Wolfgang Schirmacher - Networld from Within
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. "Networld From Within - A Media Philosophy of the In Between." In: Wolfgang Schirmacher. Just Living. Philosophy in Artificial Life. Atropos Press. New York, Dresden. ISBN 0981946269.
Wolfgang Schirmacher - Networld from Within. A Media Philosophy of the In-Between
I. Philosophy and Networld
The electronic revolution has not yet found its Marx. To paraphrase a famous proposition: The philosophers have merely criticized the world; what matters is to live in it. A critique of the networld will have to be judged on whether and how it contributes toward realizing a self-fulfilled life, under the conditions of the net as well. my media philosophy describes the in-between as an authentic quality of the net and reports on a life in which Heidegger’s determination of the “end of metaphysics” is taken as much into account as Lyotard’s reference to the “Other Modernity.” The media philosophy of the in-between decisively turns its back on the prevailing life-world’s conception of man, and opens itself up to an “artificial life” that has long since commenced. Strictly speaking, we humans have always been the “artificial ones of nature” (Hellmuth Plessner), but ecological cybernetics was the first discipline to force the extension of the concept of life, shaking to the core the unfounded dualism of natural and artificial. When human-machine systems exhibit all characteristics of life, then the time has come to take on the sole responsibility for an anthropomorphic conception of life to which nothing human is foreign. But for this very reason, the leap into a life full of artificial worlds that generate themselves from equiprimordially ["gleichursprünglich"] remains a philosophical adventure, comparable to a voyage with no return, a death in the interest of life.
"Live a net before you get a theory" is good advice for the educated disparagers of the networld, but even long experience in a net existence does not guarantee a solution to the more fundamental problem: when venturing into any new environment, one always brings oneself along. Thus it is not surprising that the networld, from within as well, bears an unfortunate resemblance to the everyday life-world — in day-to-day dealings and as a search for new forms of expression. For the individual, such characteristics of the net as (nearly) free access to information and E-mail accounts, (pretty good) privacy, and opportunities for playful self-determination of gender may amount to a personal breakthrough, but for the species, it amounts in the end to a mere duplication of reality. Such critics as Arthur Kroker have correctly pointed out that the advantages of the net are negated by the eminent disadvantage of the disappearance of the body, and only the “cynical ear”{1} and the manipulated eye remain. This structural antagonism to the body endemic to the networld is also revealed in quite well-developed plans for the direct stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain: man as orgasmic rat.
While the postmodern deconstruction of metaphysics has theoretically overcome and playfully neutralized logocentrism as well as anthropocentrism, the dominance of symbols as well as the exploitation of nature, precious little of this has yet been attained by the operators and users of the networld. Those who dwell (temporarily) in the networld are influenced only to the extent that they, too, are caught up in postmodern culture and thus become entangled in a development that takes place for the most part behind their backs. The irony of history is instructive here: the decentralized and quasi-anarchical nature of the internet, perhaps the best example of what the networld has to offer, is attributable to the process of its conception. The internet was created that way as a ruse of war, by order of the strongest centralized power of the modern age: the American military. Attempts to introduce censorship into the internet and curb the use of encryption demonstrate just how difficult it is for those in power to come to terms with this (practically speaking) grass-roots democracy. Openness is the last thing the representatives of the status quo in society want to permit in the net.
But every netizen, too, builds his or her own virtual house, which must be defended against hackers; internet service providers such as America Online and Prodigy even build their own cities, in which the tyranny of local law and order prevails as it did in the Wild West. Yet even when the net dweller’s curiosity and adventurousness gain the upper hand, he is still standing in is own way. What is most difficult to leave behind — for what is now at stake is the core of Western metaphysics — is a self-image that conceives of the world around me as the means to an end. In this apparently so self-evident view, technologies are mere instruments for ends that we ourselves determine and strive toward. Even in the play and experimentation to which the networld lends itself and invites us, our own intention retains its leading role and limits the horizon of action. If the openness of the networld and cyberspace are often extolled today, this is still no description of what actually takes place in the net, but merely a weak comparison with the so-called real world. Compared to the maximum-security prison we call our day-to-day life, the net is a minimum-security facility. The consumption-obsessed technoculture of the American west coast, which with its untrammeled appetite for new conceptions of the world has since become a paradigm even in Europe and Japan, furnishes our net-cell with alluring toys and comes up with stylish designs for the window bars.
