T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Introduction..................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One. After the Break ......................................................................... 3

Chapter Two. Beginnings ............................................................................. 35

Chapter Three. New Maps for a New Body.................................................. 51

Chapter Four. Cyberspace as Myth............................................................... 73

Chapter Five. Cyberspace as Écriture: The Metaverse............................... 117

Chapter Six. Cyberspace as City................................................................. 145

Chapter Seven. Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace................................. 163

Conclusion. What Lies Ahead .................................................................... 187

I N T R O D U C T I O N

A
lthough cyberspace has become, in the last twenty years, a reality in
the daily life of millions of human beings, there have been very few
genuine attempts at mapping the new virtual world. What exist are
ephemeral, day-to-day, even hour-to-hour map renderings of network traffics
which, while very useful for the smooth conduct of everyday online business,
are too transient to be adopted as long-term models.
This book is a response to what I perceive to be the inadequacy of the
existing ways of mapping cyberspace and an attempt to formulate a
long-lasting blueprint through which our understanding, our theorizing, and
our practice of cyberspace can be anchored on solid grounds.
I will consider how modern and especially contemporary critical theory
have paved the way to the emergence of virtuality; what is actually meant by
seemingly interchangeable terms such as virtual reality, the new media, cy-
berspace, the matrix, and simulation; how attempts at mapping cyberspace
have fallen short of the requirement for a stable long-term theoretical
framework; how and when the mapping of cyberspace began and how the new
space begged a new map to accommodate a new body; how cyberspace can be
seen as the last contemporary bastion of myth; how this mythical space sur-
vives through writing and is, in itself, a writing, an écriture; and finally how,
in the cyber-polis, cyber users can map new practices that thwart power cen-
ters.
The debate has been one-sided enough to prevent a quiet and clear-headed
assessment—or, for some, re-assessment—of cyberspace. On the one hand,
Neo-Luddites have repeatedly—and many times convincingly—pointed at the
imminent dangers facing humanity after the “machine” has taken over. In
apocalyptic scenarios of varying credibility, the human race gradually disap-
pears or is driven “underground.” On the other hand, techno-junkies have
hailed—with equally convincing terms—the computer age as the harbinger of
liberation, total equality, enlightenment, and absolute truth. I believe that as
long as the “geomapping” of cyberspace is not seriously investigated, both
2 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

camps, the technophobes and the technophiles, will remain at loggerheads for
quite some time before a re-appraisal is effected.
This re-assessment, more than two decades after the creation of cyber-
space, I propose to envision through the prisms of myth, writing, and the polis.
Yet this must remain an obvious contribution to the on-going dialogue fever-
ishly taking place around this essentially new and challenging mode of exis-
tence we have come to designate as cyberspace.1
It will be soon clear that I don’t intend—nor would I be able to even if I
wanted—to approach this topic from a technological angle. My aim is to invite
further research in the area, and as such it is essential that this be followed by
further concrete analyses which will fill the shortcomings associated with an
undertaking of this scale. This book is primarily intended for the critical,
cultural, and literary theorist and, above all, for the inquisitive reader who, no
doubt, is wondering about the nature of the new world we, as humans, have
been hastily ushered into.

N O T E

1 John Perry Barlow, in “The Best of all Possible Worlds,” Communications of the ACM
40.2 (Feb. 1997), 68–74, begins his essay by cautioning that, thirty years after the
creation of cyberspace, the wildest forecasts have been given a sound “thrashing” by
reality and that his “one certain prediction” for the next fifty years is that “practically
anything [he says] of it now will seem silly by then” (69).
C H A P T E R O N E

After the Break

That is perhaps the greatest problem of all. Life as we know it has ended, and yet no
one is able to grasp what has taken its place.
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things1

I
t is difficult to argue against the fact that our twenty-first century has
witnessed the emergence of a different breed of human beings under the
sign and aegis of the information age. It is also true that the survival of the
fittest theory has now to be expanded to mean, almost exclusively, the survival
of the electronically fittest. Pierre Lévy, already in 1990, was saying: “We live
one of those rare moments when, through a new technical configuration, that
is, through a new relationship with the cosmos, a new style of humanity is
being invented.”2 The new technical “configuration,” following in the wake of
changes in critical interpretative techniques, has rendered classical notions of
reading and writing, of space and time, and of reality itself, dangerously
obsolete. Lévy announced that “[h]istorical transcendentalism is at the mercy
of a boat trip. Let social groups scatter a new means of communication, and all
the balance of representations and images is transformed.”3 In 1997, Lévy was
again speaking of a shift from one humanity to another which, though still
undetermined, was not fully accepted as a topic to be discussed, questioned,
and aimed at.4 What the new technologies are heralding is no less than the
“brutal” acceleration of the “process of hominization” brought about by the
new techniques of communication through the creation of virtual worlds. The
process of emergence of the human species, far from being over, is just
passing through its apex.5 What is being glimpsed, to Lévy, is the new ability
to think collectively this adventure, as a “space of Knowledge” has been
added, thanks to the new technologies, to the three classical spaces of Earth,
Territory, and Trade. 6 Talking about the relationship between the new
technologies, collective thinking, and the new space, he said:
4 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

The role of the computer and that of the digital techniques of communication is not to
“replace mankind,” neither to come close to a hypothetical “artificial intelligence,”
but to favor the construction of collective intelligences where the social and cognitive
potentials of each and every person are permitted to develop and expand in a mutual
relationship.7

