From The _South Atlantic Quarterly_ 92:4, Fall 1993 Copyright (c) by Duke University Press Placed online with the author's permission Please do not reproduce, reprint, repost, or recirculate _Flame Wars_, Mark Dery "Flame wars," in compu-slang, are vitriolic on-line 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"1 suggests that such exchanges occasionally take place offline, 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; disembodied, sometimes pseudonymous combatants tend to feel that they can hurl insults with impunity (or at least without fear of bodily harm). Moreover, E-mail missives or "posts" seem to encourage misinterpretation in the same way that written correspondence sometimes does. Like "snailmail" (compu-slang for conventional letters), electronic messages must be interpreted without the aid of nonverbal cues or what sociolinguist Peter Farb calls "paralanguage"---expressive vocal phenomena such as pitch, intensity, stress, tempo, and volume. The importance of body language is universally conceded, of course; books on the subject are staples of the supermarket check-out stand. Paralanguage, Farb writes, is no less essential to accurate reading: "No protestation by a speaker that he is uttering the truth is equal to the nonverbal confirmation of his credibility contained in the way he says it."2 Both, significantly, are missing from on-line, text- based interaction, which may account for the umbrage frequently taken at innocently-intended remarks. It accounts, too, for the cute use of punctuation to telegraph facial expressions. Here is a key for some commonly-used "emoticons," defined in _The New Hacker's Dictionary_ as "glyph[s]...used to indicate an emotional state" (read them sideways): :-) = smiley face; used to underscore a user's good intentions. :) or, less frequently, :} = variations on the same theme. ;-) = wink; used to indicate sardonic humor or a tongue-in-cheek quip ("nudge, nudge; wink, wink"). :( = sadness, sometimes used facetiously. Of course, no signalling system, as one "net surfer" observes, is fool-proof: Shit happens, especially on the Net, where everyone speaks with flattened affect. I think the attempt to signal authorial intent with little smileys is interesting but futile. They're subject to slippage like any other kind of sign. The bottom line is, anyone who plans to spend time on-line has to grow a few psychic calluses.3 Electronic notes, posted in group discussions, differ from hand- or typewritten letters in several significant ways. Like public bathroom graffiti, their authors are sometimes anonymous, often pseudonymous, and almost always strangers. Which is the upside of incorporeal interaction: a technologically-enabled, post- multicultural vision of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity, and other problematic constructions. On-line, users can float free of biological and sociocultural determinants, as least to the degree that their idiosyncratic language usage does not mark them as white, black, college-educated, a high-school drop-out, and so on. "There is no visual contact, no hearing of accents," said Wayne Gregori, a 35-year-old computer consultant who runs SFNet. "People are judged on the content of what they say."4 Posts are read and responded to by computer users scattered across the Internet, the global meta-network that comprises information services such as BITNET; the private, academic and government laboratories interwoven by NSFNET (the National Science Foundation Network); mainstream networks such as America Online and CompuServe; and smaller, more esoteric bulletin boards like San Francisco's WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and New York's MindVOX. (Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, once compared the Internet to a "library where all of the books are dumped on the floor in no particular order.")5 But unlike profundities scrawled on restroom stalls (which always seem, somehow, as if they belong on the walls of Pompeiian ruins), on- line conversations exhibit a curious half-life; as the reader scrolls downscreen, scanning the lively back-and-forth of a discussion that may go back weeks, months or even years, he experiences the puns, philippics, true confessions, rambling dissertations, and Generation X-er one-liners as if they were taking place in real time---which, for the reader watching them flow past on his screen, they are. On occasion, one might stumble onto a flame war, although verbal brawling lowers the tone of colloquia and is therefore frowned upon. In the WELL's _Mondo 2000_ conference, users take their disputes outside the topic, into the virtual version of the back alley---a topic-cum-boxing ring called "Flame Box," where they may roll up their sleeves and pummel each other witless. Witlessness, in fact, was the order of the day in the flame war I witnessed, where squabblers seemed to specialize in a baroque slackerbabble related to the mock-Shakespearean put-downs used by Alex on his droogies in _A Clockwork Orange_: "Look, you syphilitic bovine harpy," "You heaving purulent mammoth," "Get thine swampy effluvia away from me, you twitching gelatinous yolk of rancid smegma," and on, and on. "This standoff will probably end in Koreshian glory," predicted one user, with thinly-disguised relish. In some ways, flame wars are a less ritualized, cybercultural counterpart to the African-American phenomenon known as "the dozens," in which duelists one-up each other with elaborate, sometimes rhyming gibes involving the sexual exploits of each other's mothers. At their best, flame wars give way to tour-de- force jeremiads called "rants"---demented soliloquys which elevate soapbox demagoguery to a guerrilla art form. Characterized