With cyberspace, artificial life has developed a new realm, but artificial life is by no means reducible to digital existence. The human technologies that keep us alive fall across a wide spectrum, from breathing all the way to the exchange of information, and are constantly being renewed and improved. Without exception, every technology is for human beings a mode of life whose quality is determined by how it contributes to the fulfillment of existence. The networld would remain ethically empty and thus inhuman if we had to do without a fulfilled existence in order to be able to inhabit it. From outside, and sometimes from inside as well, the networld has been accused of starkly reducing the richness of human communication and replacing it with speed and functionality. In the net, an “aesthetic of disappearance” seems to be at work, whose result is not openness, but monotony. A media philosophy of the in-between will have to treat the question of whether the networld is in principle open or closed not as a metaphysical question, but as a pragmatic one. In the end, it is the praxis of openness that decides whether the net will fulfill itself anthropomorphically as it unfolds in life technologies both ordinary and essential. Orientation toward the sublime, the generating of a monad, and imperceptible fulfillment are three of these life technologies that help to differentiate between a humane and an inhumane networld.
II. Orientation Toward the Sublime: Is there Life After Technology?
Searching, reading, and sending, exchanging opinions and information, surfing and hacking are the activities of the networld dwellers, be they digerati or cyberpunks. The internet brings an explosive mixture of library, radio, magazine, video, post office box, telephone, bulletin board, and billboard{2} to our computer screen. The “integration of computers, telephones, and multiply-coded databases, (soon) in conjunction with automated language translation programs,”{3} is transforming our perception as it is our use of symbols. All the senses are demanded in the multimedia networld, in which the technical as well as the emotional and mental abilities of communicative praxis are becoming more important than the speed of communication.{4} The virtual cosmopolitan knows no hierarchy, for all “addresses” in the internet are created equal, and today’s lunatic is tomorrow’s cult figure. Neither are there any fence-sitters in the networld: one is either inside or out.{5} The technoculture once accorded an outsider status is being replaced by a capitalistic one, and market forces are increasingly determining what is being offered to the virtual world community. Real-world services are being offered in digital form, from virtual bank accounts{6} to online gambling.{7} The unprecedented low prices of long-distance telephone calls in cyberspace are certain to make them a hit, and it is estimated that in 15 years, 20% of all Americans will be working in virtual offices (9 million already do so today).{8}
Even a superficial analysis shows that the breakneck pace of the networld’s development is due above all to the fact than it offers simulated, user-friendly versions of useful, real-world institutions and services. Admittedly, the unpleasant sides of reality are increasingly catching up with this duplication of existing institutions, whether in the form of annoying network congestion or the large-scale appearance of con artists and militant right-wing radicals in the internet.{9} Also, the fact that only 10% of all net-dwellers are female raises the question of just what kind of reality is being duplicated here. Some may contend that cyberspace is but one of many “social spaces” and its influence should not be overestimated. But this sociological view fails to address the phenomenon of the birth of a new artificial world with paradigmatic character. It is the very critics of this development, such as Neil Postman, who have conceded that all cultural and social life has long since been preformed by technology.{10} Has technology taken control over our life? Is there a will at work that is no longer controlled by any human measure? Some theoreticians lament helplessly that the power to change the world has been wrested away from us by the cybernetic machines, and in at most 100 years humans will attain the status we now accord to animals and will look up to the new lords of evolution.{11} Paul Virilio’s concerns about our relationship to the other nature{12} deserve more serious consideration, as does the incisive defense of imagination put forth by Dietmar Kamper{13}. While Virilio fears that nature will become the “phantom limb” of humanity, Kamper has shown the extent to which even the fictional and virtual can threaten the openness of imagination.
