The second leg of the triangle is the customers, and the relationship between the technician and the customer is a primary responsibility for this kind of work. As in any service work, keeping the customer satisfied is the ultimate mission, as the machines are not able to pay the lease or fill out the all-important Customer Satisfaction Management Surveys. In discussing the territory of technicians, Orr explains that “technicians worry more about social damage another technician can do in their territory than about what might happen to the machine” (63). He also shows how the technicians attempt to socialize with the customers, for example, when a technician banters with a customer about life as a single parent in Silicon Valley. In addition, Orr refers to the saying “Don’t fix the machine; fix the customer” (79), and gives various stories about how technicians teach customers how to properly use, identify, diagnose, and repair the machines.

However, machines are the final and most obvious element of the triangle, and the relationship between the technicians and the machines is complex. On the one hand, Orr recognizes that machines often frustrate technicians, especially when the teams share their existential crises in realizing that there will always be problems to fix and that every repair will eventually fail. However, he also shows how the technicians are indebted to the machines, who by failing give the technicians a job. Orr shows that “such a machine is a worthy opponent, partner, other” (99), and how their identity (usually that of the hero) is linked to these machines.

The problem with the machines is that they are fraught with uncertainty, as each of their interrelated parts can fail in multiple ways. The Xerox Corporation gives its technicians diagnostic and repair manuals, but these are only used by novices or as a last resort. Most of the diagnostic work performed is kinesthetic or auditory, and such instruction is difficult to convey in a written form. Therefore, instead of putting “blind faith” (113) in the manuals, the technicians rely on the discourse of their co-workers, who share techniques, tricks, quick fixes, errors in the documentation, schematics, and most importantly, “war stories” (125).

Narrative also forms an essential component of how technicians talk about machines in all three facets of their work. Telling a story of a machine’s failure is necessary to gain proper advice from a colleague if one does not know the proper remedy. Likewise, the same story can assist a customer in understanding why their machine failed and how it can be prevented in the future. Finally, technicians often need to construct narratives for the machines as a way of understanding them better: in reading the logs and asking customers for details, the technician works to identify the most likely cause of failure. Ultimately, it is through these narratives that technicians talk about machines, which Orr identifies as “a vital element of their practice” (161). However, he recognizes that this talk, while important, is a mere “means to an end” (161) of fixing the machines and the customers. From the technician’s standpoint, the only distinction between lubricating a squeaky drive shaft and reassuring a complaining manager is the specific target of maintenance and the different kinds of skills necessary to perform such tasks.

In all, Orr’s work is an incredibly interesting expose of what many would take to be a rather marginal and boring job; however, it is not simply of interest to those class-minded scholars who study the maintenance workers who are all-too-often made invisible along with the infrastructure they maintain. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, Talking About Machines makes a far more lasting contribution than the immediate fallout of his study – which was to give technicians portable radios so that they could share these tacit forms of knowledge without having to meet at a central location during a designated break period. In addition to practical solutions of interest to his employers at Xerox, his study remains relevant today because it reveals much about the way in which we humans in an increasingly mechanized world deal with not only machines, but also each other.

Kuhn’s work was published against a backdrop of Popperian falsificationism, in which science was theorized to be comprised of claims that could be empirically tested. A corollary to this is that science moves away from falsehood instead of necessarily towards truth. With such a conception, the enterprise of science became conceptualized as a series of refinements: old theories were rejected when they were contradicted by empirical data, while new theories were accepted when they were confirmed by empirical data. However, as Kuhn and my High School class learned, this depiction is not entirely pure, as there are many documented instances where scientists do not reject theories based on their incongruence with experiment.

It is far more often that scientific practice within this paradigm is refined in order to incorporate anomalies instead of rejecting the paradigm outright: “when confronted by anomaly … [a theory’s defenders] will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict” (78). For example, the Ptolemaic paradigm of astronomy was not rejected when improved optics showed unpredicted phenomena; rather, it became increasingly complex as it attempted to logically and mathematically explain planetary movements from a geocentric perspective. The Copernican model was only given a chance to survive during what Kuhn calls a crisis, in which “proliferating versions of the paradigm … loosens the rules of normal puzzle-solving in ways that ultimately permit a new paradigm to emerge” (80).

