Futures

1994

26(5)

519-528

CYBERCULTURE, CYBORGPOST-MODERNISM AND THE
SOCIOLOGY OF VIRTUALREALITY TECHNOLOGIES
Surfing the soul in the information age
Ralph Schroeder

The relation between humans and machines has come to assume a central
place within the social sciences, particularly
in debates about the role ofscience and about information technologies. Cyberculture
plays a key rolein these debates, drawing its inspiration in large part from virtual reality
systems. This article examines the affinities
between two aspects ofcyberculture:cyborg post-modernism,
which revolves around the notionthat the boundaries
betweenhumans and machines
are becoming
irretrievably
blurred, and the cyberpunk movement within youth culture
with its futuristic ideas about informationand communication
machines.
While cyberculture
may be far ahead of the current state of the technology,
it is argued here that its new conception of the relation between politics,
technology and art is an important reflection of changes within the culturalindustries that surroundinformationand communication
technologies
within advanced societies.

‘Every need to which

reality denies satisfaction

compels to belief.’
J. W. von Goethe (1809)’

The idea behind virtual reality (VR) technologies,
of a computer-generated
simulatedworld which users can experienceand manipulate,first surfaced in the 1 9bOs.2 Only
recently, however,with the increase in computing
power, has it become possible to
Dr Ralph Schroeder
is lecturer in sociology
in the Departmentof Human Sciences, Brunei University,
Uxbridge,
Middlesex
UB8 3PH, UK (Tel: +44 895-274000;
fax: +44 895 232806).
He is currently
engaged in research on the social aspects
virtual reality (VR) technology. The author would like to thankThomas Osborne, Colin Blackman,
and an anonymous
Futures referee for comments on an earlier draft ofthis paper, and Warren Ciles and Bryan Cleal for their valuable fieldwork
on VR. The research for thisarticle was made possible in part by support from the Brunei Research Initiative
Enterprise Fund.

of

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produce workable and sophisticated VR systems. With the first applications of VR
has come a wave of speculation about its future uses. VR has come to be seen,alongside other advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) suchas electronic
mail and artificial intelligence, as paving the way to a future in whichhuman beings are intimately tied to the way they embody themselves withinelectronic signals. VR is also seen as one component of the emerging realm of‘cyberspace’, the realm of non-material messages and interactions that are being
created by electronic media.
In receiving extensive publicity,
VR systems are not unlike other new
developments within the ICT sector. But in this case, they have also provided
inspiration for debates within cultural studies, where VR has informed debates about
the possibilities
of changes in the relations between human and machines, andwithin youth culture which has incorporated VR into a vision of the future in which
technology plays a consciousness-alteringrole. These two currents of thought,
cyborg post-modernism and cyberculture, share the idea that electronic media andnew computing technologies will bring about a new era in the relation between
science, art and politics.”
This article examines some manifestationsof this new worldview.
Some
pioneers of VR technology, including Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier, have beenamong its principal exponents, suggesting that the creation of virtual worlds and of
shared cyberspaces will have revolutionary social consequences and allow hitherto
unimagined forms of human expression. Such a view is echoed in the work ofacademic theorists like Donna Haraway and Alluquere Rosanne Stone, who believethat advanced information technologies may have radical political consequences, anidea which they pursue through the image of cyborgs which blur the distinction
between humans and machines. These ideas can also be found in the use of VR as atheme in youth culture, for example the cyberpunk nightclubs and cafes in London
and San Francisco. Here too, we find an agenda for cultural and political change, inin human-machineinterface
thiscase, again, premisedon innovations
technologies.
Just as hackers have influenced the development of personal computing4
cyberculture is likely to contribute to shaping the development of VR technologies.
But this is only part of the importance of cyberculture. ii cyberculture and cyborg
post-modernism are partly a response to VR technology and related advances in
information and communications systems, they also articulate changing attitudes to
new technologies in seeking to redefine their role. Even if this worldview is currently
closer to fiction than to the state of science, it is worth examination since it may
signal a more general shift in contemporary thinking about technology.

