Thanatopography

This chapter describes thanatopography as the drawing of a map of death, not the writing of a death. When new technologies respatialize the world, thanatopography teaches that they do so not because they construct a communicative network but instead because they build and distribute sites of machinic killing. In discussing Norbert Wiener's insistence on seeing the planet as a world of Belsen and Hiroshima, thanatopography pares back the presumed connection between technology and humanity, exposing something quite frightening underneath the network. A vision of the world that presumes no common similarities among people and peoples is a vertiginous vision that must see shared connections among extant technologies, not only telecommunication and computation but also war, racism, and dehumanizing labor. Communal responsibility and mutual obligation survive amid such technologies as ethical codes that negotiate difference rather than attempting to transcend it. But they also require a reckoning with very real legacies of twentieth-century machines. In place of the smooth-functioning global network, thanatopography offers a spatio-temporal figuration of mass death.

Distortion

This chapter talks about distortion as a form of dismantling. It describes distortion as the historical and theoretical technique by which readers learn to approach political documents as if they were science fiction. When considered as a vehicle of distortion, literature is measured for its potential to alter exploitative conditions, like those of war, patriarchy, and racism. The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany insists that transformative change takes shape neither in utopian nor in dystopian visions of the future, but rather in efforts toward significant distortion of the present. This attitude, which is also a theory and practice of literature, is one way to describe the inheritance of cyberculture in the works of writers and activists who employed speculative language to repurpose the thought of Alice Mary Hilton and the Ad Hoc Committee. These writers and activists focused not on the machines that would unveil the myth of scarcity, but instead isolate the forms of human life and relation that would follow the act of unveiling.

Introduction

This chapter introduces critical and literary tools for prying apart presumptions about the centrality of technology to culture. It talks about what thinking can do and what it tried to do in order to enrich and enable the emancipatory critique of technology. It describes what spoken and written language have contributed to the transformation or destruction of reactionary institutions and ideas. The chapter emphasizes against the forms of exploitation identified with machines, or with some machines but not all, or with machinic thought and the becoming-machine of laboring bodies. It explains why “dismantling” is used to describe a way of reading with roots in a particular period of literary and theoretical production, the decade and a half before 1980, which historians of labor call the Long Seventies.

Cyberculture

This chapter begins by discussing the interconnection of transformations in cybernetics (automation), weaponry (the atomic bomb), and human rights (antiblack racism). It focuses on cyberculture that was coined by Alice Mary Hilton and then extended conceptually and politically by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. The Ad Hoc committee, in 1964, mailed a letter to Lyndon Johnson, explaining that an expansion of industrial automation might result in an alleviation of racism and war. With a luminous gang of signatories, this letter represents a mere precursor to contemporary accelerationist movements. Yet in its more immediate effects, not as an endorsement of accelerated automation but instead as a critique of technologized violence. The chapter ends with a theory of cyberculture, which reveals something beyond accelerated automation.