One explanation for my teacher’s reluctance to accept that we had stumbled on a groundbreaking new discovery was that we were experimenting not during a crisis, but squarely within the realm of what Kuhn calls normal science: a period in which “research [is] firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice (10). Within a particular period of normal science, which Kuhn calls a paradigm, scientists “are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice” (11). Yet how did my teacher know that my team had not stumbled upon a crisis-inducing discovery on par with Roentgen’s glowing screen, given that both anomalies were initially rejected as bad experimentation by authorities? The answer is that Roentgen’s anomalies were explained with a new theoretical concept, the X-ray, while my team’s anomalies were not accompanied by a new theory. As Kuhn claims, “once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place” (77).

Because of this, Kuhn argues that the way in which science progresses is a steady refinement and articulation of a paradigm, which is occasionally rejected during a crisis and an accompanying paradigm shift. However, the reason such a theoretical conception of science has not already emerged is, Kuhn argues, due to the very way in which science is taught. Textbooks, which he calls “pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science,” in particular make paradigms invisible by “refer[ing] only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be views as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems” (138). Textbooks “have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution” (137); he exclaims that, “no wonder … as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative” (138).

The problem I have with Kuhn’s indictment of scientific pedagogy is that it fails to follow one of his own paradigms: that in order to be accepted, a theory has to replace another instead of merely discrediting it. I do not see any viable alternative to the traditional model of science education, in which we are indoctrinated into the methods of normal science and only later and under certain conditions are allowed to propose new theories which shift the scientific paradigm. Under a Kuhnian framework, was my team right or wrong to manipulate the data in order to fit the theory predicted by normal science? This leads to a deeper issue: under the same framework, was my teacher right or wrong to tell us that Physics would break us far more often than we would ever break Physics, which had the immediate effect of us anxiously adjusting our experiments in order to produce normal science?

In asking this question, I should note that I am making a distinction between the methods of scientists and the way in which new scientists are educated. Obviously, Kuhn argues that “If authority alone … were the arbitrator of paradigm debates, the outcome of those debates might still be revolution, but it would not be scientific revolution” (167). The issue is how one introduces a student to science, as well as how the distinction between a scientist and a student of science is approached. If an introductory Physics class begins with kinematic equations, for example, do we preface those equations with the caveat that they are only the beliefs of the current instantiation of normal science and are therefore challengeable under certain circumstances? Or, as I was taught, do we preach these theories as universal truths that they should never, ever question, which leads to a rather problematic situation when the graduate student of normal science stumbles upon a crisis-in-waiting.

In a related tangent, the controversy with Kuhn’s argument seems to stem from his explicit comparison between scientific revolutions and political revolutions:

Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life … As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice – there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community (94).

The issue is therefore the same issue any political science department focused on training civil servants would have: does an instructor teach students how the current government or political system operates in a very positivistic fashion, or ought they teach how political systems are transient and open to radical change and critique? The former choice grooms the students to be perfect civil servants who are unprepared for any disruption in the status quo, while the latter leads students to be idealistic and entirely unsuitable for a civil servant position in the first place. The same issue exists in parallel with scientific education, ostensibly for the purpose of training new scientists. Unfortunately, Kuhn’s framework does not seem to provide an answer.

As I scan the room, I see that more than half the students have laptops on their desks. Just as many chat obtrusively on their cell phones, while checking their e-mail or sports scores… I feel uncomfortable in this space. It’s not “my space.”

He continues, grieving “the loss of the emotional bond and shared frame of reference” that he once had with his students. Then Bochner goes on an extended description of bad behavior he witnessed in his undergraduate class, which includes cell phone rings disturbing class, leaving to go to the bathroom without permission, listening to music, as well as noisily consuming food and drinks. He believes this is a natural consequence of what he sees as a professionalization of the university, in which students are treated more like “customers” who are always right instead of, well, students. He then ends his essay by declaring his resolve to ban technology from the classroom in order to provide a more meaningful discussion.

