Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Digital Superdigitalism

Pointing to the screen--a show on the rainforest--my buddy said, "I'm glad we have TV to remember nature for us." I thought of the lovely first line of Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." [1]   In a world where technology sets the terms for our experience of nature, what are we to make of lines like, "One impulse from a vernal wood," etc.? [2]   Rank nostalgia. Nature has dissolved into the technologies that represent, interrogate, and preserve it. The Human Genome Project digitizes Geist. In the future Wordsworth will be a holographic theme park.

Notes

1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 3.

2. William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned," Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 107.

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