Introduction: Escape Velocity
Escape Velocity Excerpts | Published on October 12, 2004
"Escape velocity" is the speed at which a body—a spacecraft, for instance—overcomes the gravitational pull of another body, such as the Earth.
More and more, cyberculture seems as if it is on the verge of attaining escape velocity in the philosophical as well as the technological sense.
It abounds in sublime visions of a "posthuman" apotheosis that will deliver us from the human condition, into prosthetic godhood. The body is obsolete, declares the cybernetic performance artist Stelarc; he envisions a "pan-planetary physiology" for the spacefaring cyborg, its brawn augmented with robotic hardware, its brainpower boosted with computer chips. Going further, the roboticist Hans Moravec dreams of "downloading" our minds into computer memory and disposing of our dead meat altogether.
Transferred to a deep space probe, a disembodied consciousness could explore the cosmos, drifting lazily into infinity.
Spun from sci-fi mysticism, New Age millenarianism, and human potential pep talk, the rhetoric of escape velocity promises an escape from history, gravity, even mortality. It is a hymn to progress and a transport of rapture—an end-of-the-century deus ex machina that crosses cyberpunk science fiction with the pentecostal belief in an apocalyptic Rapture, in which history ends and true believers are lifted into the parting clouds.
But placing our faith in a cyber-Rapture is a risky endgame at a time when the problems all around us clamor for immediate solutions. Posthumanist visions of the mind unbound and the Earth dwindling to a pinpoint in our rear-view mirror leave social responsibility behind, on the launch pad; they ignore the depredation of Nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses. As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and social rupture, between Disney's Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, we would do well to remember that—for the foreseeable future, at least—we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The misguided hope that we will be born again as "bionic angels," to quote the ‘90s cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus; it pins our future to wings of wax and feathers.
Posted by Mark Dery at October 12, 2004 02:16 PM |