As someone who types over 70 words per minute but can barely write legibly at one tenth of that speed, I take issue with Professor Bochner’s equivocation of the use of technology with bad student behavior. I feel that laptops in particular can be used responsibly in a classroom, and even if they are not, playing solitaire or checking Facebook during class is most assuredly not on the level of talking on one’s cell phone or listening to music during class. First, they are not disruptive to other students on any level. Second, students who are prone to ignoring lectures will do so by whatever means possible – take away the laptop and students will pass notes. Finally, this is a self-defeating practice: if the course lectures really are important, students who ignore them by surfing the Internet during courses will perform badly in the course.

In addition, I feel that laptops in classrooms have significant educational value, especially in large classes. I did my undergraduate at a fairly large state school, the University of Texas at Austin, which as a large state school is similar to Professor Bochner’s school, the University of South Florida. I have had my fair share of huge undergraduate lecture courses in which I was stuffed into an auditorium with over 100 other students. I cannot seem to find his course in the catalog, but I would assume it was a large lecture course in which students rarely, if ever get the chance to meaningfully discuss course material. My experience with these courses are that they require students to soak up a professor’s lecture and then either regurgitate it in a final exam or refine it into a final paper. Either way, there is a lot of transcribing going on, which Bochner acknowledges when he references a scene in Real Genius that portrays a college classroom as a tape recording of a lecture being recorded by a classroom full of tape recorders. Laptops provide a way for students like me to take notes at a rapid pace without having to spend a significant amount of time afterwords listening to a recording of the lecture. Instead of producing an awkward condensation of a lecture on paper that often makes no sense weeks later, I can take almost ten times more notes when I type as opposed to when I write.

Secondly, Internet access may have its distractions, but it also provides access to a wealth of information that students can use in real time to supplement lectures. All too often (especially when students in one discipline take upper-level courses in another discipline), a professor will mention a theory, event, or individual that was not previously covered in the course. Students who get the reference will understand it, but those who have not had the same background as the professor will not. For example, when a professor of mine opened a lecture by claiming that a certain theorist we had read provided the foundation for Gadamerian hermeneutics – a throwaway line that actually had some significance in my understanding of the work in question. I pulled up an article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which gave me a brisk understanding of the theory in about forty-five seconds. Not perfect, obviously, but I think my understanding of the lecture was improved by exploring this reference during class.

I agree that technology in the classroom poses significant threats to the quality of education in classroom environments. However, an outright ban on technology in the classroom – which may or may not include the pen and paper – is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Students having extended conversations with each other during class is just as bad as students talking on cell phones in class. In both cases, students should be warned and then sent out for this behavior. If someone is obviously not engaged in class, then they should be told to pay attention and participate or risk being thrown out. This applies for students who are playing video games on their laptops as well as daydreaming. I see no need to ban potentially useful technological devices when their misuse is the real issue at hand.

I recently picked this up while browsing the philosophy section of a local bookstore. On a side note, I love to look at what different bookstores call “Philosophy,” as they often differ greatly. Anyways, the title intrigued me and I picked it up and started reading, as I had a good bit of time to waste. I had a good idea of what the ten books would be (some Marx, Hitler, Nietzsche, among others). I’ll save you all the trouble and post the list here, with descriptions from the publisher:

• Why Machiavelli’s The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
• How Descartes’ Discourse on Method “proved” God’s existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
• How Hobbes’ Leviathan led to the belief that we have a “right” to whatever we want
• Why Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
• How Darwin’s The Descent of Man proves he intended “survival of the fittest” to be applied to human society
• How Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the “will to power”
• How Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a kind of “spiritualized Darwinism” that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
• How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
• Why Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science

While I’m happy (and surprised) to see Descartes on the list, most of the list is rather thinly defended, with the exception of Mein Kampf. Ultimately, the problem with 10 Books is not which books are on the list, as we could have an endless debate over the ten books which screwed up society the most. Wiker treats these books as if they were pure subliminal propaganda, and implies that the various negative social movements, ideologies, and so forth would not have emerged had these books not been written. This is not the case: antisemitism in post-Weimar Germany was there long before Hitler; socialism and communism has a long history before the manifesto of Marx and Engels; and the timing is far too off to consider the Kinsey report the sole cause of the sexual revolution that culminated in the late 1960s.

