Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  Thus, while the physical workings of the computer inarguably convert symbols into deeds, and while the disembodied sociology of BBSs may treat descriptions as actions, the most significant exchange of symbols in cyberspace-the global, often computer-assisted traffic in currency, junk bonds, information, and other immaterial commodities- accentuates rather than eliminates the “division of the world into the symbolic and the real.” Breathless evocations of cyberspace as a “hermetically sealed-off area” where wishes are commands forget the world outside the magic circle-an ever more polarized two-tiered society “with an upper tier of high-wage skilled workers and an increasing ‘underclass’ of low-paid labor” and the unemployed, according to a special commission headed by former Labor Secretary John T. Dunlop.145 “Ours is a culture in which the symbolic economy, the traffic in ‘information’ and abstract value (credit, junk bonds, etc.) has accelerated beyond the economy of material goods,” writes Stuart Ewen, a critic of consumer culture.

  It operates more and more apart from it, as if an autonomous realm, though we have by no means conquered scarcity. . . . The stock market skyrockets while the material life of the economy is in shambles. . . . The health-care crisis, poverty and unemployment . . . are all ominous symbols of a worsening disintegration of the social fabric on a material level.146

  Secretary of Labor Robert Reich worries that the warp-drive acceleration of technological progress will exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, this inequity. In his New York Times Op-Ed piece, “The Fracturing of the Middle Class,” he writes, “While the information highway promises to speed some people to desirable destinations, it may leave others stranded in the technological version of inner-city ghettos.”147

  Dibbell’s argument and my rebuttal reiterate, once again, the binary opposition whose fault line runs through this chapter: that of the political versus the transcendental-what Todd Gitlin identifies as the “Change the World!” versus the “Change Consciousness, Change Life!” dichotomy. On one hand sits the thesis that cyberspace is a sociocultural, perhaps even spiritual “empowerment zone”–a magical social space where the breach between thought and deed is healed and technopagans and other on-line communitarians can conjure virtual “societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital” (Dibbell).148 On the other, there is the antithesis that those who place their faith in the magical possibilities of computer-generated worlds are abandoning all hope of political change in the world “mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital” at a time when their contributions are desperately needed.

  Technopagan visions of cyberspace as a magickal circle, of BBSs as “the new temples of the information age” (Dibbell), or of the Internet as a “spiritual tool” (Delysid) can be seen as empowering-a colonization of cyberspace and the technosphere by a subculture marginalized by the scientific world-view. Then again, such beliefs could be seen as evidence of the triumph of what Neil Postman calls “Technopoly,” which he defines as “a state of culture” that is also “a state of mind,” characterized by

  the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs.149

  Technopagans are inclined to argue that technology is fast literalizing magickal powers and may one day render this war of metaphors moot. In the WELL topic “Techgnosis: Computers as Magic,” the aeronautical engineer and high-tech entrepreneur William Mook offered a cogent, lyrical version of this argument:

  Computers basically take symbolic strings and produce other symbolic strings. As such, they aren’t too magical in the root meaning of the word. But, when attached to something that changes the world in a significant way, through robotic action, then computers are magical by definition.

  A computer might recognize the verbal symbol, “Ford Taurus.” It might then match it against a tag with CNC files to run a robotic factory which in turn manufactures and assembles an automobile according to the specs of a Ford Taurus. So one symbolic string is matched with a significantly large symbolic string which when executed by the appropriate hardware modifies the world in accordance with the original string. This is precisely what magic always was, the affecting [of] the world through symbolic acts that are interpreted by agents within the world to achieve the desired effects.

  Ultimately, we’ll have smart smoke powered by sunlight, eating the air, water and soil. It will be present everywhere and always listening for the words that invoke its power to produce goods and services in response to human need. At this point, the equation between technology and magic will be almost complete, but we will not hold it in awe, because awe is not something the magic will require.150

  Mook’s sublime evocation of a world inhabited by demiurgic demons “everywhere and always listening for the words” that will summon them into action sounds like a poetic rendering of the postscarcity technological Utopia imagined by the nanotechnologist K. Eric Drexler.

  In Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Drexler foretells a future fabricated by nanomachines-self-replicating, computerized microassemblers, smaller than a millionth of a meter, that would stack atoms at eye-blurring speed to build complex objects in the twinkling of an eye. He envisions a rocket engine “grown” by invisible assemblers in an industrial vat, spaceships fashioned from the raw materials of “soil, air and sunlight.” Nanomachines, writes Drexler, “will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities.”151

  But whether or not this alchemist’s dream come true will be realized within our lifetimes (or ever), we can at least say that, in a late-twentieth-century culture whose worldview is supposedly structured by science, the technosphere has become an ironic repository of teleological visions and transcendentalist myths-all of them testimony to the abiding influence of sixties counterculture on nineties cyberdelia. The mystical raptures and apocalyptic premonitions of the sixties endure in the millenarian prophecies of techno-hippies, technopagans, New Age disciples of human potential, and visionary technologists.

