Free Escape Velocity by Mark Dery

myth are all around us in SF movies and pop songs about technologically superior alien saviors {The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Byrds' "Mr. Spaceman," David Bowie's "Starman"). As the critic Hugh Ruppersberg points out, many of these fables rest "on the premise that advanced technology breeds not only miraculous wonders but moral redemption as well."^*^
    In like fashion, RushkofF relocates the Spiritual in the realm of the technological. He accepts on faith the notion that technologies such as psychedelic drugs "are part of the continuing evolution of the human species toward greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness."^^ Conceding the new, digital mysticism's unfortunate "inability to tackle everyday, real-world strife," he is nonetheless confident that its upgrade of sixties beliefs is preparing the way for humankind's "great leap into hyperspace."^'
    This is techno-transcendentalism's version of born-again Christianity's "rapture," in which true believers are lifted out of the mundane, into the parting clouds. Like so many other millenarian prophecies before it, the

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    cyberdelic vision of a techno-mystical apotheosis in the there and then diverts pubhc discourse from the pohtical and socioeconomic inequities of the here and now^.
    Cyberia provides ample evidence of this dynamic. Rushkoff thrills to cyberian video art in which Gulf War bombing runs are merely another special effect, collaged together w^ith "virtual reality scenes, and even old sitcoms." A Mondo groupie v^^ho drops acid before undergoing an abortion is applauded for her "unflinching commitment to experiencing and understanding her passage through time." Homeless "mole people" alleged to dw^ell in the "forgotten tunnels of New York's subway system" are romanticized as an example of the "cyberian ideal" of insurgent subcultures hidden in the cracks of the power structure. And a homeless man dragging a cardboard box isn't foraging for shelter, he's engaged in "social hacking."^^
    Naive, self-serving pronouncements such as these are commonplaces among cyberians. Their siren song of nineties technophilia and sixties transcendentalism seduces the public imagination with the promise of an end-of-the-century deus ex machina at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed. The cyberians' otherworldly trapdoor assumes various guises, among them the wiring of the human race into a collective consciousness; the technopagan ability to dream up a "designer reality" through a judicious application of the knowledge that "we have chosen our reality arbitrarily"; and the "chaos attractor at the end of time."
    In truth, cyberdelic rhetoric represents what Walter Kirn has called "an eruption of high-tech millenarianism-a fin de siecle schizoid break induced by sitting too long at the screen."^^ Ironically, Kirn is something of a mentor to Rushkoff, who thanks him in CybeMs acknowledgments. Rushkoff and his fellow cyberians would do well to heed Kirn's admonition that
    [w]hat the [cyberians] appear fated to learn from their ventures into pure electronic consciousness is that ultimate detachment is not the same as freedom, escape is no substitute for liberation and rapture isn't happiness. The sound-and-light show at the end of time, longed for by these turned-on nerds, seems bound to disappoint.^"*

    50 Mark Dery
    Deus ex Machino: Technopaganism
    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
    -Arthur C. Clarke, SF novelist and science writer'^^
    When magic becomes scientific fact we refer to it as medicine or astronomy.
    —Anton LaVey, occultisf^
    Technopaganism permeates cyberdelia. And while it informs the techno-transcendentalism of Mondo 2000 and RushkofFs cyberians, it has other stories to tell, beyond dreams of a designer reality or escape velocity.
    Technopaganism can be simply if superficially defined as the convergence of neopaganism (the umbrella term for a host of contemporary