Cyborgs in the mi(d)stBefore we locate the cybercultural worldview within the larger context of current
thinking about technology, let us briefly examine some of its manifestations. First,
there are those involved with developing the technology itself. The most well known
visionaries in this group are Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier, both promoters of thetechnology when it first began to attract widespread attention, as well as being
founders of VR companies. ’ Prophetic notions abound in their public utterances.
Thus Lanier speaks of ‘an experience when you are dreaming of all possibilities being
there, that anything can happen, and it is just an open world where your mind is the
only limitation . . . The thing that I think is so exciting about virtual reality is that. . .

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52 1

it gives us this sense of being able to be who we are without limitation; for ourimagination to become shared with other people’.’ Nevertheless, he cautions that‘there is a really serious danger of expectations being raised too high’.’
With Laurel we find a similar juxtaposition of other-worldlinessand realism.
‘With virtual reality systems’, she writes, ‘the future is quite literally within our
grasp’.8 It will ‘blow a hole in all our old imaginings and expectations. Through thathole we can glimpse a world of which both cause and effect are a quantum leap inhuman evolution’,9 a suggestive image even if it is not quite clear what the second
part of the sentence means. In a somewhat different vein, she writes: ‘I think that we
can someday have Dionysian experiences in virtual reality, and that they will be
experiences of the most intimate and powerful kind . . Dionysian experience is theexperience of being in the living presence of not only the artist but also huge spiritualforces’.‘” Although, again ‘it seems that there are some rather serious obstacles to be
overcome before virtual reality can deliver the robust kinds of experiences that we
fantasize about’.’ ’
An extension of this vision is that Laurel thinks that there will be some kind of
merging between VR machines and humans. Laurel refers to these human-machinesas ‘fusion people’.12 Here is one of the many points where there is a direct continuity
between the prophetic developers of VR and academic writing on cyberculture, andwe may therefore pursue the cybercultural worldview further in these writings.
Academic theorists derive their inspiration not so much from VR systems as
such, but from this human-machine fusion.13 Alongside a far-reaching vision basedon the possibilities of the new technology, we find here a systematized sociocultural
programme. Metaphors abound in these accounts of the future. In Stone’s ‘evocationof cyberspace’, we find her describing the ‘cybernetic act’ as consisting of ‘the desire
to cross the human/machine boundary . . . a desire literally to enter into such a
discourse, to penetrate the smooth and relatively affectless surface of the electronic
screen and enter the deep, complex, and tactile (individual) cybernetic space or the(consensual)
cyberspace within
and beyond’.14 But again, there are somethis-worldly
obstacles to these other-worldly
pleasures: ‘No refigured virtual body,no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS’.”
Bodily cyber-pursuits are a part, then, of the political agenda of cyberculture.
One important aspect of this is gender politics. Haraway ‘would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’.16 Her idea of doing away with the ‘troubling dualisms”7 within theWestern tradition and thus realize a ‘utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous
world without gender’ rests on ‘high-tech culture [which] challenges these dualisms
in intriguing ways ‘,18 including, for example, that ‘cyborgs might consider more
seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment’.”Inher ‘cyborg manifesto . . liberation rests on the construction of the consciousnessof possibility .
this is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between
science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’.2o Hence, her cyborg is ‘notutopian nor imaginary; s/he is virtual’.2’
These ideas, then, are part of the programme of cyborg post-modernism, which
is sometimes also known as ‘cyborg anthropology’ (the name of one of the panels at
the 1992 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association). Common
throughout these writings is the notion that advances in human-computerinterfacetechnology may provide the vehicle for new ways of life. The same premise also
forms the basis for the atmosphere currently generated in cyberpunk nightclubs andcafes. If the ‘liberation’ to which Haraway refers seems to take place at the level oftheoretical debate in scholarly books and journals, a similar change in consciousness

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Cyberculture,and lifestylecyborg post-modernism

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seems to be emerging withincertain strands of youth culture.