Thus, anyone who chooses to have anything to do with the networld would do better to follow the critics of this virtual cosmos than its apologists. Computer networks are artificial life for the very reason that their development cannot be predicted and every step challenges our responsibility to ourselves. The networld is no “second nature” whose laws we must obey and to whose conditions we must subject ourselves. Quite the contrary: it is an unknown life to which we give form by assimilating it. While this assimilation occurs through technologies, by no means is it subject to “force of facts” [Sachzwängen]. There is a life after technology, and in regard to its potential, the networld is certainly one of these post-technological life-worlds. Indeed, it is an excellent example of one, for “post” technology does not mean “without” technology, but “unthematized” and imperceptible technology. The post-technological networld makes use of every technology and is constantly developing new ones, but this is as self-evident as it is insignificant, comparable to an unconscious streaming such as we are familiar with from our other bodily functions. Our cyberbody is neither a prosthesis nor does it limit the imagination, but is a particular medium of our intercourse with the world and our technological “being-for-the-world” (Deleuze). If the hybrid technobody was to be understood as a vulnerable body equipped with instruments{14}, the post-technological body is a sensuous explorer of unknown worlds and not the least bit worried about its own survival. The American Michael Heim made reference to the erotic attraction of cyberspace{15}, but eroticism here must be understood in Plato’s or Bataille’s sense as a quest for the other, not as a invitation to virtual sex, that “ultimate tease”.{16}
For the post-technological body exploring it, the networld is an in-between that has lost its poles. The networld is held together by holes and all one can trust is the process itself. The order of the networld is irrevocably unstable; its equilibrium is an in-between that must constantly renew itself and never returns to itself. While it would be possible to fulfill the technocratic hopes for flexibility and functionality, for undisturbed play and easily attainable consumption, the networld would then rigidify to a mere duplicate world. This, in turn, would have to lead to the violent birth of a new networld, since there are enough post-technological cyberbodies who refuse to sell out their human right to a new world, a world of their own. This world-of-my-own is marked by its monadic character; all mine and yet militantly open to the unknown. The technocracy smashes the subject into fragmentary parts, but the post-technological self, bound up in identity and difference with its body, rises up anew every time, as flowingly as the liquid body of the T-1000 in James Cameron’s film Terminator II (1991). The notion goes as far back as Heidegger, who had determined existence (Dasein) as “being able to be and being free for one’s innermost potential.”{17}, and Merleau-Ponty referred to the body as our “seat” in life, as our “being-skin,” at home in the ambiguous in-between.{18} Regarded phenomenologically, the body is free to realize its own ability (and failure), and all the materials of the world merely express its potential. The ability of a self is not interested in the status quo of the databases, but is attracted to the sublime. At home from time immemorial in the intermediate zone between finitude and infinitude, beauty and ugliness, life and death, the sublime bestows upon the cyberbody the experience of the unknown, the monstrous, the unpresentable. Such experience transmits no content, but rather a feeling of respect and of the demarcation that as the measure of an orientation is indispensable in the net. Anyone whose expectations of the sublime have been disappointed (and every disappointment is a bodily feeling as well) has gained something essential: immunity to the promises made by the peddlers of electronic happiness.
The self in post-technological media culture must generate itself using the “guidepost of the body” (Nietzsche), but which body, which media, which culture? The aesthetic experience to which art entices us can, in its daring openness, stimulate the net’s modes of life without intending to replace them. The New York group “Artificial Life: Media, Art, Philosophy” includes painters and sculptors as well as filmmakers and video artists, philosophers, graphic artists, designers, and journalists. Their common aspiration is to contribute to an “art of life” that holds its own in all of today’s human worlds and at the same time explores the potential of media, art, and philosophy. Universalism is not the aim, but the justice that demands the best effort from every game.{19} The art that Klaus Ottmann has put up on a website calls to mind the body as an essential condition of self-fulfilling networld. But it is not the same body about which the critics correctly supposed that it would be forgotten through digitalization. The artists of the Artificial Life Group in Ottmann’s virtual gallery reveal, without didactic intentions, a persistent prejudice that has made it difficult to render fruitful for the networld the principle of the art of living: “No humanity without a body!” The works of Tracy Essoglou, Emily Lutzker, and Kathleen Ruiz show that the human body belongs neither to the real world nor the virtual world, but is an intuitively active conception of the body, in between inside and outside, concretion and abstraction. Hazen Reed’s interactive multimedia installation “People Living with AIDS” proves that we dwell without difficulty in this bodily in-between, which is imbued with an unobtrusive understanding, as long as we do not attempt to determine theoretically just where our body has gone. Being alive decides an in-between, an interaction.
