<underfire> Born Again Ideology

[ctheory]

Excerpt from: Arthur Kroker (2006) _Born Again Ideology: Religion,
 Technology and Terrorism_.  Victoria (Canada): CTheory Electronic
 Books / NWP. Online at: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=546

 
============================================================

                                    5

                       The Cosmological Compromise
                       ---------------------------


      We are witnessing a fundamental sea change in American
      politics," said Allan Litchman, a professor of political history
      at American University in Washington. "The divide used to be
      primarily economics -- between the haves and the have-nots.
      That's changed now. The divide in American today is religious
      and racial... The base of the Republican party is not
      necessarily the 'haves' anymore -- it's the white evangelicals,
      white devout Catholics, white churchgoers. The base of the
      Democratic Party is not necessarily the 'nots.' It's African
      Americans, Jewish Americans, those without any religious
      affiliation. Our politics revolve around a new cultural
      polarization.

                        -- Joe Garofoli, ~San Francisco Chronicle,~
                            March 22, 2005


 The foundations of modernity have always been based on an underlying
 cosmological compromise. Confronted with the incipiently antagonistic
 relationship between science and religion, western societies have in
 the main opted for the safer, although definitely less intense,
 option of splitting the faith-based difference. Under the guise of
 political pluralism, freedom of religious worship has been consigned
 to the realm of private belief, whereas the arena of political action
 has been secured not only for the protection of private rights, but
 more importantly, for forms of political participation, educational
 practice, and scientific debates which would, at least nominally, be
 based on the triumph of reason over faith. If the cosmological
 compromise overlooked the inconvenient fact that the origins of
 science specifically, and modernity more generally, were themselves
 based on a primal act of faith in secularizing rationality, it did
 contribute an important cultural firewall against the implosion of
 society into increasingly virulent expressions of religious
 fundamentalisms. While modern society would no longer aspire, at
 least collectively, to the ancient dream of salvation, it would have
 the indispensable virtue of providing a realm of public action where
 faith-based politics would be put aside in favor of the instrumental
 play of individual interests.

 Consequently, while Max Horkheimer, an early critic of European
 modernity, could revolt in his writings against the "dawn and
 decline" of liberal culture, his criticisms were tempered by the
 knowledge that left to its own devices, the forces of fully
 consolidated capitalism were as likely to tip in the direction of
 politically mediated fascism as they were to recuperate the divisive
 passions of religious idolatry. Like a beautiful illusion all the
 more culturally resplendent for its ultimate political futility,
 liberal modernity seemingly represented a thin dividing line between
 a history of religious conflict and a future of authoritarian
 politics. With the problem of religious salvation limited to private
 conscience, the history of western society was thus free to unfold in
 the direction of a regime of political and economic security. It was
 as if all modern history, from the bourgeois interests of the
 capitalist marketplace to the politics of pluralism, were,
 ontologically speaking, a vast defense mechanism whereby both
 individuals and collectivities insulated themselves against a
 resurrection of the problem of salvation in human affairs.

 With a false sense of confidence, perhaps all the more rhetorically
 frenzied for its approaching historical eclipse, the discourse of
 technological modernism -- western culture's dominant form of
 self-understanding -- has over the past century confidently predicted
 the triumph of secular culture and the death of religion. Indeed,
 when the German philosopher, Heidegger, remarked that technology is
 the language of human destiny, he had in mind that technology is both
 present and absent simultaneously: present with ferocious force in
 the languages of objectification, harvesting, the reduction of
 subjects to "standing-reserve", and the privileging of abuse value as
 the basis of technological willing; but marked by an absence as well,
 namely the retreat of the gods into the gathering shadows of a
 humanity that has seemingly lost its way in the midst of the frenzy
 of technological willing. If Heidegger could write so eloquently
 about a coming age of "completed nihilism" as the key element of
 technology as our historical destiny, he was only rehearsing again in
 new key the fatal pronouncements of those other prophets of the
 future of technoculture: Nietzsche, Weber, and Camus. For example, in
 _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote not so much about
 the death of god, but about a more primary death, namely the death of
 the sacred as a resurrection-effect capable of holding in fascination
 an increasingly restless human subject in open revolt against the
 absolute codes of metaphysics. With Nietzsche, the modern century
 resolved to make of itself a fatal gamble -- a "going across" -- with
 technology as its primary language of self-understanding. Impatient
 with the slowness of the modern mind to grasp the truly radical
 implications which necessarily flowed from stripping the absolutes of
 theodicy from an increasingly instrumental consciousness, Nietzsche
 went to his death noting that as a philosopher "born posthumously"
 his intimations of the gathering storm of nihilism would be the
 historical inheritance of generations not yet born.