At the Cyberseed club in London, for example, the compere, Brian Davis,
announcing the evening’s programme, enjoins the audience to ‘surf the soul’ and to‘mellow out’.22 Identifying himself and the audience as ‘cyberpunks’, the content of
his brief introductory talk is designed to put his listeners in the right mood for theevening’s entertainment. He proclaims that ‘science is magic’ and goes on to explain
how the frame of mind of clubgoers should be informed by this insight. in a similarvein, Martin Kavanagh, leader of the UK’s VR users’ group, outlines the group’s
activities and announces the activities of the ‘Virtualitea’ (sic) room of the club where
the computers are located.
The programme itself consists of a live performance of Japanese ‘new age’ musicas well as the club’s regular recorded ‘rave’ music. The promotional leaflet promises‘altered images, altered sounds, altered minds and altered states’ and lists among the
club’s attractions ‘VR machines, SEGA computer games, psychoactive cocktails,
brain machines, cyber and VR demos, massage, tarot and guest cyber scientists andartists’.
These attractions take place in three dark and interconnected cellar rooms, twoof which contain bars. In the largest of these rooms, various graphic andphotographic
images are projected on to the walls,
includingcolourfulcontemporary works of art and pictures of faraway places and peoples. These images
change frequently and, since they envelop the room, they could be said to give theimpressionof a VR-likeexperience. The second room features a bar with‘psychoactive cocktails’ (that is, drinks containing ‘smart drugs’) and is otherwise
given over to massage and tarot. It is the third room, however, which features thecomputing element of the club. Here the clientele is gathered around three personal
computers, one displaying fractal images, a second operating a computer game and‘brainmachine’.
Thismachineconsists
calledtheofaa thirdcomputer-synchronizedstroboscopic light operated via head-mounted glasses andearphones. The user who wears these, according to the accompanying leaflet, ‘canexperience deep relaxation, concentration/accelerated learning; a new sense of thebody; hallucinations and great visuals [and] true alterations of consciousness’.
By midnight, attendance has reached between 30 and 40 young people who
pursue the computer-related activities, dance or sit in a meditative state during the‘new age’ music performance and talks. Although the audience is similar to that atother clubs in London, the atmosphere in the Cyberseed club is unique in so far as
the activities are more subdued or ‘mellow’. Rather than focusing exclusively on
dancing, clubgoers wander around among the various attractions, seeking, it seems,
to ‘alter’ their mood or consciousness.
But while the club announces itself as ‘Europe’s First Virtual Reality Club’, theconnection with the technology itself is tangential. The way computers are used may
be unusual for a nightclub. Yet the main connection to actual VR systems here is thecommercial ‘Virtuality’ VR entertainment machine produced by W Industries (fl per
minute of play) at the entrance of the club, which is available ‘at a reduced price’, asthe compere points out, for clubgoers.
At the Horseshoe Cafe in San Francisco,L3 the connection with VR is more
remote still, despite the fact that references to VR feature prominently. On a shelfnext to the bar is an array of leaflets announcing forthcoming club attractions,
including ‘mind-melting visuals’ in the ‘Virtual Reality’ club, ‘look/see projections
and hyperdelic video’ at the ‘Carefree’ event, and ‘live interactive
adventures’and‘media immersion’at the ‘12 Hour mysterious Salad’. The music announced for

