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A drive-by critique of an America gone mad, and a world where chaos and catastrophe are the new normal, by the cultural critic Wired called “provocative and cuttingly humorous.”
Terrorists, tabloid media, escalating culture wars that have brought us to the brink of civil war: To many, America is an infernal carnival, equal parts funhouse and madhouse – a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” to borrow a turn-of-the-century nickname for Coney Island. In 1999, on the eve of the millennium, Mark Dery foresaw our Age of Unreason – and excavated the root causes of America’s descent into permanent social chaos.
“Escape Velocity is without doubt the best guide I have read to the new computer culture that will soon dominate our lives. Mark Dery is witty and provocative but always sane and thoughtful.” — J.G. Ballard
Wannabe cyborgs, machine-sex junkies, punk roboticists. Poised between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, the digital fringe poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology be used as an engine of repression or a tool of empowerment in the coming millennium?
Afrofuturism! Technopagans! Brain-jackers! Amok robots! An African-American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg! Before Wired, before the Web, there was Flame Wars, the mind-ripping anthology of essays on digital culture that launched Afrofuturism, cyberfeminism, and cybersex studies.
Popularized by Mark Dery through his groundbreaking 1990 feature in The New York Times and contributions to Adbusters (which introduced editor Kalle Lasn to the term), “culture jamming” is media hacking, guerrilla semiotics, sociopolitical satire, and a neo-Situationist insurgency, all in one. Media hoaxers, billboard bandits, pirate broadcasters, hit-and-run “subvertisers,” Left/progressive meme warriors, and other media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, hijacking ads, newscasts, Hollywood movies, and other mechanisms of social control and repurposing them to politically subversive or perversely personal ends, are all culture jammers. Published in 1993 as part of the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, this little manifesto was an Anarchist’s Cookbook for anti-consumerists and anti-capitalists itching to strike back at the Society of the Spectacle.
