Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismJack In!Jacked in to cyberspace, Case, console cowboy hero of William Gibson's Neuromancer, escapes incarceration. [1] Literally. Cogito ergo sum: I jack therefore I am. The carcass (note etymology) Case leaves behind is merely meat. It lives, it feels, it weeps, but pointlessly. Jacking in eviscerates humanity: the body's an envelope, a skin suit, a tumor in the neural net. [2] Is flesh obsolescing? Ask Don Juan, not me. Notes1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York, Ace: 1984). 2. For a fantasia of the post-embodied future in which changing bodies is as banal if not quite as easy as changing clothes, see Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon (New York: Del Rey, 2002). Navigation |