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these events is similar to that which is playing in the background at the Horseshoe
Cafe itself.
The main connection with VR at the cafe, however, is a personal computer in an
alcove towards the back of the establishment. The screen of this personal computeris built horizontally
into a table with the keyboard on one side. Several people,
dressed mostly in black with T-shirts featuring science fiction logos, are crowded
around the table, their attention absorbed by the computer screen which is part of SF(San Francisco) NET, an electronic mail network (or ‘bulletin board’) that provides aforum for discussion among 18 locales in the San Francisco area (at 50 cents for 20
minutes). The Horseshoe Cafe is one of the focal points for this network, with otherparticipating cafes and locations listed in a leaflet next to the computer. It also lists a
includingenvironment,
varietyof discussion
topics,‘politics,
astrology,
science/technology [and] philosophy’. The leaflet announces that ‘the information
age is upon us and it is not just a sterile world of numbers and statistics. It is also aworld of people and the amount of information each person represents’.
The discussions on this information exchange network are explicitly identified
with cyberculture both by users and by the club owner, Wayne Gregori. Gregorirefers to those who send abusive messages as ‘cyberjerks’, while another user or‘netsurfer’, whose network name is ‘Cyber Monk’, refers to his ‘cyberfamily’.”
Apart from the difference in VR-related equipment between the two venues,
there is also a different atmosphere at the Horseshoe Cafe. The cafe occupies a large
room which faces the street with a large shopfront window and it is open not only
during nightclub hours but also during conventional restaurant business hours.
Among the 40 or so customers, the beverage of choice is coffee, again of the moreconventionally psychoactive type but served in the large variety that is customary in
the San Francisco area. The main activity apart from conversation consists of reading
the newspapers and books that are lying scattered among the tables. Science fiction
seems to be the favoured genre, although Lewis Mumford and Jean Baudrillard werealso in evidence. Despite the similarities between the young and fashionably dressed
participants, by contrast with the Cyberseed club the Horseshoe Cafe mainly offers
an atmosphere of relaxed conversation, whether electronicallyor in the more
traditional cafe style.
Again, although the connection with VR technology itself is limited, theHorseshoe Cafe clearly partakes in cyberculture inasmuch as the prefix ‘cyber’ isused to designate ‘non-material’ forms of communication via electronic media.‘5
This sense of the term, which also evokes a vision of the future in which VR-like
technologies abound, provides the theme around which the Horseshoe Cafe isbased. Compared with the Cyberseed club, which promotes altered consciousness
through arts-related activity, the Horseshoe Cafe seems to be more oriented toconsciousness
alteration by means of ‘bookish’ pursuits-but
perhaps this is adifference in style rather than substance. If both clubs are drawing on the publicity
surrounding
VR technology, their main connection with it lies in fostering the‘consciousness’ attendant on its future uses.
Even if technological innovations have on other occasions generated new
cultural trends, the links between the developers of the technology, academic
theorists and youth culture in this case seem to be particularly intimate. Laurel, forexample, acknowledges Stone’s work as an important influence,”
while Haraway
thinks that the work of ‘story-tellers exploring. high-tech worlds’ ought to ‘inform
late twentieth-century
political imaginations’.”
Or again, the politics of informationand of gender of the UK Virtual Reality Users’ Group Newsletter, which partly

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provides the inspiration of the Cyberseed club, bears a strong resemblance to thepolitics of the academic theorists and the visionary developers of the technology.
cyberpunks
have been describedas the‘shocktroopsofElsewhere,
Meanwhile,
Lanier’s and Laurel’s ideas about consciousness
postmodernism’.‘”alteration are closely in keeping with the themes of both VR-related venues-as,incidentally,
are their styles of dress. These affinities and reciprocal influencesamong the three groups could be added to at length. They all point to a common
worldview and a common way of life among the members of a cultural avant-garde
in London and on the US West Coast, two global centres of the information andcommunication industries.

