Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  The obvious answer is that wherever humankind goes, sex inevitably follows, and the universe of technological innovation is no exception. The best-known literary premonition of virtual reality-the “All Super-Singing, Synthetic-Talking, Coloured, Stereoscopic Feely” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World-is palpable pornography, a quivering “electric titilla-tion” in which the audience thrills to the sexual acrobatics of “a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female.” The rise of the adult video and concomitant decline of the X-rated theater are significant if largely unacknowledged factors in the success of the VCR. According to John Tierney, a fellow at the Freedom Forum Center for Media Studies at Columbia University,

  [Pornographers] played a key role in popularizing the video-cassette recorder. In 1978 and 1979, when fewer than 1 percent of American homes had VCR’s and the major movie studios were reluctant to try the new technology, more than 75 percent of the videocassettes sold were pornographic. And when cable systems began allowing public-access programming, pornographers immediately brought forth shows like Midnight Blue.82

  Some believe that the demand for adults-only titles will likewise drive the interactive multimedia technologies destined to succeed the VCR. New York Times computer columnist Peter H. Lewis reported that X-rated CD-ROMs “drew the biggest crowds” at the fall 1993 Comdex, a computer industry trade show, and quoted one dealer as saying that “pornography may be the long-awaited ‘killer’ application that will spur the sale of CD-ROM drives.”83 Tierney takes a macroscopic perspective: “In the history of communications technology, sex seems to be the most enduring killer app. . . . Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation; virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.”84 Minitel, France’s government-run national computer network, is an object lesson in the hijacking of new technologies by human desire: Intended to function as a database for consumers, making electronic banking, teleshopping, theater reservations, and other services available to its more than 6.5 million subscribers, the pay-per-minute network garners a substantial portion of its profits from adult chat lines called “messageries,” ranging in subject from matchmaking to flaming text sex.

  “Lust,” says Mike Saenz, “motivates technology. The first personal robots, let’s face it, are not going to be bought to bring people drinks.”85 Gerard Van Der Leun maintains that “sex . . . is . . . a virus that almost always infects new technology first.” Unfortunately, not all sex viruses are metaphoric; AIDS currently afflicts fourteen million people worldwide-a number that may rise to forty million by the year 2000, according to the World Health Organization.86 Moreover, it is now the leading killer of American men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, and the fourth leading killer of women in that group.87 The Russian roulette reality of sex in the nineties may have more than a little to do with the popular appeal of what has been coyly called “getting it on(-line).”

  Still, the self-evident truths that sex suffuses all human endeavor and that worlds inside computers facilitate promiscuity with impunity in the age of AIDS do not entirely explain the advent of computer-enhanced or -enabled sex. As I argued in the first half of this chapter, sex in cyberculture can only be understood in the context of the machine sex and sex machines that litter the psychological landscape of the twentieth century. And, as “Built for Pleasure” attests, that landscape has been configured for the most part by male phobias and obsessions: DON JUAN, a male counterpart to LULU, was conceived but never realized, and there is no Virtual Victor for female users because Saenz’s creative department consists entirely of heterosexual males “who have a hard time with other kinds of fantasies,” he says.88

  Male desire displaced onto machinery is a recurrent subtext in cyberculture. The paradigmatic computer obsessive is the hacker, an archetype fixed in the popular imagination as a grungy teenager married to his terminal, sustained by caffeinated cola, junk food, and above all, an almost symbiotic relationship with his computer. Historically, computer addicts have been nerds, and what makes a nerd a nerd, more than high-water pants or pocket protectors, is his excruciating awkwardness when interacting with the opposite sex. The infamous geekiness of hackers arises from the fact, noted by Steven Levy in Hackers, that “computing was more important than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives.”89

  This is undeniably the case with the hacker profiled in an Omni article on robopsychology (“the study of the computer age pathology of loving a machine”), who says, “I’m not married . . . unless you count the numerous computers I’ve fallen in love with.”90 His self-described “first love” was a Radio Shack computer. “She spent most of her life near or in my bed, and when I was away from her I had the urge to communicate by radio.”91 In The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder reports a programmer’s reminiscence that, among the undergraduate computer mavens who met for all-night programming sessions, a few “began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost them for the sake of playing with the machine all night.”92 Presumably, some of them grew up to star in Kidder’s account of a company’s race to build a groundbreaking microcomputer; they are the hotshot programmers whose wives (if they have wives) are inevitably “computer widows.” To Geoff Simons, a writer on computer culture, this is no laughing matter.

  We already see a growing literature describing the impact of computer systems on the institution of marriage. . . . McLoughlin, a Guardian correspondent, has quoted the wife of a computer freak: “The whole thing started when he [began] to work late at the office, and I began to think that there was another woman.” And [another writer] notes that “When Lisa found herself getting upset and angry each time Carl disappeared into the den, she realized she was jealous of the Apple computer as if it were another woman.”93

  Even as the computer is feminized, females are objectified. Internalizing the sexist caricature of women as irrational creatures ruled by intuition, emotion, and (worst of all) their bodies, the most extreme male technophiles see them as kludges (pronounced “klooges”)-compu-slang for “an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts forming a distressing whole,” according to a 1962 Datamation article.94 As an MIT hacker in the early sixties, writes Levy,

  you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. “Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. “How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?”95

  Even sexual attraction is articulated in cybernetic terms: In The Soul of a New Machine, a hardware hacker describes a stunning woman as “a miracle of biological engineering.”