 Equally, Max Weber, Germany's leading social theorist during the
 fateful storm years preceding the Weimar Republic was perhaps the
 first to grasp deeply into his thought what it meant to live in the
 shadows of Nietzsche's prophecy. When Weber wrote so chillingly about
 the approaching "disenchantment" of the modern age populated by
 "specialists without spirit," he was only echoing in the language of
 social theory the image of impoverished (technological) being first
 glimpsed by Nietzsche. But it was left to another writer, the tragic
 sensibility of Albert Camus, to produce the capstone of the vision of
 technology as destiny that was the modern century. For Camus, modern
 subjectivity is the historical product of two great revolts of the
 human spirit: not only Nietzsche's metaphysical rebellion against the
 sovereignty of the sacred; but also a more explicitly violent, and
 necessarily, historical rebellion in the name of ideology. With a
 sense of the indeterminacy of an absurd universe always proximate to
 his political consciousness, Camus was in effect the last Nietzsche.
 In Camus' writings, Nietzsche's dark vision of modern subjectivity as
 a melancholic mixture of active ressentiment and passive nihilism was
 summed up into a searing literary account of the human price to be
 paid for the age of absolute ideology with its cleansing drive to
 purity without limits and justice without reason -- state systematic,
 state-sponsored mass murder, and a culture of exuberant, populist
 irrationality.

 After the prophetic visions of Nietzsche, Weber and Camus, the
 politics of technological secularism have generally been translated
 into the sanitizing language of liberal pluralism. Perhaps mindful of
 these earlier warnings concerning the gathering technological
 darkness as it penetrates human subjectivity, a pragmatic political
 settlement of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ was quietly achieved: in
 effect, postponing the metaphysical crisis in human affairs unleashed
 by the eclipse of the gods by the practical expedient of splitting
 the question of science and religion. With religion secured in the
 confessional of private conscience and science increasingly assuming
 the position of sovereign arbiter of questions concerning power -- in
 technology, market capitalism, culture, and public policy -- the
 question of theodicy was safely bunkered in the quiet suburbs of
 private faith, leaving the "question of technology" to be the
 spearhead of western historical destiny. This was a perfect
 historical compromise which, if it didn't measure up to the soaring
 certainties of the language of the sacred, was, nonetheless, a
 powerful check on the violent excesses of absolute ideology. In
 retrospect, we might say that the twentieth-century was, at least in
 part, a long drawn out struggle between two fatefully opposing ideas
 -- absolute ideology and absolute technology -- both of which were
 posthumous products of Nietzsche's understanding of the death of god,
 and each of which was by definition a monism studiously unaware of
 its limits. For example, definitely more metaphysical than purely
 technological, the digital euphoria which marked the twilight days of
 the twentieth-century represented in hindsight the simultaneous
 cultural triumph of pure cybernetic reason and the eclipse of the
 sacred in human affairs.

 There the matter stood until, that is, the triumphant resurgence of
 god as the essence of twenty-first century political history.


 The Flat World of Technology Has Just Been Thrown a Religious Curve
 -------------------------------------------------------------------

 Viewed from a conventional progressive political perspective, the
 emergence of religious fundamentalism in contemporary politics
 represents a powerful reaction-formation against the forces of
 secular change, from the stresses accompanying technological
 innovation to the boundary disturbances in race, class, and gender
 variously symbolized under the signs of postmodernism first, and
 posthumanism later. In this scenario, the triumph of science, and
 with it the claims of reason, have provoked in their wake a powerful
 counter-reaction by those with the most to lose, whether materially
 or symbolically, by transgressions against the fixed borderlines of
 the dominant signs. While this thesis is chromatically illustrated by
 the division of the United States into a media psycho-geography of
 red and blue states, it also provides for a more global perspective,
 pitting, for example, the (digital) winners and losers of Thomas
 Friedman's persuasive mapping of _The World is Flat_ against a
 threatening world of religious fundamentalism, made all the more
 potent by the latter's contribution of suicide martyrs, sleeper
 cells, and other spectacular expressions of viral terrorism to the
 media spectacle. It is as if the most recidivist tendencies of the
 middle ages have mysteriously risen from the dead to prevent the
 creative technological blast of the twenty-first century.