Virtualworlds and contemporary

directionsof world

rejection

The incorporation of new technological developments within the worldview ofculture carriers seems at first sight to be ill suited to a period in which there is
widespread scepticism about scientific and technological achievements. Yet, as wesee, cyberculture involves a fundamental reinterpretation of the importance of
science and technology which, when it is placed in the social context of its carriers,
not only fits well but is likely to endure. This appeal of cyberculture can best be
explored by reference to Weber’s disenchantment thesis.
Seventy-five years ago, in the lecture ‘Science as a vocation’, Max Weber talked
by science, by which he meant theof the ‘disenchantment of the world”’
replacement of meaningful worldviews by impersonal explanations of the world andof nature. Nevertheless,he recognized that intellectual
strata would remain
predisposed towards endowing the world with meaning: he spoke of ‘the need ofsome modern intellectuals
to furnish their souls withguaranteed genuine
antiques. by way of [al substitute [for religion]. they produce surrogates
through all sorts of psychic experiences to which they ascribe the dignity of mystic
holiness’.“’But what if these substitutes for religion are no longer available? What if,
instead, certain advances within science themselves come to be seen as the key toproducing new forms of expression or new psychic experiences? Such notions of atranscendence of the mundane uses of technology and of transforming culture lie at
the heart of the cyberculture and of cyborg post-modernism.
One common feature of all the ideas and practices outlined above is that future
ICTs will make possible new forms of human self-expression and that these, in turn,will herald a new technology-centred era which will release human beings from thematerial constraints of their current lives. Since the dehumanizing effects of scienceand technology are, paradoxically, among these, this worldview envisions a fusionof science and art, with the former providing the means and the latter the culturalends. Eventually, with the emergence of a society in which communications withincyberspace become all-important,the pioneering carriers of this worldview may
create a completely new culture.
There is, however, a central tension within this worldview. On the one hand, its
future promise
relies on technologicalinnovation,
on purely technical or
instrumental advances within specialist fields of research and the production ofmachinery. On the other hand, real advancement of this vision of the future can only
come

about

throughculturalexperience-andthesealone.

This

stems

partlytensioninnovation,fromthrough

the high

newpremium

patterns
whichof thinking

is placedand ofhere on the

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sphere of culture. The fascination attached to ICTs typically derives from the fact thatthey offer a seemingly endless supply of novel experiences, the consumption ofwhich plays an ever greater role within advanced societies, particularly in thedomestic sphere. ” VR systems potentially provide a perfect extension of this trend
since they hold out the promise that human beings may one day be able to live
within artificially generated virtual worlds limited only by their imaginations. If sucha way of life should come about, it would represent, in Weberian terms, acompletely re-enchanted world.
From a purely technical viewpoint, however, the capacities of VR systems are infact above all a tool for manipulating human experience. This is because VR systems
are machines which stimulate the human sensory or perceptual apparatus. They
consist of computer-generated
simulations
which are designed to create theimpression that users are perceiving an environment with which they can interact.
That is, they are means of creating artificial or ‘virtual’ environments.
Virtualenvironments are in this case generated by means of a computer and other technicalaids, such as head-mounted displays and data gloves, which allow the humanperceptual apparatus to recognize objects in a non-physicalenvironment.32
Ultimately then, the technical aim towards which the development of VR systems isadvancing is to establish how the senses operate and to re-create this process bymeans of machines.
If these machines are in the end able to reproduce the workings of ourperceptual apparatus completely, far from providing a limitless sensorium of theimagination, as the cybercultural worldview would have it, they may rather come toprovide an impersonally
manufactured and calculated stimulation of the senses.
Instead of seeing them as a means of enchantment, they might become a means ofdisenchanting what was previously one of the last refuges from the disenchantmentof the world, namely human perception and experience. Science and technology inthis case would not only have come to dominate the external world, but could be
able directly to manipulate the awareness that human beings have of the world,
albeit an artificial one.
These possible consequences of VR technology are not spelled out here in order
to counterpointa technocratic dystopia with the utopian elements of thecybercultural worldview. After all, how VR systems are developed and the uses towhich they are put is not subject to scientific and technical aims alone. The point is
to contrast the technical problems that need to be solved within a particular area by
various technological means, with the worldview to which this technology has givenrise and which consists of projecting on to the technology various human wishes forfulfilment.
Thistension,between mundane technicalproblem solving
andextra-mundane visions of the future, or, to employ Weber’s terms again, between
instrumental
rationality and value rationality,
is one which we would expect toreproduce itself throughout the various manifestations which cyberculture may take.