Never before, he added a year later, have the changes in technology, economy,
and customs been so fast and so destabilizing to the human race.8
J. Hillis Miller, talking about the new directions to be taken by the journal
Critical Inquiry, insisted on the importance of change and on the study of “the
effects of the new media on the sensibilities, the ethos, the interior life of our
citizens,” adding that it is “not just a description of the new media or an
analysis of their products, along the lines of film studies for cinema, but a
reflection on what sort of citizens the new media will produce or are produc-
ing.”9 Marshall McLuhan, who was equally impressed by the changes taking
place in the twentieth century, stated, as far back as 1958: “We are moving
very rapidly and at high speed naturally from an area in which business has
for, say a century, been our culture, to a situation in which culture is going to
be our business.”10 On a more extreme note, Mark Dery compared the new
technological/informational changes to a complete lift-off toward altogether
different realms: “Escape velocity is the speed at which a body—a spacecraft,
for instance—overcomes the gravitational pull of another body, such as the
Earth. More and more, computer culture, or cyberculture, seems as if it is on
the verge of attaining escape velocity.”11 Even more dramatically, Michael
Heim—probably the most mystically-minded writer on cyberspace—agreed
with Dery when he prophetically said: “Plugged into electric power and com-
puter chips, the human race in this last decade of the twentieth century is
preparing to lift off from nature into another—electronic—space.”12
Modernism and, more obviously, postmodernism and post-structuralism,
have proved to be the uncanny pioneers of the new technologies which have
culminated in cyberspace. Jacques Derrida mentioned, in his “Structure, Sign
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” an “event” which had the
form of a “rupture and a redoubling,”13 an idea taken up by Fredric Jameson in
1984 when he posited postmodernism on the “hypothesis of some radical
break or coupure” to be traced to the end of the 1950s or the beginning of the
1960s.14 But Jameson, almost twenty years later, also believed that whereas
the moderns “were obsessed with the secret of time,” the postmoderns are
obsessed with that of space15 and added, in the context of the new spatial
configuration and the information age we live in, that
[i]nstant information transfers suddenly suppress the space that held the colony apart
from the metropolis in the modern period. Meanwhile, the economic interdependence
 After the Break 5

of the world system today means that wherever one may find oneself on the globe, the
position can henceforth always be coordinated with its other spaces. This kind of
epistemological transparency no doubt goes hand in hand with standardization and
has often been characterized as the Americanization of the world (if not its
Disneyfication).16

Indeed, Lévy believes that we have “dreamed, and perhaps sometimes

attained, especially since the middle of the 1980s, a desirable software space
which is open to explorations, to connections to the outside, and to singu-
larizations.”17 The new spaces raise issues not only with outside “connections”
but also with the nature of the connections themselves. Miller, in 2000, per-
fectly saw the potential presented by the new technologies:
Moreover, these new telecommunications technologies, so many new devices for
raising ghosts in a new way, also generate new ideological matrices. They break
down, for example, the barrier between consciousness and the objects of
consciousness presupposed in Hegel’s Phenomenology.18

Yet even Derrida’s coupure is not enough to describe the new technology
and the new spaces—cyberspaces—that have emerged as a result. Bruce
Sterling, in the now famous “Manifesto of January 3, 2000,” said: “The central
issue as the new millennium dawns is technocultural.”19 Similarly, Friedrich
Kittler describes the new age in terms of a change in writing and points to the
early seventies as “the last historical act of writing” to have happened with the
design, by Intel engineers, of the first integrated microprocessor. So big is the
change that Kittler has to admit that we do not know, at this stage, what our
writing does. 20 Lévy questions as well the appropriateness of our present
means of interpretation:
[t]he conditions which used to make of critical and objective truth the norm of
knowledge are quickly undergoing transformation…Theories, with their norm of
truth and with the critical activity which accompanies them, give way to models, with
their norm of efficiency and the apropos judgment which presides over their
evaluation. The model is not put on paper, an inert support, it now appears on a
computer.21

The apparent volatility of the new technologies is what has probably made
attempts at fixating or anchoring our bearings an arduous task to say the least.
Yet it is without doubt the massive, en force influence of postmodernism and
post-structuralism that has paved the way for the decentering of solid, tangibly
identifiable, points in the space(s) of writing.
It is first of all an actual decentering of the subject that mostly identifies
the spaces created by the new technologies. Marjorie Worthington describes
the new virtual realities as having created a new kind of subject, almost iden-
6 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

tical to what has been called the “postmodern subject.”22 Jameson was more
radical as to the new space we occupy and, as early as 1984, sounded these
prophetic words:
I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a
mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects
who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has
been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the
subject.23

Continuing in the same vein, but advancing to the problem of mapping,

Jameson pointed out that “postmodern hyperspace” was allowing us to go
beyond “the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to
organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its
position in a mappable external world.”24 It is interesting to note that it is only
with the advent of cyberspace that the postmodern self can practically be seen
as forcibly deconstructed. Frances Dyson says that cyberspace is “established
as an ‘other’ place to enact the deconstructed self: a self whose multiplicity
and ambiguity is continually reinforced as the body seems to increasingly
inhabit the dematerialized world that technology creates.” 25 Dyson also
attributes the obsession with space to “Western ocularcentrism,” the
conflation of being with objects;26 and the postmodern interest with space is
doubled by a cyberspace which is, uncannily, both a space and a non-space.
And as the concept of the deconstructed self helped to problematize the very
essence of the unity of the self, the advent of cyberspace has likewise
problematized the nature of space and the nature of matter occupying that
space, and consequently problematized the nature of the relationship between
the two. Using the story of Odysseus and the sirens, Maurice Blanchot was
able to throw light on why the “other,” any “other,” is seen as a threat:
What was the nature of the Sirens’ song? What was its defect? Why did this defect
render it more powerful? Some have always answered: it is an inhuman song…But
others say that the enchanting was stranger even: it was only reproducing the habitual
song of man, and since Sirens, who were only beasts, beautiful because of the
reflection of feminine beauty, could sing like men sing, they rendered the song so
strange that the suspicion of the inhumanity of any human song would be present to
the mind of those who were listening.27

