The current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools holds tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with for so long… A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or the node in an international computer bulletin board system.
The BBS is a first, faltering step toward the jammer’s dream of a truly democratic mass medium. Although virtual communities fall short of utopia – women and people of color are grossly underrepresented, and those who cannot afford the price of admission or who are alienated from technology because of their cultural status are denied access – they nonetheless represent a profound improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic medium of television … This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation.
Hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers are heartened by the electronic frontier’s promise of a new media paradigm – interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.
In the next century, growing numbers of Americans will work and play in artificial environments that only exist, in the truest sense, as bytes stored in computer memory. The explosion of computer-based interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at least in its familiar form) the decidedly non-interactive medium that has dominated the latter half of this century: television.
The parallel world of cyberspace will take on a liquid architecture. But the inhabitants will be as liquid as their environment. They will therefore be occupied with both the design of shape and surroundings … What the street used to be to historical dandies like Brummell, Baudelaire and Wilde, the Net is to the electronical one. Cruising along the data boulevards cannot be prohibited and clogs the entire bandwidth in the end. The all-too-civilized conversation during the rendezvous stirs up some misplaced and inconvenient information, but never leads to dissidence. Willfully wrong navigation and elegant joy riding in somebody else’s electro-environment is targeted to trigger admiration, jealousy and confusion, and self-assuredly heads toward a stylized incomprehension. One fathoms the beauty of one’s virtual appearance.
We call it a Nightmare nothing between the underclass and the virtual class, No public control just virtual elites, Certainly no liberty for all just Newt and the boys in a perfect little techno-bubble clean, sterile and immunized from degrading American flesh Get wired, they say Get deregulated and upgraded Get netted and vetted Get multi-tasked, demassified and bit-netted Get backslashed, backtracked and backlit Let’s surf, merge, and purge Leave behind the First and Second Waves and welcome the famous Third Wave.
The inevitiblity of the computer should no more be allowed than letting television become a life necessity. Which is why it would be better – even if it’s no longer possible – not to be caught up in the computer-net. Only then can the new media offer a useful option. Everything else is coercion … There will now be a media-criticism that is finally informed, and which, insofar as this criticism will take place in the nets, will finally be part of the new media themselves.
Real-time “live” technologies, cyberreality, will permit the incorporation of the world within oneself. One will be able to read the entire world … And I will have become the world. The body of the world and my body will be one. Once again, this is a divine vision; and this is what the military are looking for. Earth is already being integrated into the Pentagon, and the man in the Pentagon is already piloting the world war … as if he were a captain whose huge boat would have become his own body. Thus the body simulates the relationship to the world … What will prevail is this will to reduce the world to the point where one could possess it. All military technologies reduce the world to nothing.
One day the virtual world might win over the real world. These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident … I must say that cyberspace is acting like God and deals with the idea of God who is, sees and hears everything.
You are not in control of Cyberspace, it is not there for your comfort and convenience, and no one is driving it. There is no suggestion in the notion of Cyberspace that, should human beings suddenly cease to exist – or destroy themselves in some nuclear folly – the network of machines that constitute Cyberspace would vanish with them. Cyberspace assumes that the machines we have built will soon, in some leap of almost magical synergy, break free of their creators to constitute, by means of the communications networks we are generously building for them, a universe or nature of an entirely new and different order.