Bio (Short Version)
Mark Dery is a cultural critic. Time magazine called him one of "the smartest people we know." (Praise so staggeringly over-the-top that even the Smartest Kid in the World would collapse under the strain of trying to live up to it!) Bruce Sterling wrote, "He may be the best cultural critic alive." Dery writes about media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture. He is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996). He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), the anthology that inaugurated cyberstudies as an academic field and kick-started the academic interest in techno-feminism and black technoculture (through Dery's trailblazing essay "Black to the Future," in which he coined the term "Afrofuturism"). His 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement. Widely republished on the Web, "Culture Jamming" remains the definitive theorization of this subcultural
phenomenon. He teaches media criticism and literary journalism in the Department of Journalism at New York University.
Long Version
Mark Dery is a cultural critic. Time magazine called him one of "the smartest people we know." (Praise so hopelessly inflated even The Smartest Kid in the World would collapse under the strain of living up to it!) Bruce Sterling wrote, "He may be the best cultural critic alive." Dery writes about media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture. He is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996). He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), the anthology that inaugurated cyberstudies as an academic field and kick-started the academic interest in techno-feminism and black technoculture (through Dery's trailblazing essay "Black to the Future," in which he coined the term "Afrofuturism"). His 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement. Widely republished on the Web, "Culture Jamming" remains the definitive theorization of this subcultural
phenomenon. He teaches media criticism, cultural reporting, and literary journalism in the Department of Journalism at New York University.
Dery has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly (online), The Washington Post, Lingua Franca, Rolling Stone, Spin, Salon, Wired, ID, Dwell, Print, and The Village Voice, among others. He has written columns for several national magazines, most recently "Invisible Lit," which ran for several years in Bookforum. His radio commentaries have been featured on the nationally syndicated program "Radio Nation." He is a frequent lecturer in the United States and overseas, where his talks have taken him to the UK, Germany, Italy, Finland, Macedonia, Chile, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Australia.
In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine.
He teaches media criticism in the Department of Journalism at New York University.
Long, long ago, in a universe far, far away, he pulled off a passable impersonation of a male Patti Smith during his brief-lived career as a performance poet. Since 1985, he has collaborated with the composer/multi-instrumentalist Darren Smith as one half of the music/spoken word duo Bite the Wax Tadpole.)
Personal Statement
Thoughts on the Scribbling Trade
"'I like the idea that everything has a surface, which hides much more underneath,' [David Lynch] has said. 'I go down in that darkness and see what's there.' Beneath the surface of this quotidian American dreamworld lies voyeurism, violence, sadomasochism, sexual agression—perhaps only a sleeping character's nightmare, or perhaps, for Lynch, the authentic American dream." — Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America
"[T]he only way to escape from the abyss is to look at it, measure it, sound its depths and go down into it." — Cesare Pavese
In my dreams, I write a politicized cultural criticism that combines the diamond-hard style of J.G. Ballard or Paul Bowles; the acid-drip wit of Swift, Bierce, Mencken, Twain (Twain the cynic and atheist scourge of god-botherers, not Twain the Pepperidge Farm grandpa of Disney imagineering), William S. Burroughs, or Gore Vidal (at his best); and the political conscience of Mike Davis or Stuart Ewen.
I'm deeply committed to a progressive politics whose calls for social justice, economic equality, and environmental action are founded on a tough-minded critique of the catastrophic effects of multinational capitalism and ruling class's toxic level of contempt for the working stiffs. (Is that pompously high-minded enough? Am I ready for Dissent?)
At the same time, I'm down with the postmodern emphasis on cultural politics (as opposed to the old New Left emphasis on political economy). The intertwined histories of feminism, the civil rights movement, multiculturalism, and gay, bi-, and transgender activism remind us that hacking the symbolic code that runs the hardware of political and economic power is crucially important, too. In that light, I'm naive enough to believe that ideas matter and that intellectual activism can, in its own small way, be an engine of social change.