Is cyberspace such a beautiful yet terrible beast, able, by its inherent vacuity,
to make us question our assumptions of physical space as ultimate presence?
The suspicion of nothingness looms large whenever cyberspace is used
oppositionally to real physical space. Blanchot’s famous answer to where
literature was going can be interestingly applied to cyberspace: where is space
 After the Break 7

going? Space “is going towards itself, towards its essence which is to
disappear.”28
Such dramatic actualization of what was hitherto safely relegated to the
realm of theoretical speculation has inevitably led to the resurgence of a kind
of cyber-Luddism and technophobia. In 1960, Marshall McLuhan ended his
essay, “Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media,” with the
following insightful words:
Many people are terrified at the speed of information movement in our electronic time
which brainwashes whole populations on the one hand, and eliminates long
established roles based on highly specialized knowledge. The interpenetration of
Gutenberg and the electronic galaxies is naturally very destructive at many levels.29

McLuhan, way before the explosion of the information age, had judiciously
brought together writing—Gutenberg—and galaxy-mapping. I will show here
how pertinent this vision is today.
In 1999, Jodi Dean gave voice to the fear of decentering when she said that
we had become repeatedly and fearfully reminded that new technologies are
threatening to destroy reality. Not only a symptom of Luddite technophobia,30
these fears come, according to Dean, from people as diverse as Slavoj Žižek,
Mark Slouka, and R. U. Sirius (Ken Goffman), who share the fear that the new
technologies, from cable television to software programs, disrupt the distinc-
tion between the natural and the virtual.31 AI expert Ray Kurzweil shocked the
world in July 2000 at the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
Siggraph conference in New Orleans when he excitedly announced that al-
though “[t]he natural world has had some interesting qualities to it…we can
create a more interesting world which will become more and more compelling
and realistic as we go through the 21st century.” The punch line was probably
his decade-by-decade predictions as to the state of things beginning with
2000: ending in 2050, he calmly assured his listeners that by that time, “[t]he
bulk of thinking…will be non-biological.”32 Yet, as Tyler Stevens pointed out
in 1996, the changes should not come as a total surprise:
[W]e are already used to dealing with digital, intelligent life in the form of digital
representations of other humans. A good number of us set our biological clocks by
when we are able to login and when we can read our e-mail. We are used to
narrativizing our lives, ourselves, for our on-line friends, many of whom we’ve never
met; it’s a small step to asking how we know that our correspondents are cognizant,
conscious, aware, “real.” How do we know, by what heuristics do we discover, that
our correspondents are sentient? By what standard of measurement could we gauge,
in this age of the “intelligent” machine, that our interlocutors are, in a word,
“human”?33

It is very probable that the lack of bearings inherent in the space(s) of the new
8 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

technologies is the main culprit behind the mounting fears. Reality, at least,
boasts of recognizable and theoretically mappable territory. In virtual reality,
information has suddenly taken the place of actual physicality.
Yet other voices have sought to redress the balance and to show that
picturing any technology in general and the new technologies in particular as
evil can be vastly detrimental to human progress. On the most mundane level,
cyberspace has helped people communicate with each other in what would
otherwise be a world gradually closing in on itself. Janet Moursund uttered
these simple words about her experience in a virtual world called Sanctuary:
I have been asked for advice, and I have been given information. I have listened to
stories of trivial daily events and of major life crises, incidents of loss and grief and of
elation and triumph. I have talked with different “individuals” from the same multiple
personality household, and learned to recognize them by the way they express
themselves. I’ve petted a kitten, rubbed the ears of a baby dragon, received bunches of
flowers, and been hugged and comforted when I spoke of having had a bad day. For
me, as for the others who come there, SANCTUARY is real.34

To Lévy, the advantages of cyberspace exist on more than one level: the
recreation of social networks through exchange of knowledge, the listening to
and the valuation of singularities, the establishment of a more direct and more
participatory—hence more genuine—democracy leading to the enrichment of
individuals, to the invention of new forms of cooperation and, ultimately, to
the heralding of collective intelligence.35 The new technologies also prove to
be a fertile ground for the construction and the resurgence of myth. Lévy
again: “The products of modern technology, far from being used instrumen-
tally and computationally only, are in fact major sources of the imaginary,
entities fully participating in the institution of perceived worlds.”36
Luddite critique conveniently forgets that there has never been a natural
or non-technological society in the first place. François Dagognet suggests
that the debate about whether nature is becoming technologized is based on a
false dichotomy: namely that there is a category called “nature” and a category
called “technology.” Dagognet argues, in a deconstructionist-like method, that
on the contrary, the category “nature” has not existed for thousands of years,
“not since the first humans deliberately planted gardens or discovered
slash-and-burn farming.”37 Lévy is aware of this fact and adds: “Those who
condemn the information age would never think of criticizing the printing
press or even less writing. It is because the printing press and writing (which
are technologies!) constitute them too much.”38
Lévy also laments the situation where the problematization of issues of
politics and power is sacrificed, by some, on the altar of Luddism:
 After the Break 9

Technology embodies with them the contemporary form of evil. Unfortunately, the
image of technology as evil power, ineluctable and separate, shows itself not only to
be false, but catastrophic as well…A priori morally condemning a phenomenon
artificially separated from the collective future and from the world of significations
(of “culture”), this conception forbids to think, at the same time, technology and
techno-democracy.39

It is clear that the new technologies are more than just a handy tool and more
than a lethal weapon threatening to take over the world of the humans. As
Dery judiciously says, the “technophile-versus-technophobe debate” is
rendered futile upon close inspection: the computer is a “Janus machine,” both
an “engine of liberation” and “an instrument of repression.”40
Lévy, however, for all his laudable acumen and insight into the relation-
ship between human culture and technology, and for his contribution to the
ongoing debate with his concept of cognitive ecology, stops short of pre-
senting a model allowing twenty-first-century human beings to come to terms
with the new spaces they have been invited—or, some would say, forced—to
tread. It is my contention that only when the bearings of the cyber-traveler
have been, if not fully defined, at least put within a theorizing framework, that
the prevailing confusion can be cleared. As I will show, cyberspace fills the
mythical void by re-creating an already-there virtual reality through the
magical/mythical medium of writing with the city as model.
But first things first. Familiar and not-so-familiar terms such as virtuality,
the new technologies, and cyberspace mentioned above need to be re-defined
in the context of this book. New terms like matrix and simulation will also be
introduced.
It is appropriate to begin with Miller who, far from shying away from the
advances of the new technologies, boldly put virtual reality on a pedestal
which was hitherto occupied by literature:
Radio, television, cinema, popular music, and now the Internet—these are more
decisive in shaping citizen’s ethos and values, as well as in filling their minds and
feelings with imaginary worlds. It is these virtual realities rather than strictly literary
ones that have most performative efficacy these days to generate people’s feelings,
behavior, and value judgments.41

