Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Hack the Wetware!

"Wintermute calling, Case. It's time we talked." [1]   Information hacks back. It's one thing to hack software, another thing entirely to hack wetware. Rewire the organism. That's what Wintermute, the luridly ubiquitous AI in Neuromancer, attempts--and achieves. It hacks its way into flesh, inspiring movements, coercing futures. It's what Blake attempts too ("Britons Awake!")--and achieves. [2]   It's what we should attempt by imagining a technologically advanced Romanticism: hacking our way onto the textual continuum, digitizing to hack the wetware. Our bodies need new tolerances, threshholds, parameters of performance. New wetware for the new forms of life, the digital life of information.

Notes

1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 109.

2. See Blake's "Jerusalem," The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly rev. ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988).

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