Dery introduces the online world in a short history of its rather quick beginnings; from a long icubation period in the ARPA development stages, to the rapid development and interconnection of scores of smaller networks connecting themselves to the growing Internet.
Dery "explores the digital subcultures that both celebrate and critique our wired world: cyberpunks, technopagans, cyber-hippies, and rogue technologists, to name a few."
Poised, at the end of the century, between technological rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, fringe computer culture poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology be used as an engine of repression or a tool of empowerment in the coming millennium? (from the Web: http://www.well.com/user/markdery/ESCAPE/VELOCITY/index.html)
"Escape velocity" is the speed at which a body---a spacecraft, for instance---overcomes the gravitational pull of another body, such as the Earth.
Clearly, cyberculture is approaching escape velocity in the philosphical sense as well as the technological sense. It resounds with transcendentalist fantasies of breaking free from limits of any sort, metaphysical as well as physical....Increasingly, the musings of scientists, science fiction novelists, and futurologists are infected with a millenial mysticism. (Escape Velocity, p.8)
We want our stories to lead somewhere and come to a satisfying conclusion, even though not all do so. Placing our faith in an end-of-the-century deus ex machina that will obviate the need to confront the social, political, economic, and ecological problems clamoring for solutions is a risky endgame. The metaphysical glow that increasingly haloes the high-tech tomorrows of cyberdelic philosophers, corporate futurologists, pop science programs such as Discovery Channel's Beyond 2000, or even ads such as AT&T's "You Will" campaign, blinds us to the pressing concerns all around us. (Escape Velocity pp. 11-12)
But placing our faith in a cyber-Rapture is a risky endgame a 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 Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus; it pins our future to wings of wax and feathers. (Escape Velocity p.17)
I want to keep my own enthusiasm for this technology sobered with the realities of today, and keep alive what I think is a "healthy cynicism" about the penchancy of the human soul to slip into obsession with progress to the exclusion of many greater goods. This is not an "ends justifies the means" state of affairs. We must not repeat another experience of Babel. We are called in the task of building communication infrastructures to keep our humanity about us; to keep the rest of the world in view and in our plans.