What do you think?
Rate this book
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture
"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 it—transformed 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 Cadigan’s coinage, offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us will be part-time 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 Gibson’s "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 all-powerful cyborg; devotees of on-line swinging, or "compu-sex"; 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 Jameson’s 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 2000 / 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 14, 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 --
Compu-sex: 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.
The subcultural practices of the "incurably informed," to borrow the cyberpunk novelist Pat Cadigan’s coinage, offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us will be part-time 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 Gibson’s "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 all-powerful cyborg; devotees of on-line swinging, or "compu-sex"; 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 Jameson’s 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 2000 / 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 14, 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 --
Compu-sex: 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.
355 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1993
3 people are currently reading
246 people want to read
About the author
Mark Dery
24 books97 followersFrom http://markdery.com/?page_id=130
Mark 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 (1994), a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture; Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996), which has been translated into eight languages; The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999), 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 (2012). 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 2018.
Mark 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 (1994), a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture; Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996), which has been translated into eight languages; The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999), 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 (2012). 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 2018.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 29, 2023
Specifically read Dery’s seminal article ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’ in which he defined Afrofuturism:
Why do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other-the stranger in a strange land-would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? Yet, to my knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of science fiction. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind). [179-180]
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future-might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’. [180]
Of course, subsequent writers like Nnedi Okorafor in particular have had a lot to say about this … and Delany himself challenges Dery quite vigorously in their interview:
It’s struck me more and more over the years that one of the most forceful and distinguishing aspects of science fiction is that it’s marginal. It’s always at its most honest and most effective when it operates – and claims to be operating – from the margins. Whenever – sometimes just through pure enthusiasm for its topic – it claims to take center stage, I find it usually betrays itself in some way. I don’t want to see it operating from anyone’s center: black nationalism’s, feminism’s, gay rights’, pro-technology movements’, ecology movements’, or any other center.
Why do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other-the stranger in a strange land-would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? Yet, to my knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of science fiction. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind). [179-180]
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future-might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’. [180]
Of course, subsequent writers like Nnedi Okorafor in particular have had a lot to say about this … and Delany himself challenges Dery quite vigorously in their interview:
It’s struck me more and more over the years that one of the most forceful and distinguishing aspects of science fiction is that it’s marginal. It’s always at its most honest and most effective when it operates – and claims to be operating – from the margins. Whenever – sometimes just through pure enthusiasm for its topic – it claims to take center stage, I find it usually betrays itself in some way. I don’t want to see it operating from anyone’s center: black nationalism’s, feminism’s, gay rights’, pro-technology movements’, ecology movements’, or any other center.
Read
October 10, 2014A pretty dated collection, but with a few gems. Some essays I had to skim or skip (too heavy on the feminist art-speak), but the few good ones made it worth my while. YMMV. I picked it up specifically for the essay by de Landa.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews