{fh4FF0000The Hyper-Texted Body
{fb1C00000Nietzsche gets a modem
{fb1000000Why be nostalgic? The old body type was always OK, but the wired body with its micro flesh, multi-media channelled ports, cybernetic fingers, and bubbling neuro-brain finely interfaced to the "standard operating system" of the Internet is infinitely better. Not really the wired body of sci fi with its mutant designer look, or body flesh with its ghostly reminders of nineteenth century philosophy, but the hyper-texted body as both: a wired nervous system embedded in living (dedicated) flesh.
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The hyper-texted body with its dedicated flesh? That is our telematic future, and it's not necessarily so bleak. Technology has always been our sheltering environment: not second order nature, but primal nature for the twenty first century body. In the end, the virtual class is very old fashioned. It clings to an antiquated historical form, capitalism, and, on its behalf, wants to shut down the creative possibilities of the Internet. Dedicated flesh rebels against the virtual class. It does not want to be interfaced to the Net through modems and external software black boxes, but "actually wants to be an Internet". The virtual class wants to appropriate emergent technologies for purposes of authoritarian political control over cyberspace. It wants to drag technotopia back to the age of the primitive politics of predatory capitalism. But dedicated (geek) flesh wants something very different. Unlike the (typically European) rejection of technotopia in favour of a newly emergent nostalgia movement under the sign of "Back to Vinyl" in digital sound or "Back to Pencils" in literature, dedicated flesh wants to deeply instatiate the age of technotopia. Operating by means of the aesthetic strategy of over- identification with the feared and desired object, the hyper-texted body insists that ours is already the era of post- capitalism, and even post- technology. Taking the will to virtuality seriously, it demands its telematic rights to be a functioning interfaced body: to be a multi-media thinker, to patch BUS ports on its cyberflesh as it navigates the gravity well of the Internet, to create aesthetic visions equal to the pure virtualities found everywhere on the now superseded digital superhighway, and to become data to such a point of violent implosion that the body finally breaks free of the confining myth of "wired culture" and goes wireless.

The wireless body? That is the floating body, drifting around in the debris of technotopia: encrypted flesh in a sea of data. The perfect evolutionary successor to twentieth century flesh, the wireless body fuses the speed of virtualized exchange into its cellular structure. DNA coated data is inserted directly through spinal taps into dedicated flesh for better navigation through the treacherous shoals of the electronic galaxy. Not a body without memory or feelings, but the opposite. The wireless body is the battleground of the major political and ethical conflicts of late twentieth and early twenty first century experience