by fist-banging punctuation, emphatic capitals, and the kill-'em-all- and-let-God-sort-'em-out rhetoric patented by Hunter S. Thompson, rants are spiritual kin to Antonin Artaud's blasphemous screeds and the Vorticist harangues in Wyndham Lewis's _Blast_. Here is a classic, written by Erika Whiteway (a.k.a. "outrider"): Never give in, never submit. Or just never go out of your house anymore. In twenty years this will be Life: stay home all the time because it's too dangerous to go out/you can't eat red meat in public/or sugar either/or grease/and you damn sure can't smoke; get all stimuli, info, human contact, groceries, money, etc. on your computer. All materials will be delivered by heavily armed people in tanks: they must cross the moat filled with piranha, crocodiles, and weird water-borne disease organisms, and also pass the security check that keeps them from getting Swiss-cheesed by the remote control firepower in the gun turrets at the razorwire perimeter, then they have to pass the dna identity scanner at the last portal--and they absolutely refuse ALL TIPS AND GRATUITIES. After a pleasant meal of micronuked frozen blah, you can jump onto the Net and read the Daily Horros in the form of movingpicto-news; go to the library and download the original French version of Madame Bovary AND a decent French dictionary. Read in the comfort of your cozy warm bed, safe behind triple-wall steel constructed building. Pet your cat/dog. Clean your arsenal. Sleep. Dream of a more lifelike life...remember the olden days when you could walk outside in the Night and go places, when you could drive safely from here to there...go back to sleep.6 This special issue's title is intentionally ironic. The tone, as in most intellectual discourse, is decorous; there are no flame wars here, and no rants in the proper sense (although Tricia Rose's inspired peroration on feminist mothers as "the most dangerous muthafuckahs out there," with its call for "feminist women to have as much power and as many babies as they want to, creating universes of feminist children," comes close). Even so, the compu- slang title reminds us that our interaction with the world around us is increasingly mediated by computer technology, and that, 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. (According to Clark Fife, who works at New York's Forbidden Planet sci-fi bookstore and memorabilia shop, a cap-and-T-shirt set produced by a merchandiser to capitalize on the inexplicable appeal of the Borg---implacable _Star Trek_ villains who function as a "hive mind," or collective entity, and whose bleached flesh is interpenetrated by fetishistic high-tech prostheses---have proven wildly popular. The Borg are popular, says Fife, because they resonate with the cyberpunk sensibility and because "they're symbols of technological victimization that appeal to people." Simultaneously, their cultish following bespeaks a pervasive desire among sci-fi readers, _Star Trek_ fans, and other members of fringe technoculture to sheathe the body in an impenetrable carapace, render it invincible through mechatronic7 augmentation---a hypostasization, perhaps, of a creeping body loathing congruent with the growing awareness that wires are twined through all of our lives, that our collective future is written on confetti-sized flakes of silicon.) Jejune though they may seem, "flame wars" merit serious consideration; offering ample evidence of the subtle ways in which on-line group psychology is shaped by the medium itself, these subcultural practices offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture a few years from now, when ever greater numbers of Americans will be part-time residents in virtual communities. As Gareth Branwyn notes in "Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts," "the rate of growth for new computer networks joining the Internet is 25% _every three months_," an astonishing statistic that attests to the explosion of interest in electronic interconnectedness. Approximately 10 million people frequent electronic bulletin boards,8 and their ranks are growing by the score. A WELL employee told me, shortly after the appearance of _Time_ magazine's February 8, 1993 cover story on cyberpunk, that the bulletin board's population---already 3,000 strong---had swollen by several thousand more. "People call and ask, 'Is this the cyberspace?,'" he said. Indeed, it is---"the desert of the real," where the shreds of the territory, to invoke Baudrillard, "are slowly rotting across the map."9 Those who spend an inordinate amount of time connected by modem via telephone lines to virtual spaces often report a peculiar sensation of "thereness"; prowling from one conference to another, eavesdropping on discussions in progress, bears an uncanny resemblance to wandering the hallways of some labyrinthine mansion, poking one's head into room after room. "One of the most striking features of the WELL," observed a user named loca, "is that it actually creates a feeling of 'place.' I'm staring at a computer screen. But the feeling really is that I'm 'in' something; I'm some 'where.'"10 Virtual reality interfaces, facilitated by high-bandwidth information highways of the sort proposed by the Clinton administration, will concretize loca's "feeling of 'place'"; at last, there _will_ be a "there" there. Using current developments as a springboard, one might imagine users in head-tracking 3-D goggles, a quadrophonic sound system imbedded in the goggle's earpieces. As the user looks up, down, or from side to side, the computer's high-speed program animates the world---and its soundscape---accordingly, creating the illusion of a 360-degree, real-time hyperreality. Howard Rheingold completes the sensorium with the sense