 However, as with all tidy binary divisions of the world into two
 warring camps, this explanation has for all its compelling rhetorical
 force, the singular weakness of seriously misinterpreting the
 historical facts. For example, from country to country -- from the
 professional workplaces of the American middle class to the new
 economy software portals of India, Canada, Israel and Australia --
 adherents of evangelical politics often represent less the losers in
 the "flat world" of digital innovation than the leading professional
 classes of society. Coders, designers, teachers, doctors, lawyers,
 military leaders, politicians, policy experts: the born again world
 of evangelical politics knows no strict borderline of the human
 heart. Strictly agnostic in relationship to race, class and gender,
 the world of the born again represents, as all powerful religious
 movements before it, a sudden, irreversible, rupture in the fabric of
 human belief. Definitely not a counter-reaction in the traditional
 sense, evangelical politics can be so charismatic, circulating today
 so effortlessly at the highest levels of politics, economy, media,
 and the military, because its formative sensibility is not simply
 reactionary, but transformational. When religion reanimates the
 solitude of a single life as its source of informing passion then we
 are suddenly present at the shattering of the closed episteme of
 modernist rationality, with the emergence, again and again, of the
 much rebuked problem of salvation. Irrespective of its particular
 religious expression -- born again Christianity, Islamic
 fundamentalism, Israeli Zionism, Hindu fundamentalism -- the
 reappearance of passionate religious conviction, simultaneously and
 across so much of the globe, represents a decisive challenge to the
 dominant ontology of contemporary technological society. To Thomas
 Friedman's enthusiastic, but ultimately dismal, vision of a flat
 digital world of cutthroat global economic competition, the ontology
 of salvation opens up just the opposite: a transcendent world of
 delirious intensity and life-affirming meaning -- in effect, a
 decidedly unflattened world involving individual participation in the
 deeper questions of life -- life and death, judgment and rapture.
 From Pentacostal Inuits and Born Again Christians in the heartland of
 American empire to the fast currents of Islamic Jhihad, the problem
 of salvation is the dominant singularity haunting the twenty-first
 century.


 Faith-Based IT
 ---------------

 Consequently, the question: Why in the opening moments of the
 twenty-first century has what might be described as the cosmological
 compromise between the privatization of religious worship and an
 increasingly secularized global political economy been so abruptly
 pushed aside in favor of the resurrection of evangelical politics
 which paradoxically, rather than warring with the spirit of
 informatics, allies itself at a fundamental level with the historical
 project of the will to technology? Why, that is, is it possible to
 speak today about the rapid emergence of faith-based information
 technology as the spearhead of power, specifically the power of
 American empire? Could it be that under the double pressure of
 increasingly technological forms of secularism which inject elements
 of uncertainty, indeterminacy and undecidability into the posthuman
 condition, and the rapid emergence of right-wing expressions of
 religious fundamentalism anxious to transform essentially theological
 visions into global political projects, the mask of secular culture
 has been quickly stripped away, revealing underneath not so much the
 return of a recidivist religious past but something different,
 something more ominous and ethically disturbing -- the resurrection
 of god as the spearhead of the technological future. Contrary to
 liberal-humanist ambitions which privileged the necessary opposition
 of reason and faith, is the second coming of god the final heir of
 the legacy of Enlightenment? Is the last ruse of the triumph of the
 age of reason that it was god after all who has been waiting all this
 time, patiently and not without a sense of humor, as the varied drama
 of the posthuman comedy rode the beam of (digital) light to a
 technological future fused with the energies of faith-based politics?
 It may well turn out out that god never really died but has only been
 endlessly deferred by the hubris of Enlightenment.

