[-empyre-] II

[Jonathan Marshall]

Hi Ana

>Jon, I did my share of writing at that time and my first book about
>the subject, Internet and Women, was published 1995. To write the book
>I travelled to Palo Alto and me Howard Rheingold, Brenda Laurel, Sandy
>Stone, Anne Balsamo (who was a guest at -empyre not so long time ago),
>Marcus Novak.

It was a great time :) i loved it, although in my small corner of Australia, it was more 'why are you dealing with this rubbish?'  Hey i liked the way that magic intersects with technology in thought and culture - that was how i began.

>The general concept was we were in a kind of paradigm shift, shifting
>from the real to the virtual, from the analog to the binary. 

However, I was always ambivalent about paradigm shifts and millenial movements. The coming of the Third Age, the Kingdom of heaven, the Rule of Peace is often announced, and then followed by the exile or death of those who don't fit in, those who want to slink in the old ways and so on. The voluntary becomes compulsory in that you cannot live or integrate with others without the badge of transformation: the signs emblazoned on, or in, the body or the clothes.

and why would we wish to end the 'real' or end the 'analog'? that was alway weird to me.

>We should
>be smarter if we connect some chip to our brain, to walk faster if we
>had a prothes of titan in our legs, we should hear or have our hearing
>improved if we had a chip implanted in our ear or in our eyes, to give
>us the sight of a cat.
>
>It reminded me of the sci-fi writer Cordwainer Smith, who was working
>at the CIA as well. 

I wonder if Clive Barker's cenobites where the first subliminal horrors of the information revolution?
appearing through the inscrutable tech cube
Mastery of the body by inserting metal into flesh. 
the banning of chaos, and hence the banning of life.

>He wrote about hybrids between men and animals,
>men with some genetical change or some gene borrowed from a cat, who
>did them have the abilities of the cat or the strenght of the elephant
>or the swiftness of a deer.

I recently read Sarban's The Sound of his Horn, late 40s as well i think, in which the victorious Nazis made humans animal-like, in order to have worthy creatures to hunt. 

there is always at least another side.

jon

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