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“A lively compendium of dispatches from the far reaches of today’s computer savvy avant-garde”, Escape Velocity explores the dawn of the Information Age, and the high-tech subcultures that celebrated, critiqued, and gave birth to our wired world and a counterculture digital underground (The New York Times Book Review). Poised between technological rapture and social rupture, Escape Velocity poses the fundamental question of our time: Is technology liberating or enslaving us in the twenty-first century?
Mark Dery takes us on an electrifying tour of the high-tech underground. Investigating the shadowy byways of cyberculture, we meet would-be cyborgs who believe the body is obsolete and dream of downloading their minds into computers, cyberhippies who boost their brainpower with smart drugs and mind machines, techno-primitives who sport “biomechanical” tattoos of computer circuitry, and cyberpunk roboticists whose dystopian contraptions duel to the death before howling crowds.
“Re-prov[ing] Dery an astute and trustworthy patrolman of the cultural and social borderland between science fiction and non-fiction”, Escape Velocity stands alone as the first truly critical inquiry into cyberculture (Wired). Shifting the focus of our conversation about technology from the corridors of power to disparate voices on the cultural fringes, Dery wires it into the power politics and social issues of the moment. It is essential reading for everyone interested in computer culture and the shape of things to come.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
December 1, 2007 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780802196507
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780802196507
- File size: 5040 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 4, 1996
Freelance cultural critic Dery takes readers on a strange, unsettling, often provocative tour through fringe computer subcultures. We meet cyber-hippies and ``technopagans'' who use the personal computer in New Age mystical rituals via echomail, a technology that links discussion groups into a communal conference. California roboticist Mark Pauline stages spectacles in which robots and humans are menaced by heavy machinery or remote-controlled weaponry, while Chico MacMurtrie's puppet-like robot musicians, acrobats and warriors enact ecotopian dramas. Australian cybernetic body artist Stelarc, plastered with electrodes and trailing wires, embodies the human/machine hybrid all of us are metaphorically becoming. Dery also profiles online swingers hooked on virtual sex, cyberpunk rockers, cyberpunk novelist William Gibson and D.A. Therrien's performance ensemble Comfort/ Control, which dramatizes popular anxieties over the autonomy of intelligent machines and the nightmare of humanity's obsolescence. Dery closes this adventurous inquiry with an appraisal of the ``posthumanist'' visions of novelist William Burroughs, techno-mystical SF author Vernor Vinge and Carnegie-Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec. Illustrated. -
April 1, 2015
A prime example of avant-garde cyberpunk futurism. Spilling over with the wide-eyed tech enthusiasm common during the early days of the web and virtual reality, Dery presents cultural criticism on some of the more out-there projects that, in some cases, are still being pursued. While some of this work's content may have been superseded, its sociological value persists. (LJ 2/15/96)
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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