  The crossed wires of sex and technology in hacker culture, as in cyberculture at large, are readily apparent in computer slang. Computer nuts and even corporations routinely boast about the speed and memory capacities of their machines in a manner that bears a distinct resemblance to locker-room braggadocio about sexual prowess; I.D. magazine calls this practice “machoflopping,” defined as “ballyhooing multi-gigaflops and tera-flops.” A 1983 novelty book called Silicon Valley Guy Handbook includes dialogue such as “I get there and she [a computer program named Julie] is ON LINE. I mean, like, she’s wearing all this software. I’m calculating the access time to her front-end processor.”96 Even in isolation, the technical jargon of the computer industry-floppy disk, hard drive, input/output, male-female connector, slot, joystick–seems rife with sexual innuendo. In a letter to the computer magazine InfoWorld, an account executive with a PR firm noted that his client, a software publisher, perceived “computer software as needing to be simple, hot, and deep.”97

  Mechano-eroticism, among hackers and cyberpunks, is often colored by a pernicious loathing for the weak, “feminine” flesh, contemptuously referred to in compu-slang as “meat,” a term bathed in sexual associat
ions. Sleep-deprived and fueled with coffee, Coke, and McFood, the body is bent to the needs of an implacable ego that seeks the status and power denied it in the all-important high school arenas of sports and social interaction. Nascent computerphiles, writes Levy, are “those weird high school kids with . . . underdeveloped pectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked PE, who dreamed not of scoring on prom night, but of getting to the finals of the General Electric Science Fair competition.”98 Uncomfortable in bodies that are often pudgy or skinny, some hackers dream of becoming one with their machines in a transcendental fusion of the ego and the Other that is equal parts machine sex and divine assumption. Levy writes, “Real optimum programming, of course, could only be accomplished when every obstacle between you and the pure computer was eliminated-an ideal that probably won’t be fulfilled until hackers are somehow biologically merged with computers.”99

  This, to the masculinist technophile, is the weirdly alchemical end point of cyberculture: the distillation of pure mind from base matter. Sex, in such a context, would be purged of feminine contact-removed, in fact, from all notions of physicality-and reduced to mental masturbation, the electrical flickerings of a consciousness encoded in computer memory. Even now, clumsy gropings toward a technology that displaces sexual thrills into the domain of disembodied cerebration have been reported by the psychologists Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth:

  A thirty-year-old Los Angeles cocaine user reported that he was no longer satisfied having sexual intercourse with “biological units.” A career musician, familiar with electronics, he was able to develop a biofeedback contrivance that could register changes in penile erection and transmit the information to an Apple computer. He would mechanically masturbate via an automatic vacuum device, developed to provide sexual stimulation for people who could not masturbate because of spinal injury. The biofeedback penile information would program the computer to project varying degrees and kinds of pornographic footage, excerpted and stored from a database of four hundred pornographic video tapes. The whole experience was augmented by repeated and heavy use of cocaine.100

  Born of body horror, an all-consuming obsession with entertainment media, and the dissolution of traditional notions of community, such loveless, sci-fi pathologies, though voguish, are not new. Marshall McLuhan touched on them in his 1969 Playboy interview, in which he bemoaned the perceived effect of the sexual revolution in an age of information overload: a “mechanical view of the body as capable of experiencing specific thrills, but not total sexual-emotional involvement and transcendence.”101 This throws a pessimistic light on his observation a sentence later:

  Projecting current trends, the love machine would appear a natural development in the near future-not just the current computerized datefinder, but a machine whereby ultimate orgasm is achieved by direct mechanical stimulation of the pleasure circuits of the brain.102

  As feminists such as Brenda Laurel remind us, this latest manifestation of a century’s worth of mechano-eroticism is in large part a product of male desires, not all of them healthy. “I know from 15 years’ experience with computer guys that we have a class of people we call nerds who are radically uncomfortable with their bodies and their sexuality,” she says, in an interview with the sex guru Susie Bright. “When men talk about virtual reality, they often use phrases like ‘out-of-body experience’ and ‘leaving the body.’ When women talk about VR they speak of taking the body with them into another world. The idea is to take these wonderful sense organs with us, not to leave our bodies humped over a keyboard while [the] brain zips off down some network. The body is not simply a container for this glorious intellect of ours.”103

  The question of whether women, unique in their ability to experience menstruation, menopause, and childbearing, are somehow more attuned to the body than men has bedeviled thinkers since time immemorial and will not be settled here. That said, we can nonetheless conclude that cyberculture is fraught with male dread and desire, and that when those two currents cross, as they do in the conjunction of sexuality and technology, much of what floats to the surface is pathological.

