06.06. mark dery "metaphor as illness" -------------------------------------------------------19:00 media~space! Watch your Language! METAPHOR AS ILLNESS: We live in a moment when the membrane between metaphor and materiality is increasingly permeable: force-feedback virtual reality enables us to reach out and touch neo-Platonic hyperrealities fashioned from shaded polygons, for instance. At the same time, the growing realization that the industrial boilerplate in which we've sheathed our metaphors for the wired world around us is inappropriate to an age of ever-smaller, ever-smarter "soft" machines has given rise to a vogue for feminine and "neo-biological" metaphors for the polymorphous perversity of digital technologies. Stranger still, Marvin Minsky's ever-popular biocybernetic metaphor--the neo-La Mettrian notion of the brain as a computer, voguish among AI theorists and cyberpundits--has engendered techno-eschatological visions of the Net as an emergent hive mind. "Metaphor as Illness" offers a fast-acting antidote to millennial cyberbole of this sort. Beginning with an exploded view of the metaphor as Ur-technology (language itself being, after all, an elaborate network of metaphors), it rains deconstructive hammerblows on received metaphors of the brain as a meat machine and the global telecommunications network as (your choice) a) a numinous Gaian Mind, b) a collective consciousness, or c) an emergent "super-organism." Finally, it ponders the liberatory possibilities of _useful_ metaphors, and considers the larger moral of our millennial fables about mind over matter, examples of which include John Perry Barlow's declaration of the Net as the "New Home of Mind," the Progress & Freedom Foundation's proclamation that "the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter," and the Heaven's Gate cultists' saucer-eyed visions of a millennial Rapture, underwritten by a manifest contempt for the meat as an obsolete "vehicle" (a world-view shared by ubernerds such as Hans Moravec, the Extropians--a California-based posthuman potential cult--and, in more mainstream form, a representative sampling of Netizens, digerati, and New Age mutant ninja hackers). Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He wrote _Escape Velocity:Cyberculture at the End of the Century_ (Grove Press), and edited the essay collection _Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture_ (Duke University Press). He also wrote _Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs_ (Open Magazine Pamphlet Series), a monograph on guerrilla semiotics and information war. His byline has appeared in various critical anthologies and numerous newspapers and magazines, among them The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Wired, The Web, Mondo 2000, The Discovery Channel Online, Suck, Salon, Semiotext(e), Adbusters, 21.C, and World Art. "A strange, unsettling, often provocative tour through fringe computer cultures." - Publishers Weekly "Escape Velocity is extraordinary--a rare book that is both scholarly and compulsively readable... Stimulating, perceptive, and a hell of a lot of fun." -- Pat Cadigan, author of Fools and Synners