultural chaos in millennial America and the essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams.
His is the author, most recently, of a bio From sitelink Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and book author who has taught at NYU and Yale.
He coined the term “Afrofuturism,” popularized the concept of “culture jamming,” and has published widely on American mythologies and pathologies, His books include Flame Wars, a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, which has been translated into eight languages The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a study of cultural chaos in millennial America and the essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams.
His is the author, most recently, of a biography, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, published by Little, Brown in.
sitelink.