In all, Wiker does not spend any time explaining why each book became so rabidly popular within the cultural context of the time, or why it supported an ideology that was embraced by so many people. Communism cannot be explained by saying that The Communist Manifesto was simply a good piece of prose that convinced millions of people to revolt against capitalism. In fact, without State and Revolution and What is to be Done? by V.I. Lenin, the Communist Manifesto would have entered the dustbin of history much earlier. Communism before the Bolshevik revolutions of 1917 was hardly developed at all. For a rather detailed history of communist thought and practice that explains the delicate mix of personalities, writings, social movements, and historical conditions, check out To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson. It is more than ten times the length Wiker spends on Marx and Engels, but that is the price you pay for analysis.

The same logic goes with Nazism and Mein Kampf , which is the book’s only decent section. To state that a book “screwed up the world” gives a significant amount of agency to a text. Now , Mein Kampf really did propel Hitler to popularity, which he then exploited. It logically follows that without having written his autobiography, he would not have been able to seize control of the country. However, the other books do not deserve this sort of agency. It seems that most of the time, Wiker’s method of determining which books most screwed up the world is to see how many people died as a direct or indirect (usually indirect) result of someone having read it. Needless to say, this ignores many other factors, especially with highly popular books.

The exception are Kinsey and Mead, whose works are attacked primarily because they are, in the author’s opinion, unscientific. However, solely being an unscientific non-fiction bestseller isn’t enough, or else this list would be hundreds of books long. Wiker’s problem with Kinsey and Mead is that they are culturally destructive and work to create “family breakdowns” (Inside Flap). Wiker attempts to implicate Kinsey as one of the primary causes of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which is a rather spurious claim. Of course the Kinsey Report played a part in the sexual revolution, but saying that it singlehandedly introduced alternative sexualities that aren’t based on the nuclear family into American culture gives it far too much credit. It is needless to say that if you don’t find anything wrong with alternative sexualities you won’t buy these two books as screwing up the world, but Wiker again ignores the cultural setting in lieu of attacking a single book. What would have happened if the Kinsey report was published in 1848, instead of 1948? Would we have had a sexual revolution instead of a civil war two decades later? I think not. And had Kinsey and Mead not written their books would we be living in a Puritan paradise? Hardly.

Finally, the inclusion of Descartes and Hobbes is rather naive, in my opinion. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of either of these philosophers, and think they made many mistakes which Wiker doesn’t even identify (his criticism is mostly a religious one). However, to say that they screwed up the world not only conceptualizes “the world” in ways that are quite Cartesian, but also ignores their place in the history of philosophy. Would first Hume, then Kant have emerged without the writings of Descartes? Would first Locke, then Rousseau have written what they did without the writings of Hobbes? I’m not saying that the works of Descartes and Hobbes had to be written before anything like late-Enlightenment thought could come about, but rather that philosophy is path dependent – in short, that what came before matters.

What I would appreciate is a list such as this that explained why these books were so popular. Not necessarily a prescriptive history that explains why each book had to be written, but one that looks to see why that book became accepted in popular, political, and academic culture. We’ve had enough of the Great Man trope in history – the idea that certain historical events happened solely because of one individual. Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power without the support of the civil institutions in Germany, Napoleon wouldn’t have been able to consolidate power throughout Europe without a delicate mix of situations and events, and Communism in Russia never would have taken off without a series of conditions among the various classes and careful planning not simply by Lenin, but all of the Bolsheviks with all of their sometimes-contradictory interests. Why can’t we have a socio-political history of books that also refuses to make this fallacy?