  Throughout cyberculture, and especially in cyberspace, we encounter the capitalist goddess of progress, the angels and alien saviors of the New Age, and the animistic spirits of paganism, calling to mind Robert Pirsig’s proclamation, in the New Age classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that “the Godhead resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”152 Whether Pirsig’s Godhead, Maxwell Delysid’s loa, or Tony Lane’s electrical familiars are taken literally, as manifestations of the numinous, or metaphorically, as mythic beings that once resided in nature and now inhabit the technosphere, is a matter of individual conviction. But in either case, it seems that reports of the death of God were greatly exaggerated.

  Joseph Campbell assumed as much when he told a short parable about peering inside his PC. Campbell, who held that the major religions were all but obsolete and that modern myths were needed, was dazzled by the dizzy mandala of the computer’s microcircuitry. “Have you ever looked inside one of those things?” he asked an interviewer. “You can’t believe it. It’s a whole hierarchy of angels-all on slats.”153 The Sacred, it seems, is alive and well inside the machine.

  2 / METAL MACHINE MUSIC

  Cyberpunk Meets the Black

  Leather Synth – Rockers1

  Billy Idol, Cyberpunk™. © Gene Kirkland

  “Cyberpunk” began as a literary subgenre-an ear-catching coinage borrowed from Bruce Bethke’s 1983 story of the same name and applied, in a 1984 Washington Post article by the critic and editor Gardner Dozois, to the “bizarre, hard-edg
ed, high-tech” SF emerging in the eighties. Soon, the term tore loose from its moorings and floated into the mainstream. In their 1991 nonfiction whodunit, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Katie Hafner and John Markoff used it to describe “young people for whom computers and computer networks are an obsession, and who have carried their obsession beyond what computer professionals consider ethical and lawmakers consider acceptable.”2

  Pulled in every direction by journalists, SF manifesto-makers, postmodern theorists, netsurfers, and fans, “cyberpunk” has been stretched into strange new shapes. My use of the neologism, in a 1989 cover story for Keyboard magazine, as a label for electro-industrial rock with a grungy, sci-fi edge serves as a prism to refract some of cyberculture’s recurrent themes: the convergence of human and machine; the supersession of sensory experience by digital simulation; the subcultural “misuse” of high technology in the service of perverse sensibilities or subversive ideologies; and a profound ambivalence, handed down from the sixties, toward computers as engines of liberation and tools of social control, reweavers of the social fabric shredded by industrial modernism and instruments of an even greater atomization.

  To Lewis Shiner, one of the genre’s founding fathers, the use of the term to describe “guys in black leather who use synthesizers . . . and digital sampling” betokens the co-optation of what began as the literary equivalent of a terrorist faction.3 It is emblematic, he contends, of the mainstreaming of cyberpunk, a trend he laments in his 1991 New York Times editorial, “Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk”:

  Cyberpunk started out as a fashionable subset of science fiction, showing high technology subverted by opportunists on the margins of society, for profit or just for fun. . . . But by 1987, [it] had become a cliché. . . . Ironically, as the term . . . was losing its meaning for us, it was escaping, virus-like, into the mainstream, where it continues to thrive.4

  Instead of speaking truth to power, he argues, mass market cyberpunk “offers power fantasies, the same dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster movies”; it mythologizes “our obsession with material goods” and reaffirms our faith in “technical, engineered solutions” to economic ills and moral malaise.5

  Shiner’s worst suspicions about black leather synth-rockers who call themselves cyberpunks were confirmed in 1993, when Billy Idol-a onetime punk rocker whose market-savvy makeovers have helped him outlast the class of ’77-released Cyberpunk, a bald-faced appropriation of every cyberpunk cliché that wasn’t nailed down.

  At the same time, who is more deserving of the “cyberpunk” moniker than techno-rockers communing with matte black modules through what one ad called “neon backlit Mega Screens”? Prosthetically enhanced by a daunting array of samplers, sequencers, synthesizers, signal processors, and software that turns computers into recording studios, today’s musicians are not far removed from Neuromancer’s outlaw hackers, their sensoriums physically interlinked with the cyberspace matrix. More and more, musicians of all stripes compose and perform patched into cybernetic nervous systems whose ganglia are “interactive music workstations” such as the Korg i3, an inscrutable, button-studded machine resembling the instrument panel of a Stealth bomber. “Unlike other workstations,” boasts a magazine ad,

  the i3 is capable of producing musical “ideas” of its own-phrases and patterns called Styles that can be modified, looped and combined to block out songs in minutes. The interactive i3 extrapolates or produces chords and patterns from the notes you play. And with Korg’s Full Range Scanning feature, your chords won’t be forced into the simplistic, default versions found on other instruments.6

  A cursory browse through Keyboard, a technical magazine for electronic musicians, reveals the extent to which the contemporary musician has been borged and morphed. An ad for E-mu’s Morpheus Z-Plane synthesizer (“the synthesizer to move your music into the next century”) rejoices in “multi-segment function generators for microscopic sound-sculpting” and “14-pole Z-Plane filters”

  capable of modeling virtually any resonant characteristics and then interpolating (or “morphing”) between them in real time. Imagine sending a saxophone through the body of a violin and then smoothly morphing it into a distortion guitar. Or send[ing] a piano through the resonances of the human vocal tract pronouncing a variety of vowels.7