 Consider the following example. As the dynamic spearhead of the will
 to technology, the United States has resurrected the traditions of
 imperial empire not in opposition to faith-based politics, but
 precisely because its evangelical fusion of the textologies of reason
 and faith, from Sunday pulpits of bible readings to prayer meetings
 in the suburbs, boardrooms, and fields of sport and entertainment,
 has in the ambitious ideology of the _Project for the New American
 Century_ globalized the unique fusion of faith and technocracy that
 is what we have come to know as the civil religion behind the
 American dream. Governed by a Republican Party which declares itself
 to be one with god in the form of Christian fundamentalism, its
 public policy increasingly faith-based, its machinery of cyber-war
 intent on mapping an essentially cosmological vision of good and evil
 onto the skin of an unruly global village, the United States projects
 into history a new code of informatics: one which finds no essential
 difference between the ancient cosmology of Christian fundamentalism
 and the posthuman instrumentalism of cyberculture.

 And not only the United States. Until recently, Indian politics has
 been dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a party of Hindu
 fundamentalism bitterly opposed to the warring cosmologies of Muslim
 and Christian faiths. Less a counter-reaction than something
 fundamentally new in political history, the BJP was most strikingly
 the author of India's pro-informatics movement: the _India Shining
 Movement_. Hindu fundamentalist on one side and actively allied with
 the global networks of the technocratic class on the other, the BJP,
 in a way which is remarkably similar to the Pentagon's _Project for
 the New American Century_, represents a fusion of cosmology and
 secularism, this time in the monistic vernacular of Hindu
 fundamentalism. Equally, how to explain the essentially faith-based
 politics of contemporary Israel which has about it the historical
 singularity of fusing Zionism with the technological
 instrumentalities of cyberwar, seamlessly collapsing the ancient
 religious energies of messianic Judaism into the deployment of
 leading-edge informatics, including war, medicine, agriculture and
 aerospace. Finally, although nomadic, stateless, without fixed
 territory or officially authorized context, Islamic fundamentalism
 with its origins in the fundamentalist doctrines of the Wahibi sect,
 is deeply implicated in global networks of informatics. Working in
 the language of viral terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism reverses the
 logic of power against itself. Confronted with the predatory power of
 globalization, Al-Qaeda adopts the viral strategy of the parasite:
 seeking to move undetected within the circulatory systems of the
 social, silently embedding itself in the form of sleeper cells in the
 body politic, making missiles of civilian aircraft, always aiming for
 maximal effect in the specular universe of the mass media.

 If we were only speaking about the second coming of god as an alibi
 for the formation of powerful right-wing coalitions, that would be
 both simpler, and certainly more comfortable in terms of the
 dialectics of modernism. But this is different. Definitely not a
 counter-reaction to the loss of an irrecoverable religious past, the
 cosmological projects of the _Project for the New American Century_,
 the _India Shining Movement_, the eschatological ambitions of the
 Likud, and what one commentator has described as the "Islamofascism"
 of the Wahibi sect represent, each in its own way, the spearhead of
 the technological future. Drawing from leading elements, sometimes
 disaffected, of the technocratic class, working within, and against,
 the discourse of globalization, faith-based politics is perfectly
 allied with the dynamic unfolding of the will to technology. Basing
 its economic hopes now on the possibility of outsourcing code work
 for the virtual class and, in the future, projecting the creation of
 a distinctively Indian virtual class, the BJP spearheaded the project
 of informatics in the Indian imaginary. So too in the cases of
 faith-based politics in the United States and Israel.  In the former,
 evangelical belief can fuse so easily with the missionary
 consciousness of American empire precisely because religious faith
 provides the historical project of armed globalization with a renewed
 sense of purpose, a goal, a self-validating belief in its own moral
 rectitude. Having achieved maximal velocity in the 1990s with the
 virtualization of global political economy, could it be that in the
 21st century informatics, moving at the speed of light, is itself
 tracing a fatal curvature, arching backwards to a fateful reencounter
 with its originating religious ambitions? In the latter, the
 messianic dreams of Likud steeled in the burning fires of monistic
 moral politics are less the past of a forgotten politics than one
 possible future of a rearmed (Israeli) technological future. If the
 story of informatics is, in essence, metaphysical, having more to do
 with the "question of willing" than with the triumph of the code;
 then the resurgence of faith-based politics in technocratic form has
 everything to with relieving the fatal absence at the heart of
 informatics: namely substituting abolute theodicy for the necessary
 uncertainty, undecidibility and indeterminacy of technological
 willing. Fatigued with the imminent stresses of its historical
 project, bored with its logic of triumphalism, and perhaps alarmed at
 its own nihilism, the will to technology yearns to relieve itself of
 the burden of undecidability. Ironically, cybernetics, etymologically
 the language of the steersman, wants a goal, a purpose, a direction.
 In the political form of the BJP, Likud and evangelical American
 Republicanism, the will to technology cloaks itself in its own
 resurrection-effect. The will to technology welcomes the second
 coming of god as shelter from the posthuman storm of its own making.
 And al-Qaeda? It represents a fatal curvature in the logic of
 informatics: that point where the open field of IT as the ruling host
 is suddenly invaded by the counter-logic of viral terrorism, its
 circulatory systems reversed against itself, its data streams
 infected with fear, its "chokepoints" invitations to viral
 penetration, and consequently, increasingly armed bunkers of
 surveillance.