”Patchwork Girl; or, a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelly, & Herself” [title page], “is a haphazard hopscotch … through patched words in an electronic space” [this writing]. “[M]ade up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles, and … no absolute boundaries” [self-swarm], “the entire text is within reach, but … I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest” [this writing]. “[B]ecause” [this writing] “we live in the expectation of traditional narrative progression … a kind of vertigo besets us when we witness plot” [lives] “without shape, without end, without story” [this writing]. “We are … entangled … awkward .. our conclusions unsubstantiated” [lives].

“You could say that all … pieces of writing” [all written] “generate certain formations … but … despite ourselves” [lives] “an electronic river washes out” [hop] “traditional form with its ordered … determined structure” [what shape]. “[S]o if you think you’re going to follow … you’ll have to learn…” [think me] “words … lubricated and mobile, rub familiarly against one another in the buttery medium … The letters come alive like tiny antelopes and run in packs and patterns” [blood] “there’s just no way around it” [think me]. “You can resurrect” [graveyard] “sequence” [double agent] “with great effort” [lives] “but … pursuers, when you” [think me] “reach … for … fact” [this writing] “you’ll begin to have trouble” [think me]. “You organize writing spaces … and whichever way you turn … the figures still seem ill-arranged” [compositions].

“[T]hank goodness” [flow] “we have” [lives] “a kind of … guide…” [bodies too], “a bundle of scraps” [scraps] “who we … are hunted, by” [she goes on], “the Patchwork Girl” [write?]. “She is an infant with the strength and wits of a more-than-adult” [infant]. “She has seen things I will never see; she remembers more than I will experience in my whole life” [female trouble]. “Scraps of memories blow through her mind like bits of patterned cloth” [infant]. [S]he is … as” [my walk] “everything … is” [therapies], “but … consistency is one thing you cannot really expect of” [blood] “the Patchwork Girl” [write?]. “I … doubt that [t]here’s one way through it and that’s the way … but” [flow] “she … is always” [left leg] “linked to the chain of existence and events” [she].

“[S]he said” [write?] “If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself” [graveyard]. “You will have to sew” [graveyard] “the entire text … and have no sense of … this” [this writing] “unusual character … [Y]ou want …to … choose … from the menu … creating … a very well-shaped girl” [a single space]. “[B]ut no … because” [cut] “[t]his being you must create … must … live in the interchange” [plea] “[S]cars … mark a cut … chronicling the assaults it has withstood” [cut]. “[B]ut … they also commemorate a joining … Scar tissue is new growth.” [cut]. “You may think I am not making something new … but returning scrambled elements to order” [cuts] “is true … identity” [hidden figure].

“I see the … robbed … [t]echniques of” [quilting] “Derrida” [sources] “come in handy” [quilting]. “The … literary composition … stemmed from ancient rhetoric … Neoclassical pedagogy focused … on … smoothly flowing from one section to another.” [typographical]. “Derrida … with” [sources] “de” [mutinies] “construction … made up … tricks in writing …and … reassembled … distorted and set” [typographical] “text” [this writing] “in foreign places” [typographical] “pouring over it, inch by glitch … [T]oo brimming … in … the cheap stuff it was made of” [becoming whole], “the entire text is …” [this writing] “turned inside out … flung so far open that” [her, me] “I could force that essence to precipitate out … in chunks like rotting bark” [becoming whole]. “[T]he Patchwork Girl … is” [write?] “a … mixed metaphor” [metaphor me] “for … de” [mutinies] “construction” [typographical], “our … guide…to constructions of meaning … legible, partially” [bodies too] “here… in a … haphazard hopscotch” [this writing]:

“[S]he … animates every feature…In the next moment, … tears it … and …staring stubbornly into a whirl of colored pieces, calico, velvet, taffeta, dimity … she holds me bent back over a decorative little cliff, yet high enough to break me; then she dandles me in thin air, laughing so gaily I know she does not remember her own anger. Pensive, then abrupt; sharp-mannered, then languorously inviting; she changes with each heart-beat, and I change with her. I must. I will be swallowed up else, or crushed, or flung far away. Am I afraid? Terribly; I know this is no sport. … I think she will learn to manage herself somehow …I owe her my guidance, if she will have it. Yet I dissemble. It is more than this” [infant].“I … am restless; she makes me so” [female trouble]. “[S]he is restless … she tells me” [female trouble] “[w]hat exists: this latest word … myself imagining possibilities” [a life]. “[S]he tells me” [female trouble] “[e]verything could have been different and already is” [a life].

Case, the protagonist, is an ex-hacker who has been maimed by a previous employer, making him unable to “jack in” (37) to Gibson’s version of the globalized information network he calls “cyberspace”(4). Molly, a street-smart “razor girl” (28) with knives for fingernails and mirrored lenses for eyes, rescues Case from his self-destructive habits at the behest of Armitage, her employer who takes orders from Wintermute. As we later learn, Armitage’s mind and body has been re-created by Wintermute from soldier named Corto, who was brutally wounded in a military operation which tested the effects of technological weapons. Armitage heals Case, but only temporarily; he must complete the job for his restoration to be permanent. Together, these three obtain Dixie Flatline, a “construct” (49) created from the downloaded brain of dead hacker McCoy Pauley, as well as Peter Riviera, who has the mystical talent of making others see his “holographic cabaret” (138) through the use of special implants. They also enlist the help of Maelcum and Aerol, two Rastafarians from a space colony called Zion which rejects the hyper-technological “Babylon” (248) below. Wintermute has this team break (both physically and digitally) into the Villa Straylight, the headquarters of Wintermute’s creator, the Tessier-Ashpool corporation. With the help of Lady 3Jane, Tessier and Ashpool’s daughter, the team obtains a password which will allow them to free Wintermute’s security locks. While performing this task, Case learns that Wintermute is only half of another AI called Neuromancer collectively. He frees the locks and allows this super-AI to form, theoretically achieving godhood.

All the main characters in Neuromancer are defined by their relation to technology. Case holds a “contempt for the flesh” (6) and is unable to come to terms with the real world; his two addictions are cyberspace and, when that is unavailable, mind-altering drugs. His physical body is rarely described, leading Gibson to characterize him mainly by his actions in relation to technology (specifically cyberspace). Molly, on the other hand, uses technology to supplement her physical body. Along with her physical implants, she frequently uses temporary “derms” (85) to enhance her physical performance. Dixie Flatline, literally a man in a box, makes constant reference to his technologically-mediated existence, while Armitage/Corto is nothing if not technology: his body has been recreated by surgeons, his mind made new by Wintermute. Riviera’s main purpose is his hologram implants; like Case, his physical body is rarely described. The Rastafarians, specifically Maelcum and Aerol, are characterized in opposition to the technological Babylon on Earth, although they help the team because Wintermute made them see a sign they thought was from God. It is Wintermute, however, who can be considered the most significant character in the novel. The fact that entire novel is an adventure funded and conceptualized by the AI is significant, as all the other team members are not only characterized by their own relation to technology, but their own relation to Wintermute.

Such a state of technological identification is precisely the target of Martin Heidegger’s criticism of technology and modern metaphysics. For Heidegger, this philosophical conception of the self (which culminated in Descartes) sees the body as simply another object which may have instincts, desires, and lusts, but ultimately is controlled by the pure subject of the mind. Modern scientists, for example, prize objectivity and view the world through a framework that minimizes the researcher’s effect on the experiment. It is not specifically tools that are the target of Heidegger’s criticism, but rather this techne-centered subjectivity and mindset that leads us to consider everything beyond the pure subject an inferior object that exists solely to benefit the subject. This mindset terminates in the desire to escape the tainted body, with its bothersome limitations. While this is clearly seen in Case’s “contempt for the flesh,” (6) Molly’s anesthetic derms and Dixie’s virtual existence point to this overcoming of authentic existence which Heidegger claims characterizes the modern project and its technological mindset.