  In much the same way that virtual personae adrift on the Internet seem to be floating farther and farther away from the physical bodies to which they are anchored, virtual instruments are taking leave of their acoustic bodies–the guitars, pianos, saxophones, drums, and other Renaissance, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century artifacts that originally produced their characteristic sounds. “Perhaps [virtual] instruments should feature a wide variety of control interfaces, both traditional and forward-thinking,” muses Keyboard’s technical editor Michael Marans. “Given the vast number of parameters that can be controlled, maybe virtual reality goggles and a DataGlove are in order.”8

  In fact, a handful of composers are using DataGlove-style “gestural interfaces” even now. Tod Machover, the director of the Experimental Media Facility at MIT’s Media Lab, utilizes an Exos Dexterous Hand Master–a cyborglike gauntlet with aluminum phalanges and wire nerves–to translate his conducting gestures into commands for electronic instruments via a computer. “It uses sensors and magnets to measure the movements at each finger joint,” he explains. “This system works fast enough to monitor the most subtle movements of a finger as well as the largest hand gestures, with great precision, accuracy, and speed. . . . [T]he glove movements influence [dynamics], spatial placement, and the overall timbre of the whole piece.”9 In “Bug-Mudra,” on Machover’s record Flora, the composer-performer uses the Hand Master to direct the course of a giddily syncopated figure churned out by electric and acoustic guitarists and an electronic percussionist. The trio is plugged into Machover’s computer-based “hyperinstrument” system, in which “intelligent, interactive machines” respond, in real time, to the performances of live instrumentalists. “The piece’s entire timbral content–all the sound color of these instruments–is determined by movements of the hand,” the composer informs.10

  Machover’s Exos controller bears a $20,000 price tag; meanwhile, in the bargain basement, Mark Trayle employs a Mattel PowerGlove purchased at Toys ‘R’ Us for $79.95. (The discontinued PowerGlove was originally designed to enable young users to interact with Nintendo video games through gestures, rather than joystick movements.) In Seven Gates, “an interactive computer music composition with a touch of virtual reality,” the deconstructionist composer uses a PowerGlove to spindle, fold, and mutilate scraps of TV programs, radio broadcasts, and musical quotes stored in the memory of a computer, among them the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem, Latino radio announcers, Handel’s Water Music, “the gray-haired guy with glasses on The Nightly Business Report,” and “some drumming from the South Pacific.” Conceiving of his prearranged samples as sonic oddments arranged on “invisible shelves” behind an “imaginary fence,” Trayle plucks sounds out of thin air by reaching through a “gate” in the fence, removing a sonic bauble from the shelf, and brandishing it in a series of high-tech incantations. With a wave of the Glove, he can raise the sample’s pitch to a helium squeak, lower it to a Novocain slur, or loop it so that it stammers frantically until cut short by a flick of the wrist. A reviewer reports that some who have watched Trayle perform “tell of actually visualizing the manipulation of sounds as if they were images projected onto a screen.”11

  DataGlove-style controllers are not the only futuristic interfaces currently in use. BioControls’ BioMuse uses an eye motion tracker, together with EMG and EEG signals generated by muscle movements and brain waves, to control virtually any aspect of a MIDI instrument–pitch, panning, timbre, volume, and so forth. (MIDI, short for “Musical Instrument Digital Interface,” is an industry-standard computer language that facilitates the communication of pitch, duration, and other musical information between electro
nic instruments, thus allowing them to control each other. For example, MIDI pulses from an electronic drum machine can play back, or “trigger,” sounds recorded and stored as digital data by a computerized device called a “sampler.”) Sensors embedded in the Bio-Muse’s headband and two muscle bands detect and relay bioelectric impulses to a personal computer by means of a specially designed interface. Erik Davis witnessed a performance in which a BioMusician “played air violin, controlling pitch, volume and vibrato with his arms, while producing stereo as he shifted his gaze across the room, and changing the violin sound to a glockenspiel by closing his eyes and lapsing into [an] Alpha [wave] state.”12

  Ultimately, the story goes, human composers will be superseded altogether by artificial intelligence. Tod Machover imagines the evolution of artificial life whose Darwinian struggles make posthuman music. “One of my dreams for a long time has been to have compositions which are like living organisms . . . [comprised of] musical agents,” he says, “each of them a musical tendency, a melodic shape or harmonic progression or tone color. The trick would be to set up an environment with some kind of constraint language where you could put those things in motion. You might just push a button and watch it behave.”13

  Clearly, the “cyberpunk” tag is adequately earned in state-of-the-art electronic music, be it pop or avant-garde. Nonetheless, Shiner’s point is well taken: There is something suspect about the light-fingered appropriation of a mediagenic label like “cyberpunk” by pop music, a voracious medium that has perfected the pasteurization of underground trends. A buzzword that must be made to fit artists as disparate as Information Society and Sonic Youth ends up stretched to a transparency.