Escape Velocity is the most rampantly affected, even though it claims to be the most radical and cutting-edge. One of the most startling effects of digital technology is how it pervading so much of our everyday activities of work, play, communication and learning. But shunning the ordinary, Dery takes the ‘alternative’ route in search of extraordinary ‘subcultures’ and ‘countercultures’. His book unfolds as a freak show, a parade of cyberpunk novelists, cybersex enthusiasts, technopagans, cyber rockers and underground roboticists. It adheres to the old and easily questionable post-modern assumption that the more outlandish, marginal, bizarre the phenomenon, the more socially significant it is.

As a result, Escape Velocity has a tendency to fall into the formal style of a telephone directory: since every manifestation is potentially important, nothing can be left out. From nanotechnology to neural networks, safe sex to smart drugs, Dery connects the most diverse and spurious. There is, despite all this, a unifying element. His argument is that new technologies are changing the way we configure our consciousness to our bodies and all the other objects around.

Though he swings from the utopian to the apocalyptic, Dery is really only repeating something Marshall McCluhan observed forty years ago: technology extends the range of our physical control and mental awareness. But in doing so, we make a psychic exchange with inorganic matter. We become less animated as the objects we make become more and more alive.

The only problem with the formulation is that it is hardly new (Humphrey Jennings applied it to the Industrial Revolution in Pandemonium) and so undermines Dery’s decision to select his subjects for their sensational news value. He often cites Hans Moravec’s belief that one day we will be able to ‘download’ our minds entirely onto some trillion terabyte computer hard disk. - but this is just another manifestation of the ancient desire to turn ourselves into monuments, epitaphs or statues, a ‘sundering of body from consciousness’ which Walter Benjamin once wrote is inherent in the act of writing itself.

For all the new technology of its subject matter, Escape Velocity is still working in the old technology of text, and it is in verbal texture of the book that the biggest problem real lies. Every sentence is spiked with a ‘cyberdelic’ buzz words and neologisms. Technical terms swiftly transform into metaphors and back again (like the title of the book), confusing clear or sustained argument.

Post modernists may claim that Dery is just making clear the innate ‘opacity’ of the language. But surely even opacity can have its shades and contrasts. Too often Dery’s insights get hi-jacked by his style. At one point, Escape Velocities shows the similarity between the technological visions of McCluhan and the theology of Teilhard de Chardin: a fusion of mysticism and machinery which Dery calls ‘techno-paganism’. But whereas he might have connected this to wider social trends (e.g., the growth of sci-fi religions like Scientology) Dery ends up watching a performance artist practice some new kind of body piercing. It’s cool. It’s shocking. And largely irrelevant - like a bad day at the ICA.

At least Shelly Turkle’s Life on the Screen is not just devoted to the folly of the few, and attempts to explore how the growing presence of personal computers has affected the follies of the many. The best passages in Turkle’s work are drawn from her own researches. Over the last decade, she has interviewed hundreds of men, women and children who use digital technology as everyday practitioners rather than performance artists.

Life on the Screen explores many of the same premises as Escape Velocity - especially how the development of smart machines has affected our idea of what it is to be human. But Turkle pursues these premise through a very different route. Through asking children of different ages (and in different cultures) whether an interactive computer program is ‘alive’ or not, she reveals how quickly children learn the difference between simulation and reality. The fact that computer programs are becoming increasingly sophisticated and apparently ‘intelligent’ does not seem to instill these children with any fear that computers will one day think for themselves and take over the world (like the malevolent ‘Net’ in the Terminator movies) Significantly, they have revised their ideas of what it is to be alive and human beyond the mere ability to process logical commands. They help define their humanity by seeing what a computer cannot do: breath, feel or imagine.

It is the normality of Turkle’s approach that actually makes it a more profound piece of cultural criticism. There are elements of the freak show, especially with her emphasis of t fantasy role playing and gender bending in Multi-User Dungeons - online interactive games. Yet even here, Turkle avoids the sensationalism of virtual murder and rape. She compares the stories of two inhibited lonely men who played obsessively for several hours a day, adopting different roles in online charades. For one, it became an unhealthy addiction - a way of acting out his fantasies of power and revenge. For another it became a way of working them out.

Unfortunately, despite long sections where Turkle makes the digital domain both understandable and real, there are also chapters cluttered with apologies for the intellectual mentors of her student days. Hours of valuable processing time are wasted on Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari and the circularities of post modern theory. Without this virus on her hard disk, Turkle’s distinction between a culture of calculation and a culture of simulation - a distinction that largely covers the change from the centralized, inaccessible mainframes of the 70s, and the colorful user-friendly PCs of the 90s - would be perfectly acceptable. But by adding the key word ‘simulation’, the dormant bug is triggered, and what was initially just a suggestive observation mutates into ideological position, then into a sprawling series of self-justifications.

Book review for New Statesman April 1996