Neuromancer/Wintermute, however, is the pinnacle of the technological society and the clearest embodiment of Heidegger’s techne-centered being. Instead of actively being-in-the-world, this superior construct is a passive participant when it comes to existence. It may have thoughts and even citizenship but its body is simply static hardware, a mainframe that always perceives and experiences through something or someone else (a sensor or data input). This can be seen in Neuromancer’s final conversation with Case. When asked how things will be different, the AI responds: “Things aren’t different. Things are things.” (270) Neuromancer, the now all-knowing godlike being, seems infinitely resigned when it comes to Earth. It focuses on talking to an AI in the Centauri system. Such a resignation is precisely Heidegger’s prediction of posthuman existence: a world that is dead to us.

This type of technological innovation is not new for Mitchell. He states that such advances are part of our human heritage, from “[w]alking sticks [which] provided an early, rudimentary form of exoskeletal support” (20) to automobiles which replaced the legs as a mechanism for transportation. The concept of a networked self is also something which came before the technological advances of the 21st century. Mitchell describes that even sexual reproduction itself can be considered part of this system, as it “is constructed to interface with other, compatible sexual plumbing for the efficient transfer of genetic information in fluid format” (22). With this point in mind, Mitchell spends a large majority of his book describing the various “circumscriptions” (41) that make the 21st century urbanite distinct from homo habilis, whose use of crude tools ushered in the stone age. These advances, which include “wireless coverage” (49), “miniaturized machinery” (64), “dematerialized text” (84), “location-tracking technologies” (115), and “[m]odularized, parameterized, mobilized software” (141) combine into a single genre of technological innovation which provides a new framework for human interaction: the neo-nomad.

For Mitchell, this change is beneficial for humanity as a whole. It “offers liberation from the rigidities and interdictions of the predefined program … a release from ways of using spaces produced and enforced by dominant social orders” (160). By opening up multiple paths of resistance and communication, such technologies make a broader struggle against oppression possible. However, is this fundamental shift necessarily advantageous for marginalized groups who desire such freedom from dominating social institutions? The only example that Mitchell gives in support of this new resistance is an uncited instance where suburban and urban “kids” (160) used cell phones to coordinate both “street demonstrations” and “raves” (161). These digitally literate youngsters then discovered that they could program worms and viruses to “clog channels of communication” (161) presumably used by their enemies. Such a stratum seems hardly oppressed when compared to their inner-city peers. It must be emphasized that new technology is often a privilege of wealth and unavailable to most marginalized groups. In contrast to this nomadic resistance, we can remember the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, arguably one of the most effective social movements in recent memory, which advanced without these digital information networks at all.

Furthermore, even if such actions did constitute egalitarian political resistance, such occurrences are rare in the networked world. Instead of using the digital world to influence the physical, many acts of political resistance stay in the network. When resistance becomes as easy as friending a politician in Facebook or writing a blog post, is it truly effective? As the 2004 election proved, mobilization on the Internet – specifically the so-called “blogosphere” – failed to translate into significant real-world political action. It is possible that nomadic resistance is solely symbolic, carrying little weight. On the other hand, information networks seem to significantly benefit those already in power. Mitchell discusses this topic, but determines that such networks are amoral; that is, they can be used for “good or ill” (192), as he keeps reiterating throughout chapter twelve. However, such a conclusion ignores the systematic bias that such networks have towards those who control them. And despite what Time Magazine said, multibillion dollar corporations still own MySpace and Blogger, the U.S. Government still indirectly controls ICANN, Choicepoint still sells your aggregated personal data to the highest bidder (non-governmental or otherwise), and the NSA can still obtain phone and Internet conversations without a warrant. When it comes to new powers afforded by the network, the common person does not appear to even break even, much less those on the fringes of society.