What are, then, these “virtual realities” Miller speaks of? Webster’s En-
cyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language defines “virtual”
as the following:
1. being such in power, force, or effect, though not actually or expressly such.

and
10 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

2. Archaic. having the inherent power to produce certain effects.42

Even at this very basic stage, it is important to note that two elements are
immediately discernible: absence and fiat. It is this combination of power and
unlocatability which gives cyberspace and cybermapping qualities we
associate with, on the one hand, classical myths and, on the other hand, with
contemporary critical theory notions of écriture.43
One of the earliest and most lucid attempts at defining virtuality is Richard
Norton’s 1972 essay “What is Virtuality?” in which he stated that the term
“implies an immediate, if tacit, admission that something is not the case in
fact. But something else is the case and this something else is quite practica-
ble. Is there power in a virtual reality? Yes, indeed there is.”44 Another inter-
esting point he made, and this years before the explosion of the new
technologies, was that “[a]ll virtual events are then actual events in terms of
themselves but virtual events in terms of the actual realities for which they are
the alternatives.”45 In other words, cyberspace is an entity which exists in
itself, as reality exists in itself. The problem arises when the rules and laws we
apply—or the rules and laws we see being applied—in one world conflict with
those of another. The term “virtual reality” (VR) was first coined by Jaron
Lanier, one of the “gurus” of cyberspace, and has recently been defined as “a
real or simulated environment in which the perceiver experiences
telepresence.”46 In the same context, Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein
define virtual reality as “the dream of pure telematic experience” which, be-
gun “in the cybernetic shadowland of head-mounted scanners, wired gloves,
and data suits,” has now become “the electronic horizon of the twenty-first
century.”47
Simplistic attempts, like those of Julio Bermudez and Debra Gon-
deck-Becker, see “classical reality” as the natural world we live in, whereas
“digital space,” which they equate with a “virtual place,” is a world with
functions not necessarily following or referring to classical reality. It is an
“immaterial world” offering alternative experiences to those of classical real-
ity.48 More to the point, architect Peter Eisenman sees the virtual as “a condi-
tion in real space that contains the oscillation between past and present time,
between figure and ground, between smooth and striated space.”49 This in-
ter-penetration or complementarity is also quite lucidly problematized by
Philippe Queau in his “Virtual Multiplicities”:
The word “virtual” comes from the latin [sic] virtus, virtue, which itself comes from
the latin [sic] vir, man. As for the word “real” it comes from the latin [sic] res,
thing…The virtual is neither the opposite of the real (the unreal) nor the opposite of
the actual (the potential). The virtual is like the leavening in dough. It unites and
combines the poles, the forms and the forces, but only in order to transform them…It
 After the Break 11

constitutes, in the true meaning of the word, an “intermediary” reality—a metaxu—as

Plato said.50

Lévy points out that virtus also means strength and power: in scholastic
philosophy, what exists potentially and not actually is known as virtual;
virtuality and actuality are, in fact, only two different ways of being. 51
Language is, first of all, a virtualization process which keeps what is alive
prisoner of the here and now and opens up the past and the future; we humans
constantly inhabit a virtual space the moment we use language. Second, all of
our technology, from the beginnings of humanity, is the materialization of a
virtual possibility and without that virtualization no technology is possible.
More, rituals, religions, morality, laws and rules are social mechanisms set up
to virtualize relations built on power, pulsions, instincts, and desires. Finally,
to Lévy, art, the summum and pride of humanity, is the ultimate result of
virtualization, since it “sits at the crossroads of the three great virtualizing and
hominizing currents, namely language, techniques, and ethics.” Art
“fascinates because it puts into play the most virtualizing of all activities.”52
The virtual, if properly defined, bears almost no relation to the false, the
illusory, or the imaginary. The virtual, in fact, is not the opposite of the real;
far from it, it is a mode of being “fecund and powerful,” which allows the
blossoming of creation and opens up mines of meaning under the “platitude of
the immediate physical presence.”53 It is this new “mode” which forms Lévy’s
key concept as it is developed more clearly in his subsequent works: the vir-
tual is not a particular mode of being, it is the “process of transformation”
from one mode of being to another, a “heterogenesis,” a “welcoming of
otherness” on the same lines as the process of hominization mentioned above,
and not, as one may think, the alienation so feared by some.54
Virtualization is not derealization; on the contrary, it is an “identity mu-
tation” where the ontological self sees its center of gravity moved from its
traditional anchoring point.55 The process of self-discovery through virtual-
ization allows humans to “step outside,” to be “out there”; they “deterritori-
alize themselves.” 56 Brian Massumi sums up Lévy’s contribution to the
dialogue on the virtual by acknowledging his emphasis on the “participation”
in the virtual of earlier technologies like writing and his distinction between
various terms like the actual, the possible, and the potential as “an integral part
of any thinking of the virtual.”57
Lanier takes the definition one step further and rhapsodizes about the
different meanings of virtual reality: “A delinquent disassociation from the
truth…A protean, all-encompassing triumph of creativity…An ecstasy or
epiphany brought about by technology…A transcendent perspective brought
about by technology.”58 But it is here that problems begin to appear. What
12 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