WEB PAGE: Klaus Ottmann's Virtual Gallery presents: Tracy Ann Essoglou, Emily Lutzker, Hazen Reed & Kathleen Ruiz, members of the New York based group ARTIFICIAL LIFE: MEDIA, ART, PHILOSOPHY
III. Generating a Self: Nomadic Monads in Post-Technological Media Culture
“Under every gravestone a world lies buried,” wrote Heinrich Heine. In its own self-conception, the self is a monad, an irreducible unit of microcosmic quality. Particularly the veteran dwellers of the networld — whether bearded, first-generation internet programmers or cyberpunks with body piercings — easily fit this description, given their headstrong, independent, and creative qualities.{20} With his epochal book The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque, {21}, Gilles Deleuze has reclaimed the monadic self for the present day. Man as monad accomplishes in a finite manner the infinite task of “folding, unfolding, ad refolding”{22} matter, time, and space, or put more simply: the material-mental process of creating the world never ends, and it repeats itself in each individual. Thus, the networld is by no means an anthropological novelty; rather, it fulfills more clearly than ever before our essence as the artificial ones of nature, for in the networld, the primacy of biology and metaphysics is overcome as a pain is overcome. Death becomes the objective report of an “irreversible metabolic coma,”{23} and it is in an electronic folding that the self generates itself as its “event of technology.”{24} Whether we like it or not, we monads are autonomous beings, givers of our own law, and absolutely responsible for the created world, be it society, nature, or internet.
The world must have its place in the subject, Deleuze explains, so that the subject can bring forth a world. (The world must be placed in the subject in order that the subject can be for the world.) [which one? mine or yours?] According to Deleuze, Heidegger’s "In-der-Welt-Sein" (being in the world) is preceded by a "Sein-für-die-Welt" (being for the world), our authentic individuality. That the monad has no windows, but is marked by a state of closure, as Leibniz provocatively asserted, is the condition under which a new world can begin at any time in each and every individual.{25} Hannah Arendt called this “natality,” the primordial human capacity for radical and unexpected life changes.{26} In each “envelopment,” as Deleuze underscores, a “whole world” is literally “contained,” one which does not exist outside the envelopment. Virtuality and self-enjoyment{27} characterize these world-engendering monads. Virtual reality has always been reality for us, for all “folds” exist primarily and authentically only in the soul endowed with imagination and self-confidence. “The world is what the soul expresses,” Deleuze emphasizes, and thus we always move from the virtual to the real.{28} Self-enjoyment brings the body into play, without which no definite and particular expression would be possible. In this state of joy, the monad chooses: “Everything is ordinary! Everything is unique!”{29} The chosen locus of Lebenslust (lust for life), unmistakable in its concreteness, comes out of the obscurity of the soul, determines us for the space of an event, and plunges back into the obscurity of the endless foldings.{30}
Thus, the networld can be understood as the bodily expression of a post-technological soul, as real virtuality and a celebration of self-enjoyment. The self that generates itself in this net is neither biomorphic nor technocentric, but in a precise sense “erotic”: searching for that which has not yet been and perhaps never can be expressed. It has nothing to do with the networld, but reflects on the individual person involved, when an internet pioneer like Clifford Stoll believes he is observing today: “[One lives a much more superficial life online than in the real world.][get original quote]”{31} No world is authentic when it merely serves as a substitute for another; therefore, every world should be judged on its own terms. The power game of hierarchy — the question of what is better and what is worse — violates the incomparability of worlds that share their origin and exist side by side. Indeed, one of the first empirical studies, recently published, “The Interactive Consumer,”{32} shows that the majority of netizens are individualists with a good measure of self-confidence. With the help of the newly developed JAVA language, compared by experts to Prometheus’ gift of fire, interaction is brought back into the home. The soul’s conversation with itself, Plato’s ideal communication, is thus endowed with a net form, and at the same time JAVA offers protection from con artists, viruses, and Trojan horses like some muscular bouncer.{33}
JAVA demonstrates even more tangibly just how the nomadic self will give form to the post-technological media culture. Not only the library will become virtual, but the home, office, shopping mall, university, and cities and communities of all types will do so as well. While the mere duplication of existing conditions is a danger that will always accompany this trend toward a holographic universe built by information, but the change from quantity to quality is still not to be denied. “Hot links” will increasingly replace the all-too-bibliothecarial system of cross-referencing. It is another life (and not merely life from a different aspect) when the visual discourse replaces the verbal description, when a virtual visit replaces the real walk-through. But as for the monad, at home in the many worlds it has created, the last thing it would ever do is allow itself to be completely dominated by any one specific world or strive to guarantee its survival. For any rigidification would infringe upon the orientation toward the sublime and at the same time ruin the joy in one’s own existence that comes from variety. The heated debate about the cybernetic organism, condemned or celebrated as the cyborg,{34} only serves to confirm just how little confidence is placed in the self’s formative powers. The postmechanical body, refigured in every possible way, is indeed, as Virilio observes, a technological intervention in the inner world of that which we previously called our body. But the traditional body conception was likewise a mere “folding” of matter, time, and space, just as the cyborg is now. Both are life forms that deserve to be drawn back some day into the darkness of the soul, to succumb to the river of oblivion, so that new and unheard-of forms might come into being. Thus the self, as a net monad, must be a nomad as well: always in motion and willing to take part in birth or in death in the process of artificial life. In contrast to Leibniz, the communicative play of monads in Deleuze’s view obeys no prestabilized harmony. Rather, accord dissolves and “penetration” becomes unavoidable. The resulting difference with his chaos-order (chaosmos), however, enables us to “organize” our world and its artificial nature, again and again in ever new ways. Or as Baudrillard puts it: “The Other is what allows me not to repeat myself for ever).”{35}
Jennifer Fischer and Patricia Pericas are two members of the ARTIFICIAL LIFE group in New York who work consciously with the otherness of the networld. Jennifer’s outline for an online education project treats the net as a self-evident environment characterized by transparency. Patricia proposed an artificial life game that allows each player to use the material of the past to transform history into an open process. For both, the still largely unknown networld is different from the worlds known up until now, and that is its advantage. Yet the art of life is needed in every world, and it is the whole person that is demanded, not his or her impoverished, instrumentalized existence.
