PVIII. Belly of the Beast

Of course, digital networked information and communications technologies are susceptible to indefinitely many uses. And they are incomparably more likely to express and even exacerbate the given terms of social struggle than to provide the means somehow to hurdle past or orbit over this interminable scene of struggle, whatever the fervent hopes of technophiles and technocrats may be in this regard.

Come what may, each year the number of blogs and the scope of their readership continues to proliferate deliriously across the globe for now. And the impact of these widespread and wider-spreading social software facilitated network practices on conventional media, popular culture, creative work, and political organizing appears to be as rapid, slippery, deep, and disruptive as it is finally unfathomable to those of us lodged here in the belly of this beast itself.

There is little point in wondering whether these developments presage democratic experimentalisms in collaborative oversight, assessment, and policymaking via online fora or even direct ongoing voting on policy initiatives, or will facilitate instead authoritarian consolidations of violence via surveillance and the ever more sophisticated manipulation of publicly circulating information. This is because both eventualities could so readily co-exist and neither is likely in any case to arrive in the pure forms that underwrite the technophilic and technophobic discourses that substitute for more careful technocriticism of prosthetic practices as they are emerging and being taken up in fact by people in the actually existing technocultures in which we are ineradicably immersed. And yet what could be wanted more urgently in a moment like this than for us, as Arendt would have it, to think what we are doing?

Once upon a time, computers came into the world and in no time at all, it seems, they had changed absolutely everything. Televisions arrived on the scene and managed the exact same feat, surprisingly enough, more or less concurrently. Then the computers and the televisions unexpectedly began coupling and producing queer offspring called, among other things, personal computers which changed absolutely everything again. Personal computers and telecommunications networks could scarcely be kept apart, you know, whereupon the internet burst fabulously upon the scene in a flash to change absolutely everything yet again soon thereafter. At the moment it would appear that this internet is hooking up promiscuously with cellphones, digital cameras, hand-held gaming consoles, and other mobile digital devices, and sure enough something altogether new is changing absolutely everything again even as we speak. And already one can discern a faint pheromonal insinuation of promising relations to come, of web applications migrating into contact lenses or hearing aids or medical sensors under our skins to monitor, expand, overlay our corporeal inhabitations of and interfaces with our environments in almost unfathomable intimacies.

There is definitely a part of me that would like to pretend that the preceding paragraph is a straightforward parody of the curiously reprosexual excitements that attend the prognostications of so much conventional corporate futurism. But realism demands I admit the extent to which my own presumably more “academic” discourse pays ongoing tribute to this sort of thing. I admit the discomfiting, crazy-making, and highly enjoyable kinship of some (much?) of my own technocritical, technocultural, and technoethical interventions, like so many of my favorite volumes of cyborgological academic net-jazz, to the seductions and comforts and distractions of popular science fiction and its cousin public-relations discourse.

I really do believe, you know, that even when technologies break all of what we take to be their promises they remain endlessly promising still. Even when our prostheses fail to “change our lives” in the ways we would demand of them or fear from them –- that is to say, even as our prostheses fail to deliver us from our lives, just as they fail again and again to deliver our hearts’ desire -– still, we are all of us ineluctably changed all the same through the prosthetic practices in which we invent our tools and weave them every day into our everyday lives.

Technologies persistently change our lives even while just as persistently they break our hearts. The technological imaginary may be freighted with deranging superlatives, but even as the fantastic technoconstituted disasters and paradises they inevitable conjure up and conjure with fail to materialize on the ground technologies preside nevertheless over transformations as sweeping and significant as could ever be imagined beforehand.

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