New romancers33
Having given a brief account of some ideas and activities of these three closely
related groups of culture carriers, we may now locate the cybercultural worldview
within a wider social and cultural context which, I argue, provides fertile soil for its
continued appeal.
The material basis of this worldview is the growing economic importance of
ICTs in advanced societies.
This
aspect of contemporary social life is well

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documented. ICTs now occupy a central place in the economies of advanced
societies.34 To this must be added the continuous expansion within institutions ofhigher learning, providing an enlarged base for the employment of commentators on
the cultural industries and its products.”
These two growth areas overlap andreinforce each other, with the rising demand for expertise in the area of the mass
media and information technologies contributing to the growing market for the
products of cultural industries and vice versa.
Equally powerful perhaps is the ideal basis of this worldview. Cyberculture
derives its strength from a major current within contemporary intellectual
life
towards a romanticization of culture and of science through a merger between the
two. The idea that culture and science will become thoroughly intertwined may thus
be seen as a product of the growing autonomy of academic production from social
life, whereby the more mundane role of science and technology in providing theengine of economic growth can be ignored while the realm of science/culture isinvested with a life of its own.
The theoretical ground for this cybercultural fusion of science and art has been
prepared for some time, especially among philosophers and sociologists of science.
So, for example, Feyerabend denies the efficacy of science and invokes Dadaism as
an alternative scientific meth0d.j’ Similarly,
in the sociology of science the focus has
recently come to be placed on the representational and literary qualities of scientificknowledge, rather than its instrumental or wealth-creating consequences.37
The fascination with science as a form of culture within cyborg post-modernism
is, incidentally, perfectly compatible with a science-rejecting viewpoint inasmuch as
once science has become subsumed within sociocultural life or merged with art, its
effects need no longer be seen as the feared ‘external’ ones of an instrumental
domination of nature or society. The youth-cultural
version of overcoming thetension within this worldview is slightly different from the academic one: here, theidea is to emphasize
the countercultural
possibilities
of technology.
Thuscyberculturalists
see themselves as outlaws or renegades. As Elmer-Dewitt
puts it,they have ‘a way of looking at the world that combines an infatuation with high-techtools [with] a disdain for conventional ways of using them’.38
Although cyberculture
is mainly sustained by the social organizationofintellectual
life, it is also a product of advances in computing and related
technologies. VR is well placed to occupy centre stage among these advances since
it is likely that computer-generated simulated worlds will play a central role in the
improvement of human-computerinterface technology, an area on which muchscientific effort is currently converging and to which resources are being devoted ona large scale. As long as innovations continue within this area, cyberculture willcontinue to be able to draw on the promise that future applications of these
innovations may bring, thus sustaining its dream of a merger between science and art
and of finding new outlets for self-expression in the creation of new worlds by meansof advanced ICTs.
The wider context for this appeal, however, is the shift in thinking about scienceand the expectation of deriving meaning from science. Such hopes that science mayherald the dawn of a new age are not new. They also accompanied the advent of the‘steam age’ and of the ‘space age’, for example. Yet since VR technologies seemingly
create a whole new horizon for human expression, and since science is no longer
seen as a tool for mastery over the world but rather as the handmaiden of magic,
perhaps VR is the perfect vehicle for the belief in merging human beings withinformation and communication
machines, or that cyborgs represent a form of