TAPE 3:30 minutes
IV. Imperceptible Succeeding Fulfillment as Ethics of the Networld
For the individual, life in the net can be unpredictable, and thus an intensive learning experience, exciting and character-building. As serious play and magical gateway to new realities, the possibilities of the networld are unexcelled. Yet the question remains: how does net life judge its own fulfillment and what kind of identity does it encourage? It is this “how” that decides the ethics of the networld, that determines whether the “good life” is attained or not. Do the electronic nets capture and at the same time secure what previously escaped attention and control? If so, an ethics of fulfillment that in an imperceptible and pre-conscious manner acts as a “rationality of the body” and “innocence of becoming” would run into danger.{36} The networld has produced an instrumental perception with the intention of facilitating the exchange of information. But every subsequent development necessarily dissolves this all-too-limited intention and opens itself up to a “hyperperception” that brings the “twofold Other” (Lyotard), enownment and thing (Ereignis und Sache){37}, into play as a productive disturbance. Neither the (postmodern) renunciation of identity nor an ultimately self-deceptive self-diagnosis can signal an ethical existence. How the individual’s happiness and sorrow fulfill themselves is necessarily imperceptible, but can be perceived “at the margin.” Imperceptibility is what characterizes the fulfillment of human life. For an ethics of the networld, imperceptible fulfillment is as necessary as it is self-evident. Toshiharu Ito sensed: fulfillment “is like the wind -- one cannot see it, but one can feel it.”{38} [get actual quote] Even social mimesis is generated indirectly by the media, in the monadic “life-for-the-world” (Deleuze), and ethically it would make no sense to construct aims for it. The networld fulfills itself in such imperceptible perceptions as failing to hear something, blurring, sounds fading away, dreaming, forgetting, deciding not to do something, letting something be, getting over something, “ashes”: Paul Celan’s “Heartland” is a “no-man’s land.” (Adorno){39}
The open countryside of the internet has sharpened our eye for the impermanent character of nets, which are woven only to come apart again. The style of net technology is deeply pragmatic; “it works”{40}, it dwells in the interstice between functioning and fulfillment; it requires our consent, which is nevertheless quite temporary: “for the moment.” Identity, too, in the networld has a purely in-between character, and each new personality that I authentically “exist” owes itself to the forgetting of the so-called self. Immersion in the Other, be it a saint or a murderer, is the net’s miracle of perception. The sleep of controlling reason gives birth to a monster with an infinite number of faces (a multiple-personality freak). Yet the most challenging ethical quality of the networld is the end of biology’s tyranny over human beings. The art of life had always consisted in anthropologically transforming the Other Nature to create zones of free play for humanity, but never before have we fulfilled ourselves in attaining so much artificiality. The netizen no longer has to continue to accept the fate of “wretched dependence” upon the biological body, nor is death feared any longer as an enemy. Death in the net is an exciting, cutting-edge experience! The dualism of death and life is revoked; I do not exist. All that exists is life, in innumerable forms. Nothingness is not annihilation, but the promise of a different plenitude.
