transCendenZ (TM)

I find it interesting that Cronenberg often talks about "flesh" when he means so much more than that. From Videodrome's "Long Live the New Flesh" to EXistenZ' "MetaFlesh Game-Pod," Cronenberg seems to be locating new, reality-breaching experiences at the layer of the skin. Like much of the new forms of human described in the cyberpunk we've read this quarter, the new ways of being in Cronenberg have to do with growth or bio-organics but also link very closely to tropes of death: "Death to Videodrome!" and "Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!" (For a nice discussion of Cronenberg and the death drive, see Teresa de Lauretis' "Becoming Inorganic" in the Summer 2003 issue of Critical Inquiry.)

Perhaps it's the penetrable body that Cronenberg sees as both the enabling device to generate horror in his audience and also the site at which to imagine this work's central novum. The body not only offers a physical entrypoint for the gamepod to connect and affect the characters, but it also offers the central metaphor by which the gamepod communicates with the humans. Indeed, the body is the means by which we realize the gamepod's sentience. Take for example Allegra's realization that the pod introduces the theme of disease into the game in order to let her know that it is malfunctioning. Like a child or animal without language, the pod strives to communicate its suffering through gesture and other metaphorical representations of its pain. Further, the pod seems to only know how to create objects from other bodies (e.g, the fishbone gun).

Might the gamepod be communicating both its own independent thinking and its status a new kind of living being birthed from the human?

Time really is that which keeps everything from happening at once ...

Several of the writers this week contemplated the relationship between cyberspace and time. Indeed, discourses around computing have often focused on time (in the form of processor speed), with much concern about the rate at which computing speed could possibly increase before it hit some some sort of wall (see Intel founder Gordon Moore's 1965 article in Electronics Magazine.

Discussions of (the promise of) the Internet center around the realization of real-time communication and updates or streaming media for instantaneous delivery. Still, much Internet time is spent waiting, as the data must come available before they can be shared. Some of the information resides in the past and some in the future. I'm not sure if I'm more excited about the records of 197,745 cases from the Old Bailey dating back to 1674 that have recently been digitized or the release of the trailer for the X-Files movie tomorrow. For the latter, there's a count-down ticker on the website. Part of the joy is sitting and watching the ticker count-down (yes, I've spent some time doing this). Of course, part of the trailer has already been show at February WonderCon. Two things to observe here really:
1) In its current incarnation, cyberspace obtains (much of) its information from the human world and thus must wait for some human agency to update it.
2) Cyberspace is not housed in a single, unified space but rather on a variety of servers that reflect human ownership/experience.
We wait for a single, unified cyberspace with unlimited access to data and navigable through one central hub. (If we want that.)

Picturing the Hacker Subculture

Both Turkle (Second Self) and Taylor ("Hackers: Cyberpunks or Microserfs?" in The Cybercultures Reader) engage directly with the issue of how hackers are depicted. Turkle's description of MIT's "the Ugliest Man on Campus" contest depicts computer engineers as mostly men, reveling in their nerdiness. Some of the interviewees see "having a girlfriend" as being at odds with being a hardcore programmer, some see the latter as a way to sublimate the desire for the former. Neither the contest nor the depiction of the hackers in the chapter seek to really undermine the stereotype of the unattractive a-sexual or "girlfriend-less" computer geek. If anything, the chapter brings to light the way these constructions of geekiness rely on certain hegemonic notions of beauty and the ways in which sexual frustration/under-development is almost always constructed under a heteronormative system. 

Taylor's essay shows how cyberpunk works against some of this. By pointing out the fundamental difference between depictions of real-world employees at Microsoft and the hackers of cyberpunk fiction, he at least opens the possibility of sexy, engaged, uber-cool computer geeks.  Certainly this depiction is more compelling to the media market. The guys in Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science have given way to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and Ryan Phillippe in Anti-trust. Angelina Jolie in Hackers or, even better, Kristin Lehman as the hacker "invisigoth" in the William Gibson-penned X Files episode. Even the cyberpunk authors seem to be getting cooler as their latest books come out, whether it's Neal Stephenson pictured in a motorcycle jacket ... or the creation of the Buzz Rickson's "Pattern Recognition" MA-1 flight jacket, which was customized to match the description of the jacket favored by the main character of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

I'll be interested in discussing the implication of these curious dynamics in class!