Topic: Getting

Does the logic of network existence entail radical schizophrenia – a shattering of the integral subject into an assemblage of aliases and agents? Could we hack immortality by storing our aliases and agents permanently on disk, to outlast our bodies? (William Gibson’s cyberpunk antiheroes nonchalantly shuck their slow, obsolescent, high-maintenance meat machines as they port their psychic software to new generations of hardware.) Does resurrection reduce to restoration from backup?

My software surrogates can potentially do much more than provide origins and destinations for messages: when appropriately programmed, they can serve as my semiautonomous agents by tirelessly performing standard tasks that I have delegated to them and even by making simple decisions on my behalf … A more maliciously conceived one might be programmed to roam the digital highways and byways, looking for trouble – for opportunities to corrupt the files of my enemies, to plunder valuable information, to eliminate rival agents, or to replicate itself endlessly and choke the system. Fritz Lang got it wrong: the robots in our future are not metallic Madonnas clanking around “Metropolis,” but soft cyborgs slinking silently through the Net. The neuromans of William Gibson are a lot closer to the mark.