was, with Lévy, a mode of being or a progression, threatened with others the
concept of physical, tangible reality altogether. Mark Poster refers to discus-
sions about a virtual reality which “so destabilizes the real that the real itself is
understood as ‘virtual,’ as provisional, constructed,” and reality can then be
seen as “always already virtual.”59
The new technologies which I have been mentioning until now in a rather
general context can be equated, maybe for the first time in the history of hu-
man culture, almost exclusively with media. Why this is important to my
thesis is the fact that the new technologies, media, information and the space
in which these three blend—and in which the distinction between them re-
mains blurred—form what is also called cyberspace. Geert Lovink is aware of
the link and says, in his “From Speculative Media Theory to Net Criticism,”
that the Net is the “medium to end all media,” the “Metamedium,” yet be-
moans at the same time the lack of current cyberspace theory. To Lovink, the
media theory of the 1980s was a discourse of “The End” presented within the
context of cyberculture by writers such as William Gibson, Steward Brand,
Timothy Leary, Howard Rheingold, and theorists such as Norbert Bolz and
Friedrich Kittler who took up the pioneering works of Marshall McLuhan.
Yet, “net criticism” and “cyber discourse,” born of the works of those think-
ers, is still, to him, a fledgling discipline.60 David Silver, in his introduction to
cyber studies, traces three stages or generations in the new discipline in the last
fifteen years of the twentieth century: popular cyberculture, when the Internet
was seen as the new frontier; cyberculture studies, when virtual communities
attracted academic scholars; and critical cyberculture studies, which dealt with
issues of identity and digital discourse.61
McLuhan, of course, became famous for his 1964 essay “The Medium is
the Message” in which he explained the title by saying that
it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and
action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in
shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content”
of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.62

Comparing the electric light to a communication medium, he added that the

message of the electric light “is like the message of electric power in industry,
totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized.”63 If one were to forget the span
of years, this would read like a description of the Internet. McLuhan also
foresaw, more than forty years ago, the uncanny physicality of what will later
be called cyberspace as long as it is the medium itself which is under scrutiny:
“If the formative power in the media are the media themselves, that raises a
host of large matters…Namely, that technological media are staples or natural
resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and oil.”64
 After the Break 13

Such was the influence of McLuhan’s theories that even today the fasci-
nating link between the two modes, “real life” and “virtual reality,” is still
discussed in the context of media theory. John Armitage, in his “Resisting the
Neoliberal Discourse of Technology: The Politics of Cyberculture in the Age
of the Virtual Class,” wonders how, if the medium is indeed the message, it is
able to exert such power over human beings who are willing to exchange their
corporeality for virtuality.65 Indeed, one has only to listen to Sterling rhapso-
dizing, in the ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) 1995 conference,
about the new media:
Media is an extension of the senses.

Media is a mode of consciousness.

Media is extra-somatic memory. It’s a crystallization of human thought that survives

the death of the individual.

Media generates simulacra. The mechanical reproduction of images is media.66

The allusion to Jean Baudrillard—and to Walter Benjamin—is clear and not

gratuitous. Cyberspace is the simulacrum par excellence and the new media,
here synonymous with the new technologies, are equated with an array of
simulacra behind which nothing—for this is the definition of simulacra—is
hidden. Baudrillard, in his seminal Simulacra and Simulation, eloquently said:
The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium
and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new era. There is no
longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in
the real…One must think instead of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of
genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal.67

While I agree with Baudrillard that what was the medium is now “intan-
gible” and “diffused,” this does not mean that we should not attempt to map or,
at least, to come up, with a theory upon which such mapping can be under-
taken. But what exactly is cyberspace? After the first Conference on Cyber-
space was held in 1990 at the University of Texas at Austin and the text of the
papers gathered in Cyberspace: First Steps, the marriage of cyberspace to
virtual reality was, as Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “ratified,”68 and the path made
clear for definitions, enunciations, and theories of cyberspace. Martin Dodge
and Rob Kitchin, in Mapping Cyberspace, define cyberspace as “navigable
space,” from the Greek kyber, and refer to Gibson’s Neuromancer as the
original source. To them, cyberspace is better seen as a collection of con-
tinuously expanding spaces.69
Indeed, for the most commonly and most-widely used definition of cy-
14 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

berspace, one has to go back to Gibson’s pioneering 1984 cyberpunk novel

Neuromancer, still now the inspiring bible of cyber fans.70 Gibson, in probably
one of the most quoted passages in all his novels, writes:
‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A
graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the
human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the
mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .’71

In the sequel to Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third volume of

what is known as the Sprawl Trilogy, further explanation is given:
There’s no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She
remembered a smiling tutor’s lecture in the arcology’s executive creche, images
shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the
neuroelectronically primitive ‘virtual world’ technology linking them more
effectively with their planes…As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the
video terminals atrophied.72

Cyberspace is accessed, in the Gibsonian world, by connecting through the

“static-wall,” and “into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the
bright grid of the matrix…like an infinite cage.”73
Many names have been given to what Philip Elmer-DeWitt calls “that
shadowy space where our computer data reside.” DeWitt mentions the Net, the
Web, the Cloud, the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Datasphere, the Electronic
Frontier, the Information Superhighway. But DeWitt adds that Gibson’s con-
tribution, or coinage, has proved to be “the most enduring” among “the mil-
lions of computers jacked into the Internet.”74 Mike Featherstone and Roger
Burrows see cyberspace as “a generic term which refers to a cluster of dif-
ferent technologies” and identify three main variants: Barlovian cyberspace,
Virtual reality, and Gibsonian cyberspace which can be further described as “a
city of data, a Borgesian library of vast databases containing all a culture’s
deposited wealth, where every document is available, every recording play-
able and every picture viewable.”75 To Lévy, cyberspace is the “moving space
of interactions between knowledge and knowers of deterritorialized intelligent
collectives.”76 More prosaically, cyberspace is, according to John Perry Bar-
low, “that place you are in when you are talking on the telephone.”77
The connectivity feature looms large in Michael Benedikt’s essay “Cy-
berspace: First Steps”:
Cyberspace: Accessed through any computer linked into the system; a place, one
place, limitless; entered equally from a basement in Vancouver, a boat in
Port-au-Prince, a cab in New York, a garage in Texas City, an apartment in Rome, an
 After the Break 15

office in Hong Kong, a bar in Kyoto, a café in Kinshasa, a laboratory on the Moon.78

