Most books about cyberculture are either rants or raves, her-alding the new utopia or dismissing it as utterly dysto-pian. What they have in common is that they focus on computer technology itself, assuming that it is unlike anything human beings have ever faced. But in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Mark Dery takes a different approach. While he acknowledges that the technology is amazing and new, he shows that people's reactions to it actually have less to do with its amazing newness than with basic human drives that have been present for millennia.

Dery begins with a discussion of how the counterculture went from rejecting technology in the sixties to embracing it in the nineties. He cites Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand's 1972 assertion that hackers had the same worldview as hippies but better technology, and goes on to talk about how altered states are now sought not through drugs but through computerized virtual reality. In the sixties Timothy Leary said, "Turn on, tune in, and drop out"; in the nineties, "Turn on, boot up, and jack in."

From there the author launches into an exploration of the fundamental motives behind such pursuits. He notes, for example, that when cyberians rhapsodize about transferring the mind from the body into an immortal machine, they are arguably describing "techno-transcendentalism's version of born-again Christianity's rapture,' in which true believers are lifted out of the mundane, into the parting clouds." In an age when religion has taken a back seat to reason, people's fear of death and their unmet spiritual needs, combined with a simple failure to comprehend new technology, can yield technopaganism. Freud's observation that primitives "believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking" is pertinent here, too: since thought, in the form of computer programs, can profoundly affect reality, it is no wonder that mysticism is on the rise. Even the technological elite are not immune. In The Soul of New Machine, Tracy Kidder quotes a programmer on the thrill of assembly language: "I could . . . talk right to the machine . . . . I could talk to God."

Using Technology to Protest Technology