That said, I'm as weary of the politicization of aesthetics as I'm wary of the aestheticization of politics. The Walter Benjamin in me is trying to make peace with my inner Georges Bataille. Politically, I'm alarmed by the erosion of civil liberties during John Ashcroft's reign of terror, made manifest in the Patriot Act and the extrajudicial incarceration of "enemy aliens"; by the apocalyptic blowback brought on by America's disastrously misguided foreign policy; and by the increasingly nasty, brutish nature of our times--terrorists yelling "God is great!" (without a hint of irony) as they decapitate an American hostage, soul-sickening footage of gleeful Iraqi kids kicking the severed head of an American security contrator, nauseating images of an American G.I. leading a naked Iraqi prisoner around on a leash. There's guilt enough to go around. Meanwhile, back in American Empire, hostilities are escalating in the culture wars, from the fundamentalist fatwah against "secular humanism" and all its works and ways to the neocon jihad against liberalism. And the right-wing elite's war against popular democracy continues unabated, with tax relief for the wealthy, the defunding of public education, the downsizing of social services, the growth of the prison industry, and the upspike in federal incarcerees, thanks to ever more draconian sentencing laws. Here, in Fortress America, where gas is cheap but as then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer helpfully reminded us, "Americans...need to watch what they say, watch what they do," there's a spreading sense that the two-party system is a sop for the masses, a perception triple-underscored by the 2000 presidental vote-counting debacle. The real Powers That Be are the corporate contributors who underwrite campaigns and, as Dick Cheney's backroom deals with energy companies remind us, write legislation. Bush to Masses: Shut up and Drive.
In sum, I'm hell-bent on throwing a glaring light on the subversion of participatory democracy by global capitalism and its bought-and-paid minions in government, and in humane alternatives to the jungle logic of the free market.
Aesthetically, however, I believe in the revolution of the mind. I'm committed to the politics of political incorrectness--thinking the unthinkable and speaking the unspeakable, the bad thoughts and bad words that outrage the mind police at both ends of the ideological spectrum, whether the pitchfork-and-bible brigade on the flat-earth far right or the dissent-stifling Stalinists on the Dworkinite far left. I'm drawn to the unlit corners of society, the nethermost regions of the self: freaks, forensic pathology, true crime, conspiracy theory, cannibalism, madness, medical museums, Art Brut, weird science, sexual deviance, soft tissue modification (by tribal peoples and postmodern primitives), creature features, alien abductions, insects, Situationism, Surrealism, science fiction, the gothic, the grotesque, the carnivalesque--in short, extremes and excess of every sort. I want to induce, in my reader, the vertigo that comes from leaning too far over the edge of the cultural abyss.
—Mark Dery
Selected Interviews
"The Culture Jammer," an Austin Chronicle interview on the occasion of my keynote lecture at the 2003 "Games Without Borders" videogame and videogame theory conference at UT Austin.
"PostFuture Shock," a wide-ranging, off-the-beaten-path interview with Roy Christopher, editor of the brutally cool Front Wheel Drive.
"Vive la presse," a spirited (if somewhat linguistically fractured) Q&A with me, conducted for a rough-around-the-edges but intellectually combative little Parisian start-up called Verity. I'm in Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth-Mike Davis/Ecology of Fear eco-pocalyptic Jeremiah mode, in the last half of this.
"The Road Ahead," a Time magazine roundtable consisting of me, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Tim O'Reilly, and...Moby. The number of column inches each of us got correlated, unsurprisingly, with the number of weeks we'd been on the bestseller list...or not. Worth a glance.
"Loving the Alien," San Diego CityBeat editor Kelly Davis's short, drily funny interview-cum-introduction to an excerpt from my book-in-progress.
My Dinner with Dery," an almost unbearably hilarious Orange County Weekly column by Rebecca Schoenkopf, inspired by one of my lectures at UC Irvine during my time there as the Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow, in January 2000.
"Building a Progressive, Pragmatic Futurism: An E-mail Interview with Mark Dery" a provocative, in-depth interview from 1996, with the always insightful cultural critic and Net theorist Geert Lovink. Later included in Lovink's Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia.
"Mind to Mind with Mark Dery," a 1996 interview about Escape Velocity with the estimable Howard Rheingold, futurist, technoculture critic, and the Charlie Rose of online interviews.
"Peering into the Global Meta-Mind," an interview with The Boston Phoenix.
"What About Cyberdelia?" In 1996, someone actually cared. Mark Dery and R.U. Sirius take it to the mat in HotWired's long-defunct "Brain Tennis" debate forum.