Benedikt gives cyberspace a labyrinthine quality: “Its horizons recede in every

direction; it breathes larger, it complexifies, it embraces and involves.
Billowing, glittering, humming, coursing, a Borgesian library, a city; intimate,
immense, firm, liquid, recognizable and unrecognizable at once.”79 Ryan takes
up the corridor-like feature of cyberspace (which she also calls “Cyberia” or
“Cyberelia”) and says that instead of being traversed point by point like
Cartesian space, it is traveled by jumps and “seemingly instantaneous
transportation”; that it is not finite but “infinitely expandable”; that since it is
non-physical, it is equally distant from all points. As such, its size and/or area
expand and change continually and cannot, therefore, be mapped. Cyberspace
becomes then “the closest approximation of the mystical circle whose center is
everywhere and circumference nowhere: every user regards his home site as
the heart of the system, and there is no limit on how far the system can
reach.” 80 Cyberspace is the twentieth-century’s monument to a totalizing
vision, just as the cathedral was in the Middle Ages and the encyclopedia was
in the Age of Enlightenment. The ideal of the total work is transformed into
the idea of universal intertextuality: every individual text is linked to countless
others. In the electronic age, as Ryan says, “the text literally becomes a matrix
of many texts and a self-renewing entity.” 81 If the cathedral and the
encyclopedia were monuments constructed according to a specific vision of
reality, cyberspace is, to some, a gigantic laboratory set up to examining that
reality itself. Heim is often quoted saying that cyberspace is not a mere
breakthrough in technology; with its virtuality, “cyberspace is a metaphysical
laboratory, a tool for examining our very sense of reality.”82
Behind the obligatory literariness and cyber-fantasy, one can see why
such vistas have mesmerized cyber fans and theoreticians of cyber-culture
alike. The fascination of willingly and consciously entering into a world of
“nonspace,” into a world similar to that of the mind, is irresistible. For the first
time in human history, humanity can attain, without the use of mind-altering
techniques or drugs, to a realm where the limit is only the extent of the
imagination. Myth, as I will show in more detail later, is an essential element
in any mapping of cyberspace.
Robert Nirre is more mundane in equating cyberspace with the Web:
“You type: you connect. Your computer nuzzles into another and sucks off a
loving, coded flow. You follow a link, you traverse, you search, you back out
again.” Yet even Nirre, a programmer, launches, quite like Gibson himself in
Neuromancer, into the following mesmerized description:
But what is this, exactly? Clearly it isn’t amenable to our spatial understanding. There
16 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

is neither a physical nor even a conceptual space. There are places but nothing
between them, no interspatiality; one navigates a sprawling agglomeration of
webbed-together billboards, of insides without exteriors, of islands of hyperdense
information adrift on etherealized seas.83

Roy Ascott, during the ISEA 2000 conference, preferred to lump the physical
and the informational together in what he calls the new Big Bang, the
combination of “Bits Atoms Neurons and Genes” together as the new media
universe, a universe of “moist” media, the coming together of the silicon
domain of computers and the wet biological world of living systems. Ascott
devises an interesting new name for this convergence, calling it “natrificial”
space, the union of nature and the artificial.84 A year later, Ascott formally
dubs the basis of the new art of the coming century “Moistmedia,” a
“transformative art concerned with the construction of a fluid reality.”85
Clearly some framework has to be put in place in order to hamper—or,
better, to situate in a theoretical framework—the enthusiasm of sometimes
unbridled fantasies. In some extreme cases, writers have put forth scenarios
that are nearer science-fiction than reality: Hans Moravec, first in conjunction
with KurzweilAI.net, gave a picture of the future where beings will totally lose
their geographical boundaries, establishing connections only as informational
entities in cyberspace, finally becoming a bubble of Mind expanding at almost
the speed of light.86
This is not say that theoreticians have not seriously poured over the
problem. Lévy, for instance, has fruitfully compared cyberspace with archi-
tecture and urbanism. Instead of structuring physical space, the programmer
“organizes the space of cognitive functions” such as information, memory,
evaluation, decision, conception, etc.87 Yet he also says that technology is a
dimension, “cut out by the mind, of a heterogeneous and complex collective
future in the city of the world.”88 What Lévy is doing here, and one wonders if
he is successful at it, is desperately trying to get away from the whole problem
of mapping, and attempting to replace it with a space of functions which will
try to mirror the cognitive abilities of the human race, lumping together the
mind, physical dimensions, and urban mapping. Yet one has to be fair: the
conundrum is not to be easily solved: a “space of cognitive functions” is still a
space where human beings go to, or connect to, everyday more and more
frequently. But where do they actually go? What and where is this new “di-
mension” and how can it be mapped in urban-like fashion without it being
possessed of physical existence?
Can the problem be with the subjects themselves? What if, according to
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we were not one but many? The two au-
thors begin their famous Mille Plateaux with the following announcement:
 After the Break 17

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each one of us was several,
there was already quite a crowd…We are no longer ourselves…We have been
aided, aspired, multiplied.”89 Would the dissolution of the individual self be
more conducive to a better understanding of the non-physicality of cyber-
space? In this context, Dyson writes that the cyber experience occurs as flows
of data and the “as if you are there” is becoming a “you are there.” One is “in
cyberspace, not watching it, one is a navigator, a netizen, not a viewer.” The
gap between signifier and signified, Dyson says, between viewer and viewed,
and between real and representation is quickly narrowing.90
But this is hardly new. Postmodernism and post-structuralism had already
done away with classical concepts of the author and Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, and Stanley Fish, just to mention a few, had already shattered the
notion of the innocent and passive reader. The individuated author and the
individuated reader belong to historical fallacies. But the dissolution of the
individual, or the convergence of many individualities into one, poses the
same problems mentioned above, those of a “global brain/mind” which would
pulsate with all the sucked-in individualities willing to donate themselves.
While no one can question the plausibility of such scenarios, critical
and/or cyber theorists try to encompass the many attempts and strive to come
up, if possible, with unifying theories about the nascent cyberspace. It is not
enough—and ultimately counter-productive—to just resort to the old answer
that cyberspace’s confusion is inherent in its essence and that any attempts to
map out cyberspace are doomed to failure. As my thesis unfolds, it will be
clear that such endeavor is not only possible but also highly rewarding in
terms of our positioning in cyberspace.
The “matrix” is yet another term offered in the attempt to pin down the
nature of cyberspace. Derived from the Latin mater, it boasts the following
definitions:
1. that which gives origin or form to a thing, or which serves to enclose it.