  The scariest of those pathologies eroticizes the machinery of death, reiterating McLuhan’s unholy trinity–“the widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death.” The assertion that war perverts the relationship between sex and death is amply evidenced in the military’s use of sexually charged metaphors and double entendres to describe high-tech weaponry: scientists engaged in defense research speak in terms of “‘Vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay-downs, deep penetration . . . the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks’-defined by one military adviser to the National Security Council as ‘releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.’”104 Not for nothing did the feminist historian of science Donna Haraway proclaim modern war “a cyborg orgy.” In a Re/Search magazine interview, the performance artist Carolee Schneemann deconstructs the military brief-ingspeak of the Gulf War, noting that

  the language of this war has all been about ‘creaming them . . . pounding them relentlessly.’. . . [I]t’s the jerk-off language of men who can never cum. It’s like a gang-bang, an endless rape with the heaviest battering ram, the battering cock.105

  Not nearly as apocalyptic but no less creepy is a fawning profile of the novelist Tom Clancy (“famous for his sensuous descriptions of high-tech weapons”) in Amtrak Express magazine. “Where some best-selling authors offer up steamy sex scenes,” the author notes, “Clancy is more likely to give his readers a glimpse down the sights of a Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher.”106 Then, too, there is the suppressed Gulf War story uncovered by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Carol Morello, who reported that pilots aboard the USS John F. Kennedy watched porno films before going on bombing missions.107 But neither of these examples comes close to the spooky little poem a friend of mine learned in the marines:

  This is my rifle

  This is my gun

  One is for killing

  One is for fun

  Stanley Kubrick takes up these themes in Dr. Strangelove (1964), the doomsday comedy about the strangest love of all, that of aging power brokers for sexy weaponry. From the film’s beginning-refueling bombers copulating in midair to the strains of “Try a Little Tenderness”–to its thermonuclear denouement, we are treated to a parade of Freudian gags that confuse sex, technology, and death.

  In penetrating Mother Russia with his phallic B-52s, General Jack D. Ripper reaffirms a manhood threatened by fluoridation, the Communist plot to pollute “our precious bodily fluids.” Major T. J. “King” Kong, the commander of the B-52 fated to drop the bomb, ogles a Playboy spread; the plane’s primary target is Laputa (Spanish for “whore”). Decorated with salacious graffiti (“HI THERE,” “DEAR JOHN”), the twin H-bombs in the belly of the B-52 resemble proudly out-thrust breasts. Later, when Kong straddles one and rides it into eternity with a rebel yell, the missile suggests a penile prosthesis suitable for the giant ape who is the major’s namesake. The movie ends with a visual pun that crosses destruction with seduction: a series of billowing explosions that, while capturing an atomic götterdämmerung, unmistakably conjure multiple orgasms.

  As the cold war lampooned in Dr. Strangelove fades into history, the American attitude toward sex and violence remains a conundrum: Faces of Death, a “greatest hits” compilation of gory last moments, can be found at nearly any neighborhood video store, but condoms cannot be advertised on TV despite mounting teenage pregnancies and AIDS deaths. The pornography of violence, meanwhile, is ever present: Our local news shows are slaughter benches, piled high with images of human suffering packaged as entertainment, and a day’s worth of escapist programming in Washington, D.C., contains about eighteen hundred violent scenes, a significant number of them involving assault or murder.108 Simultaneously, says Elizabeth J. Roberts of the Project on Human Sexual Development at Harvard University,

  Television tells the child viewer over an
d over that human sexuality . . . is an acceptable subject if it is cloaked in humor or ridicule or viewed as a harsh, hurtful, or criminal part of life. . . . Affection and intimacy are viewed as inappropriate to the ‘real world.’”109

  In a WELL discussion of Future Sex, the magazine’s then senior editor Laura Miller wrote, “We’ve been inundated with the inevitable ‘In the future we’ll have perfect sex with robot playmates’ stories, not one with any real insight into human sexuality or even any real social vision about what such a development might bring with it. . . . What good is getting it on with androids if your own sexuality is as underdeveloped as a Third World country?”110

  Contemplating mass culture’s undying fascination with sex machines and machine sex, Howard Rheingold writes, “[T]here is no doubt that people everywhere . . . are fascinated by the prospect. And why not? Contemporary philosophers have pointed to [the] progressive mechanization of human culture and the future of sexual expression as the site of a potential collision of immense dimensions.”111 But J. G. Ballard has given us a minatory glimpse of such a collision. Like the cyberpunk machinist Mark Pauline, who once observed that “the true marriage of human form and technology is death,” Ballard is mindful of the fact that the curious pathology of our century-the almost sexual desire to become one with our technology-is at its heart necrophilic. He is not nearly as sanguine about the impending crash of mechanization and sexual expression as Rheingold seems to be:

  In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.112

  6 / CYBORGING THE