"Flame Wars," the verbal firefights that take place between disembodied combatants on electronic bulletin boards, remind us that our interaction with the world is increasingly mediated by computers. Bit by digital bit we are being "Borged," as devotees of Star Trek: The Next Generation would have it—transformed into cyborgian hybrids of technology and biology through our ever more frequent interaction with machines, or with one another through technological interfaces. The subcultural practices of the "incurably informed," to borrow the cyberpunk novelist Pat Cadigan’s coinage, offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us will be part-time residents in virtual communities. Yet, as the essays in this expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly confirm, there is more to fringe computer culture than cyberspace. Within these pages, readers will encounter flame warriors; new age mutant ninja hackers; technopagans for whom the computer is an occult engine; and William Gibson’s "Agrippa," a short story on software that can only be read once because it gobbles itself up as soon as the last page is reached. Here, too, is Lady El, an African American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg; devotees of on-line swinging, or "compu-sex"; the teleoperated weaponry and amok robots of the mechanical performance art group, Survival Research Laboratories; an interview with Samuel Delany, and more. Rallying around Fredric Jameson’s call for a cognitive cartography that "seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of place in the global system," the contributors to Flame Wars have sketched a corner of that map, an outline for a wiring diagram of a terminally wired world. Contributors . Anne Balsamo, Gareth Branwyn, Scott Bukatman, Pat Cadigan, Gary Chapman, Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Mark Dery, Julian Dibbell, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Pauline, Peter Schwenger, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer "[C]onsistently smart and bold in its analysis. . . . [I]t will make you conscious of the many assumptions you bring to understanding this new cultural space, as well as make you aware of the complex of ideas that have combined in the making of a more general cyberculture." --Don Palm, "H-Net Book Reviews" "Like it or not, we are becoming a culture more and more entwined in new electronic media. To be a well-informed and culturally aware person you need to start thinking about how our society relates to these media. "Flame Wars" is a great place to start." --Caius van Nauhuys, "Whole Earth Review" "Most [cybercrit] is pure hype. "Flame Wars" is different. "Flame Wars" is better. "Flame Wars" is like jacking into the heart of microprocessor darkness itself, like online surfing the Net Edge of the postmodern tidal wave. . . . Let the flame wars burn." --Andrew Leonard," The Bay Guardian" ""Flame Wars" . . . connects the dots of cyberculture's pixilated universe."--"Voice Literary Supplement" Mark Dery is a cultural critic whose writings on technology and fringe culture have appeared in t he New York Times , Rolling Stone , Wired , and Mondo 2000 . Flame Wars The Discourse of Cyberculture By Mark Dery Duke University Press Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-1540-7 Contents FLAME WARS, NEW AGE MUTANT NINJA HACKERS: READING MONDO 2000, TECHGNOSIS, MAGIC, MEMORY, AND THE ANGELS OF INFORMATION, AGRIPPA, OR, THE APOCALYPTIC BOOK, GIBSON'S TYPEWRITER, VIRTUAL SURREALITY: OUR NEW ROMANCE WITH PLOT DEVICES, CHAPTER 14, SYNNERS, FEMINISM FOR THE INCURABLY INFORMED, SEX, MEMORIES, AND ANGRY WOMEN, BLACK TO THE FUTURE: INTERVIEWS WITH SAMUEL R. DELANY, GREG TATE, AND TRICIA ROSE, COMPU-SEX: EROTICA FOR CYBERNAUTS, A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE: OR, HOW AN EVIL CLOWN, A HAITIAN TRICKSTER SPIRIT, TWO WIZARDS, AND A CAST OF DOZENS TURNED A DATABASE INTO A SOCIETY, VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AND THE EMERGENCE OF SYNTHETIC REASON, SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES PERFORMS IN AUSTRIA, TAMING THE COMPUTER, GLOSSARY, INDEX, NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS, CHAPTER 1 MARK DERY FLAME WARS Flame wars, in compu-slang, are vitriolic online exchanges. Often, they are conducted publicly, in discussion groups clustered under thematic headings on electronic bulletin boards, or—less frequently—in the form of poison pen letters sent via E-mail to private mailboxes. John A. Barry's definition of "flame" (n., v.) as "a (usually) electronic diatribe" suggests that such exchanges occasionally take place off-line, although denizens of computer networks are putatively PC junkies and hence likely to prefer virtual invective to FTF (on-line shorthand for "face-to-face") tongue-lashings. Then, too, the wraithlike nature of electronic communication—the flesh become word, the sender reincarnated as letters floating on a terminal screen—accelerates the escalation of hostilities when tempers flare;