It would be anthropocentric and therefore an act of violence to codify a certain net body or historically successful form of net life and proclaim it as the new humanity. Yet such a monopoly, which can be observed in the history of humanity as ideological nodal points, hinders an ethics of the networld that is imbued with the openness of the in-between. It is in the free exchange of bodies, which includes the cyborg as well, that the in-between has its locus. One need not shrink back from even such gruesome body experiences as injury, torture, decay, and dying, for my in-between-bodies is not subject to danger. Cybernetic immortality is by no means attained by fleeing from biological death, as some critics would have it,{41} but through an immensely enriched artificial life. After 150 years, lived so intensively and imperceptibly, the cyber-human will be able to allow himself or herself a realism in the spirit of Schopenhauer: “Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love.”{42}
[1] Arthur Kroker: Spasm. New York 1993, p.50.
[2] Cf. Steven Levy: How the Propeller Heads Stole the Electronic Future. New York Times Magazine, September 14, 1995, p.59 ("a combination book, radio, magazine, mailbox, conversation parlor, bulletin board and, oneday, television set").
[3] Ernest Hess-Lüttich: Wie werden wir uns morgen verständigen? Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 4.September 1995, p. 25
[4] Cf. Denise Caruso: Technology - Digital Commerce. New York Times, October 9, 1995.
[5] Cf. Martin Sauter: Fenster zur Welt - Cybercafés in der Schweiz. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11.September 1995, p.
[6] Cf. Wired (October 1995), p.51.
[7] Cf. Wired (October 1995), p.134.
[8] Cf. Wired (October 1995), p.68.
[9] Cf. The Far Right: On The Air and On The Internet. New York Times, April 27, 1995.
[10] Cf.Neil Postman: Technopoly.
[11] Cf. Kevin Kelly: Singular Visionary. Wired (June 1995), P.160.
[12] Cf. Paul Virilio: Das Verschwinden des Körpers
[13] Cf.Dietmar Kamper: Unmögliche Gegenwart. München 1995.
[14] Cf. Katherine Hayles:
[15] Cf.Michael Heim: Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford 1994.
[16] Cf. Michael Marriott: Virtual Porn - Ultimate Tease. New York Times, October 4, 1995, C 1.
[17] Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit. Tübingen 1963, p.321.
[18] Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
[19] Cf. zur Idee einer Gerechtigkeit unter den Bedingungen der Postmoderne Jean-François Lyotard: Just Gaming
[20] Cf. St.Jude, R.U.Sirius, Bart Nagel: Cyberpunk Handbook. New York 1995.
[21] Gilles Deleuze: Die Falte. Frankfurt/ Main 1995 (französische Originalausgabe: Le Pli. Paris 1992.) Zitiert wird nach der amerikanischen Ausgabe (The Fold. 1993).
[22] Deleuze: The Fold, S.137.
[23] Cf. Timothy Leary: Chaos and Cyber Culture. New York 1994.
[24] Cf. Wolfgang Schirmacher: Ereignis Technik. Wien 1990.
[25] Deleuze: The Fold, p.26.
[26] Cf. Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition.
[27] Deleuze: The Fold, S.133.
[28] Deleuze: The Fold, S.26.
[29] Deleuxe: The Fold, S.89.
[30] Deleuze, The Fold, S.98.
[31] Clifford Stoll: Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.
[32] Published by Cordiant P.L.C. (New York) by a team of clinical psychologists and cultural anthropologists. Cf. Stuart Elliott: Advertising. New York Times, September 25, 1995.
[33] Cf. John Markoff: Making the PC Come Alive: A Software Company that Puts You in the Picture. New York Times, September 25, 1995.
[34] Cf. Donna Haraway: The Cyborg Manifesto
[35] Jean Baudrillard: The Transparency of Evil - Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Transl. J.Benedict. London 1993 (frz. 1990), p.174.
[36] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche:
[37] Cf. Jean-François Lyotard: Das zweifach Andere. In: Bildstörung. Ed.J.-P.Dubost. Berlin, 1994, S.14-18.
[38] Cf. H.Ito:
[39] Cf. Cf. Theodor W.Adorno: Kants "Kritik der reinen Vernunft". Vorlesungen Bd.4. Nachgelassene Schriften IV. Ed. Tiedemann. Frankfurt 1995, S.
[40] Cf. Paulina Borsook: How Anarchy Works - On location with the masters of the metaverse, the Internet Engineering Task Force. In: Wired (October 1995), S.110-118.
[41] Cf. Der Datendandy. Hsg. Agentur Bilwet. Mannheim 1994, S.189.
[42] Cf. Bruce Sterling: The Future? In: Scenarios: The Future of the Future. Special Wired Edition (1995), S.170.