2. print. a mold for casting type faces.

3. a mold made by electroforming from a disk recording, from which other disks may
be pressed.

4. Archaic. the womb.91

What is indeed interesting in these definitions is the concept that the matrix is
that which comes first, that which gives birth to, the origin of things; an idea
which, if applied to cyberspace, is immediately and irrevocably outrageous to
our whole protological views of the universe. How can cyberspace possibly be
the master mold from which our physical reality was subsequently produced?
18 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Here, of course, we rejoin cyber-fiction movie hits like, among others, “The
Matrix,” “Existenz,” and “The Thirteenth Floor,” where the relationship
between physical reality and virtual reality is turned upside down.92 It is true
that western philosophy, since Plato’s metaphor of the cave, has been
entertaining such notions and has been toying with the attractive idea that our
world is but a reflection of a higher order of things. Yet, even to philosophical
minds, cyberspace as matrix, for all to try and experience, is an awesome and
quite impressive notion to accept. But is the term “matrix” as an alternative to
“cyberspace” easier to picture? In the matrix as Gibson sees it, the physical
and the abstract mix, the objective and the subjective are interchanged: “In the
nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed
unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator…would have
presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands.”93
Nothingness and nonspace again present the reader with almost
insurmountable problems. Short of being a mystic, it is highly dubious that a
passage such as the following from Neuromancer’s ending would make much
sense:
‘I’m not Wintermute now.’

‘So what are you.’ He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

‘I’m the matrix, Case.’

Case laughed. ‘Where’s that get you?’

‘Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.’94

The ultimate nature of the matrix is the undifferentiated dissolution of the self
in the grand scheme of things. In the matrix, no more dualities, no more
oppositions. As Baudrillard says in his “Clone Story”:
The Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty
of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code. No more mother, no more
father: a matrix. And it is the matrix, that of the genetic code, that now infinitely
“gives birth” based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory sexuality.95

The matrix as replacement for “Father” and “Mother” is seen in Gibson’s

second part of his trilogy, Count Zero, where the protagonist is pictured in his
infancy as a boy who had been acquainted with holodecks and who had ex-
perienced “mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the
matrix cyberspace,” a plane “where the great corporate hotcores burned like
neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to ap-
prehend more than the merest outline. 96 Cyberspace as beyond echoes the
 After the Break 19

matrix as before, the origin of all things, where even the sexes are undiffer-
entiated. The fantasy and utter magic of these two notions can only be ex-
pressed in a discourse which re-invents and re-inscribes myth in the new
dimensions of the new technologies. Baudrillard is aware of this when he
writes:
It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues—ever since Narcissus bent over
his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the
expiration of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only
God has this power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself
immaterially in the beyond.97

And it is here that the twin concepts of simulation and simulacra appear in
connection with the tantalizing problem of reality vs. virtuality or “realspace”
vs. cyberspace. Kurzweil, in another futuristic scenario, envisions full
immersion into virtual reality by sending millions of nanobots to nerve fibers
with the job of suppressing signals coming from real senses and placing them
on hold. The nanobots, complete with instructions, will then take over and
present a fully immersing simulation to our senses.98 The illusion would be
perfect, the graphics pristinely “real,” and the switching from one world to
another totally seamless. Instead of entering into a simulated world, we would
be, body and all, the simulation itself. Instead of entering into cyberspace, we
would become part of cyberspace itself as we are now part or reality. Instead
of leaving our bodies behind us, we would take them with us. Our bodies,
instead of remaining physical bodies only, would become cyberbodies; we
would have actually grown cyberbodies. The knowledge of new world(s)
created by simulation would be as filling as that experienced in real life, if not
more. In fact, Lévy believes that “knowledge by simulation” is “undoubtedly
one of the new means of knowledge brought about by informatized cognitive
ecology,” 99 and assures his readers that computerized simulation lets us
explore more complex and more numerous models than those afforded by our
limited memory and mental imagery. Simulation, to him, “does not refer to
some un-realization of knowledge or of our relationship to the world, but
rather to augmented powers of imagination and intuition.”100
All of the above does not fit very well with the dictionary definition of
simulation which gives the Latin simulatio, “a pretense,” as the origin of the
word. Furthermore, “simulation” is:
1. the act or process of pretending; feigning.

2. an assumption or imitation of a particular appearance or form; counterfeit; sham.

3. Psychiatry. a conscious attempt to feign some mental or physical disorder to escape

20 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

punishment or to gain a desired objective.101

It is clear why “simulation” was—and still is, despite the fervent efforts of its
adherents—seen as the representation of a sham reality, incomplete and
supplementary, a margin which is, ultimately, dispensable. Baudrillard
accepts the dictionary definitions given above but gives them a specific twist:
to simulate is “to feign to have what one doesn’t have” and implies an absence.
Yet he warns that things are not that simple and quotes the Littré: “‘Whoever
fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill.
Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms’,”
and simulation therefore “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the
‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’.” 102 Dissimulating is hiding what is,
simulating is showing what is not. The first, as Baudrillard says, “reflects a
theology of truth and secrecy,” the second “inaugurates the era of simulacra
and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no
longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its
artificial resurrection.”103 Simulation is not mere counterfeit, mere sham, mere
faking; it is not a playful one-time happy-go-lucky journey into a cheap
imitation of reality, an ersatz realm on the computer screen or apprehended
through VR goggles. Simulation, in Baudrillard’s term, is a “strategy of the
real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal.”104 What is even more dangerous, in the
Baudrillardian socio-political worldview, is that simulation, by showing a
thing which is not, by consciously showing it as imaginary, is in fact hiding the
truth that it really is and what is referred to as real is not. The famous
Baudrillardian Disneyland analogy makes this clear:
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America
that is Disneyland…Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe
that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are
no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.105