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consciousness suited to the new age.
VR technologies are rapidly being developed by a growing number of research
institutes and firms for a variety of anticipated scientific applications and commercial
products. On the basis of comparisons with similar technologies, social science may
be able to identify which of these applications, if any, are likely to have an importantsocial impact. But it is hard to disagree with Ellis’s cautious conclusion that thesedevelopments are still some way off: ‘It is difficult to foretell the future practicalmass-market
applications for virtual environments. . some of the ultimate
mass-market applications are likely to be unknown today. Possibly, once the worldis densely crisscrossedwith high bandwidth, public access, fiber-optic “information
mass demand will materialize for convenient, virtual environment
highways”,
displays of high-resolution
imagery’?’
Whatever the case may be in VR research and industry, VR technologies andnew beliefs about science and technology, particularly in the form of cyberculture,
are likely for the various reasons outlined here to continue providing inspiration
within contemporary culture. The reality of cyberculture, however, as I hope to haveshown, remains the Weberian one whereby beliefs reflect the predispositions of theintellectual strata which are their carriers, as well as the Durkheimian one whereby
the role of knowledge and belief mirrors more fundamental features of social reality.
Whether, in addition, we can discover the ‘cyborgs in us all’40 or experience hitherto
unimagined states of consciousness within our computer-simulated environments-l
will show you meaning in a handful of silicon chips, as T. S. Eliot might havesaid-remains
to be seen. The conditions
which have thus far sustained
cybercultural ideals, however, whether technological, social or cultural, may bewith us for some time yet.

Notes and references
1. JohannWolfgang1809)), page 298.

2.

von Goethe,

Elective Affinities(Harmondsworth,Penguin,1971(first published

Ivan Sutherland,‘The ultimate
display’,
Proc-eedings of international Federation of Information
Processing Congress, 1965, pages 506-iO8;
see also the author’s overview
of the early history ofvirtual reality ‘Virtual reality in the real world: history, applications
and projections’,
Futures, 25(g),November
1993, pages 963-973.
3. The use of the term ‘cyborg’ in cyborg post-modernism
does not necessarily correspond to the typicalusage in science fiction,
where the term refers to a wholly
artificiallycreated organism or being.
Instead, as we see below, it envisions some kind of fusion between human beings and machines, andparticularlyelectronic
media.
1984).
4. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York, Doubleday,
is detailed in Howard Rheingold’s
Virtual5. The role of Lanier and Laurel in early VR development
Reality (London, Seeker and Warburg,
1991). Lanier has since withdrawn
from VPL, the VR company
which he founded,
while Laurel, who previously
co-founded
Telepresence
Research, now works at
Interval Research Corporation,a recent VR start-up company.
6. Jaron Lanier, panel session on ‘Virtualenvironments
and interactivity:
windows
to the future’,
ComputerGraphics,
23(5), December
1989, page a.
7. jaron Lanier cited by Benjamin
Woolleyin Virtual Worlds: A lourney in Hype and Hyperreality(Oxford,
Blackwell,1992), page 20.
a. Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley,
19911, page 197.
9. Ibid, page 198.
10. Ibid, page 196, emphasis in the original.
11. Ibid, page 186.
12. Brenda Laurel interviewed
by Jas Morgan in ‘Brenda Laurel the Lizard Queen’, Mondo 2000, No 7,
1992, page 84.
13. Although
in some cases, it is hard to sustain this separation.
Whereas Stone and Haraway seem tofocus on the relation
betweenhumansand machines,
Kroker draws more directlyon VR,

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14

15
16

17
18
19
20
21

22
23
24
25

26.
27.

28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

40.