of touch, imagining high-tech bodystockings that "know" where their wearer's limbs are in space. The inner surfaces of these suits would be covered with an array of intelligent sensor-effectors---a mesh of tiny tactile detectors coupled to vibrators of varying degrees of hardness, hundreds of them per square inch, that can receive and transmit a realistic sense of tactile presence.11 Plugging into the global telephone network, the user connects with similarly-equipped individuals or groups. All appear to each other as believable fictions: lifelike characters inhabiting a three-dimensional environment. (Reality, here, is mutable, evoking Greg Tate's mock-serious vision of the defaced, re-faced Michael Jackson as "harbinger of a transracial tomorrow where genetic deconstruction has become the norm and Narcissism wears the face of all human Desire";12 gender, ethnicity, age and other variables can be altered with a keystroke or two.) "You run your hand over your partner's clavicle," imagines Rheingold, "and 6,000 miles away, an array of effectors [is] triggered, in just the right sequence, at just the right frequency, to convey the touch exactly the way you wish it to be conveyed."13 It must be noted, however, that virtual embodiment of the Rheingoldian sort is an early-to-mid-twenty-first-century technology. It would require a global fiberoptic network in concert with massively parallel supercomputers capable of monitoring and controlling the numberless sensors and effectors fitted to every hill and dale, plane and protuberance of the body's topography. Then, too, a reticulated fabric of safe, high-speed micro-vibrators is only a mirage, given the state of the art in current technologies. Nonetheless, there is more to cyberculture than cyberspace. Cyberculture, as I defined it in an earlier essay, is a farflung, loosely-knit complex of sublegitimate, alternative, marginal, and oppositional subcultures [whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities, often framed by radical body politics]...[Cyberculture is] divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, fringe science, avant-garde art, and pop culture.14 Fredric Jameson has noted the correspondence between cyberpunk novelist William Gibson's cyberspace---the sci-fi reification of what Jameson calls "the world space of multinational capital," where vast sums are blipped through fiberoptic bundles---and has called for a cognitive cartography, "a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system."15 A map of the increasingly virtual geography in which we find ourselves, suggests Jameson, is essential in "grasp[ing] our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain[ing] a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion."16 Compasses and sextants in hand, the writers in this collection embark on Jameson's project, mindful (if intuitively) of one WELL-dweller's corrective: This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation such as the WELL. (cf. Benjamin's "revolutionary literature;" on-line far supersedes the newspaper as a medium in which the reader is likely to also be the writer.) I really have no objection to someone who has come into our community, lived here and participated, analyzing [his] experience and trying to put it into perspective. I think the objection to the "critics" who are now fawning over cyberthis and cyberthat is that they are perceived as intellectual carpetbaggers who don't bother to learn the terrain before they create the map.17 - 30 - Acknowledgements: I am greatly indebted to Gareth Branwyn, a longtime resident of virtual communities and serious thinker about cyberculture. His many insights, articulated in lengthy conversations on- and offline, proved invaluable in the writing of this essay, as did his willingness to fact-check the finished work, sparing me the fate of the "intellectual carpetbagger." Endnotes 1 John A. Barry, _Technobabble_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 243. 2 Peter Farb, _Word Play_ (New York, 1975), 69. 3 Anonymous correspondent, in a private E-mail letter to the author, April 17, 1993. 4 Katherine Bishop, "The Electronic Coffeehouse," _The New York Times_, August 2, 1992, V3. 5 Robert E. Calem, "The Network of All Networks," _The New York Times_, December 6, 1992, F12. 6 Erika Whiteway, using the pseudonym "outrider," in the topic "Flame Box" in the _Mondo 2000_ conference, March 29, 1993. 7 The mirror image of "electromechanical," _mechatronic_ is a Japanese coinage meaning "the fusion of machinery and electronics"; it stresses the importance of the former in the equation. See Frederik L. Schodt, _Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia_ (New York, 1988), 42-43, 49. 8 Judith Berck, "All About Electronic Bulletin Boards," _The New York Times_, July 19, 1992, F12. 9 Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in _Simulations_ (New York, 1983), trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, 2. 10 Judith Moore, "The Way of the WELL," in _The Monthly_, 1990. 11 Howard Rheingold, _Virtual Reality_ (New York, 1991), 346. 12 Greg Tate, "I'm White!: What's Wrong with Michael Jackson," in _Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America_ (New York, 1992), 95. 13 Rheingold, ibid. 14 Mark Dery, "Cyberculture," in _The South Atlantic Quarterly_, Summer 1992, Volume 91, Number 3, 509. 15 Fredric Jameson, _Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_, excerpted in _Storming the Reality Studio_: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham, NC, 1991), 228. 16 loc. cit. 17 William Rolf Knutson, a computer programmer, fiction writer, and occasional _Mondo 2000_ contributor, in a private E-mail letter to the author, March 25, 1993. .