MARK DERY: KEYNOTE

• Friday, 7:00PM UT Campus [ACES Bldg Room 2.302, 24th and Speedway on the UT campus]

"Mark Dery has a hammerlock on the zeitgeist. He may be the best cultural critic alive."

-- Bruce Sterling (in Bookforum)

The body is obsolete, declares the cybernetic performance artist Stelarc; he envisions a "pan-planetary physiology" for the spacefaring cyborg, its brawn augmented with robotic hardware, its brainpower boosted with computer chips. Going further, the roboticist Hans Moravec dreams of "downloading" our minds into computer memory and disposing of our dead meat altogether.

Transferred to a deep space probe, a disembodied consciousness could explore the cosmos, drifting lazily into infinity.

Spun from sci-fi mysticism, New Age millenarianism, and human potential pep talk, the rhetoric of escape velocity promises an escape from history, gravity, even mortality. It is a hymn to progress and a transport of rapture -- an end-of-the-century deus ex machina that crosses cyberpunk science fiction with the pentecostal belief in an apocalyptic Rapture, in which history ends and true believers are lifted into the parting clouds.

But placing our faith in a cyber-Rapture is a risky endgame at a time when the problems all around us clamor for immediate solutions. Posthumanist visions of the mind unbound and the Earth dwindling to a pinpoint in our rear-view mirror leave social responsibility behind, on the launch pad; they ignore the depredation of Nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses. As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and social rupture, between Disney's Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, we would do well to remember that -- for the foreseeable future, at least -- we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The misguided hope that we will be born again as "bionic angels," to quote Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus; it pins our future to wings of wax and feathers.

-- Mark Dery; from Escape Velocity

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He wrote Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, which has been translated into eight languages, and edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, a seminal anthology of cybercrit. His essay on guerrilla media activism and disinformation warfare, "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs," is a bona fide Net classic, widely circulated online. His most recent book is the essay collection, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (www.levity.com/markdery/).

A frequent commentator on new media, fringe thought, and unpopular culture, Mark has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly (online), Elle, Lingua Franca, Rolling Stone, Salon, and Wired, among others. His column, "Invisible Lit," ran for several years in Bookforum, and his radio commentaries have been featured on the nationally syndicated program "Radio Nation." In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine.

Mark is the director of digital journalism at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication.

All GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS events are free and open to the public.