Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.

In The German Ideology (another in the long line of proto-hip-hop "dis records" curiously common to German thought), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels schooled the Young Hegelians on the solipsism of their disembodied flights through the realm of pure philosophy. Exhorting his colleagues to address the pressing problems of the material world populated by "real active men," Marx and Engels hoped to deliver a wake-up call to European intellectuals and workers alike. Cultural critic Mark Dery, who boasts a deep bibliography and an unparalleled skill for deftly suturing strings of quotes into something resembling an original argument, attempts to sound a similar alarm - "Danger Will Robinson! This obsession with disembodied post-humanism ignores the sociopolitical problems of real active men!" - in his well-researched meditation on the perils of technophilia, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.

Sans froth and brimstone, Escape Velocity is a curious beast - a chiliastic jeremiad bereft of sound and fury. Dery negotiates a labyrinth of "cyberdelic" straw men, machine fetishists, outre body artists, and fringe scientists with the meticulous care of a museum curator, his massive database of block quotes in tow. What distinguishes Escape Velocity from the recent slew of neo-Luddite tracts, from Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies to the Unabomber manifesto, is the obvious relish with which Dery mines his cybercultural terrain. He seems to delight in having amassed a completist's collection of tissue samples from the myriad drainpipes of the digital underground. There is a curious tension between the hipster's love of subcultural arcana and the parent's disapproval of deviance in Dery's writing, as if he finds cyberculture both irresistibly cool and dangerously irresponsible. The lingering subtext of all technology-fearing salvos from the Left - from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment to Baudrillard's Simulations - is an unacknowledged nostalgia for some impossibly idealized agrarian past when men weren't alienated from their labor, their bodies, their peers. To this implicit yearning Dery brings a fan's obsessive curiosity and an academic's desire to plumb the depths of previously uncharted text, resulting in a schizophrenic rhetoric that bounces between fawning appreciation and terse condemnation.

Such contradictions give rise to critical blinders in the presence of subjects the author clearly admires. While Dery leaves no descent into cyberdrool unexamined in his dissection of "cyberdelic" magazine MONDO 2000, he is more than willing to entertain the half-baked theories of white guys who build menacing machines that destroy each other in anarchist versions of Monster Truck rallies (Mark Pauline) and patently silly "performance artists" whose idea of transgression is augmenting their pudgy naked bodies with pseudo-robotic prostheses and spelling out "EVOLUTION" in front of ostensibly awestruck audiences (Stelarc). The few, inevitable block quotes Dery offers as rebuttals to such cyborged charlatans do little to offset the preceding pages' recital of their apparently multivalent critiques of technology and society. Puzzlingly absent is a much-needed examination of the unfettered techno-libertarianism of Wired, especially since Dery attempted such a task in a column for the Canadian quarterly Adbusters over a year ago. Perhaps an unflattering look at that cybercultural juggernaut would have interfered with the author's use of Wired's name in his dustjacket bio.

For all his cautionary pedagogy, Dery is surprisingly short on solutions. In his conclusion to Escape Velocity, he leaves us with the earth-shattering revelation that, since we may not yet know everything about the human brain, downloading one's consciousness into a computer may not be such a good idea. While Dery's monitory thoughts concerning the infantile escapism of unbridled technophilia are often indisputable, his lack of commitment to alternatives threatens to lose the reader to the infinitely more impassioned theories of his subjects. Dery is a zealous researcher, and his lucid prose is free of the post-Structuralist murk that clouds the work of thinkers he is so fond of quoting, yet his inability to form original conclusions makes Escape Velocity seem more like a librarian's guided tour through the cybercultural canon than the vehement response to millennial crisis that he clearly intends it to be.