 The Double Cone Theory of the Propagation of (Political) Light
 --------------------------------------------------------------

      Everything's relative. Speed, mass, space and time are all
      subjective. Nor are age, motion or the wanderings of the planets
      measures that humans can agree on anymore; they can be judged
      only by the whim of the observer. Light has weight. Space has
      curves. And coiled within a pound of matter, any matter, is the
      explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT. We know all this, we
      are set adrift in this way at the end of the 20th century,
      because of Albert Einstein.

                 -- Frank Pelligrini, ~The Time 100,~ March 29, 1999

 The alliance between the second coming of god and IT is not
 understandable in the modernist, which is to say Newtonian,
 certainties of absolute time and absolute space. Perhaps more than we
 realize, we are now living out the radical implications of quantum
 mechanics first stipulated by Einstein's Special Theory of
 Relativity. What was originally presented as a decisive overturning
 of the dominant scientific discourse of Newtonian physics has now
 become the cultural physics of the posthuman condition. Quite
 literally, the lasting lesson of the historical project of
 informatics has been to map the speed of light onto our bodies,
 economy, politics, culture, entertainment and religion. We live now
 in the universe of the special theory of political relativity where
 power accelerating at the speed of light reaches its maximal
 velocity, distance expands, gains (ideological) weight, and just as
 suddenly reverses, time-traveling to the supposed past of religion
 and mythology. In this new universe of political relativity,
 light-through power is both wave and particle, globalization is
 another name for the spacetime fabric of electronic politics, only
 opposites exist simultaneously, and the "science fiction" of
 wormholes and warp speed becomes the normal political reality of
 power, which under the influence of informatics, approximates the
 cultural physics of the Special Theory of Relativity. In the century
 which followed the rebellion against the Newtonian episteme that was
 constituted in all of its intellectual daring by the Special Theory
 of Relativity, the symbolic iconography of absolute space and
 absolute time has dissolved into a more fluid field of 'worldlines'
 and 'wormholes' and 'spactime fabrics,' and light that slows down and
 distances that shrink, and sometimes stretch, the greater the
 acceleration of the universe.

 Thinking about the radiating matter of religious fundamentalism
 seemingly everywhere now which has suddenly reappeared from the
 supposedly buried past to form the essence of the unfolding
 (technological) future, I know that physicists today privilege the
 "double cone" theory of the propagation of light waves: namely that
 the immense whirlpool of black holes populating the spacetime fabric
 of the universe are accompanied by corresponding white holes --
 singularities through which the light-through past slipstreams
 through to the future riding the beam of light. And I speculate:
 Could it be that history today is not understandable in the Newtonian
 terms of absolute time and absolute space, but should be reconceived
 as a unitary fabric of spacetime, where the light-time and
 light-space of power moving at the speed of Einstein's Special Theory
 of Relativity can be stretched and bent and reversed and twisted? And
 if this is the case, then why cannot we think of the fabric of
 political spacetime as filled with galactic singularities: intense
 centers of centrifugal political energy, such as ancient religious
 cosmologies, which suck the passing matter of politics, identity,
 culture, and society into the dark immensity of the act of faith?
 Myth breaks through into history. Religious fervor renews its long
 forgotten affiliation with the art of politics. Understood through
 the prism of Einstein, immensely dense blackholes of religious belief
 follow worldlines which burst into the future through corresponding
 whiteholes of technocratic ideology. Having reached its maximal
 velocity with the triumph of the virtual class in the 1990s, the
 speed of light-through power instantly reverses course, slows down,
 goes backward, double-cones its way into that more abiding source of
 energy: religious faith. Which is not to say that ancient religious
 epiphanies suddenly appear on the technocratic horizon as images of a
 faded, idealized past, but as immensely energetic religious projects
 intending to get it right this time. No longer the separation of
 Church and State, but wormholing religious cosmology directly into
 the eye of power, hooking theology to the unfolding spacetime fabric
 of the future. Viral, recombinant, creative, powerful, essentially
 religious eschatologies such as the _Project for the New American
 Century_, _India Shining_, and dreams of a New Jerusalem are
 variations on a common theme: the resurrection in the distinctively
 posthuman vernacular of IT of the vision of the Second City of God,
 this time in alliance, as in the American situation, with the New
 Rome. In the contemporary historical epoch, conservative discourse is
 intent on getting it right: the Christian project as the essence of
 the New Rome -- taking over the reins of government, infiltrating the
 administration of public policy, filling the airwaves with the
 Christian project of historical redemption masked as "war on
 terrorism", installing evangelical Christians in key positions of
 executive power, and using every instrument of IT in support of the
 creation of the new surveillance state. In the Einsteinian spacetime
 fabric of contemporary technoculture, mythic time breaks into
 historical space. And it is only now beginning: the first, tentative
 stages of recovering the missing mass of god on behalf of the project
 of technocracy.