Cyberculture,cyborg post-modernism

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characterizing
the ‘age in which we live’ as “‘the Age under the Sign of the Will to Virtuality”’
andidentifying
virtual reality as the ‘dream of liberal fascism’ (Kroker interviewed
by Sharon Grace in‘Codes of Privilege:
Arthur Kroker’, Mondo 2000, No 11, 1993, page 62). He asserts that ‘thedominant
form of consciousness
in the world today is television’and ‘viewIs
television
now asalmost a preliminary
phase in preparing the masses of humanity
for virtual reality’ (ibid, page 64).
Liberationis neverthelesspossible: ‘I would say the most radical action is saying “No” while saying“Yes” to technology+r
in criticallydistanring
yourself while drowning
your body in high tech.
Cruising the electronic
frontier at hyper-speedwith a copy of Nietzsche’sWill to Power in yourvirtual hands’ (ibid, page 65). While Kroker’s inspiration
may be overtly Nietzschean,
he also hints at
the Feuerbachianroots of his ideas: ‘I do most of my writing at McDonald’s’(ibid, page 63).
Alluquere
Rosanne Stone, ‘Will the real body please stand up?: Boundary
stories about Virtual
Cultures’,in Michael
Benedikt (editor). Cyberspace: First Step5 (Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press, 1991),
pages 108-109.
/bid, page 1 13.
Donna Haraway,‘A cyborg manifesto:
science,technology,
and socialist feminism
in the latetwentieth
century’,in her Simians, Cyborgs and Women (London,
Free Association
Books, 19911,
page 181.
Ibid, page 177.
Ibid, page 177.
/bid,page 180.
Ibid, page 149.
Donna Haraway,‘The promises of monsters: a regenerative
politics for inappropriate/dothers’, in
Lawrence Crossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (editors), CulturalStudies (London, Routledge,
19921, page 329.
All quotations
refer to the author’s visit on 24 June 1992.
The author’s visits took place on 4 and 5 August 1992.
Cited by Katherine
Bishop, ‘The electronic
coffeehouse’,
The New York Times, 2 August 1992,
page 21.
On a second visit to the Cyberseed club In London on 3 December
1993, the various activities weresimilar to those on the previous occasion.
It was noticeable,
however,that the use of the prefix‘cyber’ had become more common:the cyberfashion
show, for example, was preceded by a sessionin which the compere demandedthat members of the audience conveyed
their ideas about what
constitutes‘cyberstyle’and ‘cyberculture’
to other clubgoers
by means of a microphone.
As thisevent, unlike the first, was covered by television,these pronouncements
were also intended for morewidespread
consumption.
Laurel, op tit, reference 12, page 84.
Haraway,
op tit, reference
15, page 173. A selectIon of cyberpunk
stories and commentaries
oncyberpunk fiction can be found in the volume edited by Larry McCaffery,
Storming the RealityStudio:
A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham,
NC, Duke University
Press,
1991).
On the back cover of McCaffery’s
volume,see reference 27.
Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Soriology (London,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19481,
page 155.
Ibid, page 154.
See, for example, the essays in Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch (editors), Consuming Technologies:
Media and information in Domestic Spaces (London,
Routledge,1992).
Roy Kalawsky,
The Scienc-e of Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments (Reading, MA, AddisonWesley, 199J), especially
pages 43-85.
This is a variationon the title of William
Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer (New York,
Berkley, 1984) which makes use of VR-like technology.
For example, James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic- Origins of theinformation Society (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University
Press, 1986).
Randall
Collins,‘On the sociology
of intellectual
stagnation:
the late twentiethcenturyinperspective’,
Theory, Culture and Society, 9, 1992, pages 92-94.
Paul Feyerabend,
Stience in a Free Society (London, New Left Books, 19781, pages 100-l 05, 120.
For an overview
of recent arguments,
see Steve Woolgar,
Science: The Very idea (Chichester,
Ellis
Horwood,1988).
Time (US edltion),
74 7(6), 8 February 1993, page 59.
Philip Elmer-Dewitt,‘Cyberpunk!‘,
Stephen Ellis, ‘Nature and origin of virtual environments:
a bibliographic
essay’, ComputingSystems
in Engineering, Z(4), 1991, pages 344-345.
‘Information
highways’ in this quote is a reference to theuse of this term by the US vice-president,
Al Gore. Some of Gore’s ideas about electronic
media andVR are described in Schroeder,
op tit, reference 2, pages 969-970.
Gary Lee Downey,‘Humanagency in CAD/CAM
technology’,
Anthropology Today, 8151, 1992,
page 3.

FUTURES

June 1994