 The historical project of technology generally, and the utopian
 revolution of information technology specifically, have always
 represented an extended period of mourning for that which has been
 lost in the rationalist triumph of modernism. We are at the end of a
 period of sacrifice which has had its own historical periodicity --
 Nietzsche, the first witness to the freshness of the sacrifice; the
 bountiful years of reaping the materialist rewards of splitting open
 the horizon; literally vivisecting earth, animals, planets, the
 common genetic heritage; and resequencing the sky, the body, gender,
 class and race with new codes of informatics. But for all its
 ecstasy, the project of technology remains a mourning ritual,  an
 indefinite deferral of the sacrificial absence at the core of the
 will to technology. Or perhaps something more psycho-ontological: a
 massive cultural displacement of the language of sacrificial absence
 -- the death of god -- into sublimated expressions of the will to
 technology. In this case, the language of seduction is the wormhole
 between the rationality of the sign and the forbidden language of
 symbolic exchange. Sexual puritanism is haunted by the spectre of
 debauchery. Violence is instantly undermined by the slightest trace
 of peace which is why, for example, military machineries so deeply
 fear the reappearance of the symbolic language of peace in the form
 of human rights workers, nuns and priests spilling vials of their own
 blood on the awesome silence of missile silos, or student protesters
 at the School of the Americas in Georgia who were arrested recently
 for reenacting rituals of mourning for victims of death squads. So
 too, the modern project of technology began with a primal symbolic
 murder -- the death of god. In the curious, but predictable,
 mythology of the sign, it is the absence marked by this sacrificial
 act of genocide which haunts the story of technology, and, on behalf
 of which, information technology once released threw the
 light-through physics of the Einsteinian universe, draws closer,
 almost irresistibly, to the tangible sign of its missing origin: the
 primal act of religious faith. When the missing mass of god touches
 the full spectrum dominance of cyberculture then we are suddenly
 launched into the closed universe of posthumanism, into a strange
 spacetime fabric which is simultaneously mythic and historical, past
 and future, technocratic and religious.

 Paradoxically for all its technological pretensions, the twenty-first
 century is coded by all the signs of _Born Again Ideology_, from the
 "cosmological compromise" in its past to the "twisted strands" of
 religion and technology in the controlling rhetoric of American
 empire. While Nietzsche could only think posthumously about a future
 time oscillating between passive and suicidal nihilism, our present
 time, this specific historical epoch, witnesses the gathering storm
 and offers its theoretical diagnosis: The American Republic moving at
 the speed of light towards the gathering shadows of an ominous
 darkness.



 About the Author
 ----------------

 Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and
 Theory and Professor of Political Science at the University of
 Victoria, Canada. Co-editor of _CTheory_ and Director of the Pacific
 Centre for Technology and Culture (www.pactac.net), he is the author
 of numerous books on technology and culture, including _The Possessed
 Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern_, _Data Trash: The
 Theory of the Virtual Class_ (with M. Weinstein), and _The Will to
 Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche and
 Marx_.