Can the above be transposed to cyberspace? Can we safely show that

cyberspace exists in order to hide that it is the real space? Can we say that
cyberspace is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest
is real, whereas all of real space that surrounds us is no longer real but belongs
to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation? Is the imaginary of
cyberspace a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the
real in the opposite camp, in this case in real life? Hence the representation of
cyberspace as debility, as infantile degeneration; hence the relegation of
cyberspace to long-haired teenagers, to pranksters, to immature but dangerous
crackers, hence the overwhelming dominance of the gaming industry in
cyberspace.
 After the Break 21

True, this scenario is daring, but not devoid of interesting ramifications.106

What if cybermapping turns out to be, in the final analysis, the mapping of
reality itself or, better to say, the mapping of our hyperreality? Is it true that, in
Baudrillard’s words, “[t]he universe, and all of us, have entered live into
simulation”?107 Can the following scene from Count Zero become a reality in
the near future: “He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated
simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of the previous
century…You could smell the lilacs, late at night”108? Would simulation be-
come so real that we could, in an instant, be transported to a world so real that
even the senses would be fooled? The following scenario, also from Count
Zero sets the picture:
As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a
touch-spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact…A
confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken art school picnic warring
with the perfection of Virek’s illusion. Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of
Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia.109

If we have indeed entered live into simulation, it is all the more urgent to
map our bearings or, more importantly since we are dealing with shifting
essences, shifting allegiances and self-substituting modes of representation, to
devise a new mapping strategy that goes beyond the vagaries of the moment in
a constantly changing dimension. Far from being awed at the prospect and
daunted by what appears to be insurmountable difficulties, we could, even
with Baudrillard, agree that “[t]his is where seduction begins.”110 Barthes’
injunction that “[i]t is not the ‘person’ of the other which is necessary to me, it
is space: the possibility of a dialectic of desire, of an unpredictability of
jouissance”111 is appropriate in a study which takes cyberspace as a textual
construct. Indeed, it is not necessarily the “person” of cyberspace which I have
in mind, rather it is, paradoxically, its space, i.e., the myriad possibilities of-
fered by a theory of cybermapping among many potential others. Graham
Allen, in his book on intertextuality, writes the following words: “What to
many might seem counterintuitive in Barthes’s treatment of literary books
becomes obvious, inevitable and even ‘natural’ when dealing with hypertext
systems.”112
One clear conclusion to be drawn from the above is that cyberspace as a
new field of study is rife with theoretical possibilities and is fully open to the
gaze of cultural and critical theorists. Ryan’s edited volume on cyberspace
textuality contains these revealing words by Espen Aarseth about the race not
only to conquer cyberspace per se but also the theoretical field of cybertheory
itself:
22 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

[T]he race is on to conquer and colonize these new territories for our existing
paradigms and theories, often in the form of “the theoretical perspective of <fill in
your favorite theory/theoretician here> is clearly really a prediction/description of
<fill in your favorite digital medium here>.” This method is being used with
permutational efficiency throughout the fields of digital technology and critical
theory, two unlikely tango partners indeed. But the combinatorial process shows no
signs of exhaustion yet.113

Featherstone and Burrows echo the importance the new technologies have on
contemporary theory and on the representation of the reality we live in: “The
writings which have emerged on cyberspace, cyberbodies and cyberpunk over
the last decade are replete with utopian, dystopian and heterotopian
possibilities. For some, this entails the assumption that we are about to enter a
new era.”114
Three noteworthy attempts are currently being made to map cyberspace,
all of them spearheaded by Dodge, director of the Cyber-Geography Research
initiative. A researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at
University College, London, Dodge and his team produced, until 2001, a web
page called “Mappa.Mundi Magazine” 115 which presented, every month, a
different map of the Internet and of related cyberspace geographies. Among
the maps are “Mostly Cloudy, Clearing Later: Network Weather Maps” which
showed, graphically, network lines superimposed on actual geographical
maps of different countries, with “weather” forecasts using the specialized
jargon of weather reports; “Mapping the Geography of Domain Names,”
which showed areas of concentration of the more than 20 million domain
names116 registered on the Internet also superimposed on real maps, with the
aim of identifying decision-making areas; “The UK Academic Map,” online
since 1994 which gave a visual directory of universities and colleges in the
UK, also based on geographic maps.
Dodge also maintains a page entitled “Cyber-Geography Research” at
http://www.cybergeography.org. He introduces CyberGeography as
the study of the spatial nature of computer communications networks, particularly the
Internet, the World-Wide Web and other electronic “places” that exist beyond our
computer screens, popularly referred to as cyberspace. Cybergeography encompasses
a wide range of geographical phenomena from the study of the physical
infrastructure, traffic flows, the demographics of the new cyberspace communities, to
the perception and visualisation of these new digital spaces.117

As mentioned above, the indefatigable Dodge has also written, with Kitchin,
two books on the subject, Mapping Cyberspace (2000) and Atlas of
Cyberspace (2001).118 The latter contains more than 300 images of dazzling
beauty which, according to the authors, can be printed out and framed for
 After the Break 23

aesthetic effect. The overall aim is both technical and artistic, as the table of
contents moves from questioning the ways we can view the images to
mapping infrastructure and traffic, mapping the web, mapping conversation
and community, to finally imagining cyberspace. Kitchin describes, on his
homepage, the aims of the book:
The maps in the Atlas of Cyberspace are important as they are powerful in framing
our conception of the new virtual worlds beyond our computer screens. More and
more of our time and leisure and business activities are spent in virtual space and yet it
is a space that is difficult to comprehend and mentally visualise…Other maps in this
collection are simply beautiful to look at, possessing powerful aesthetic qualities in
their own right.119

To Dodge and Kitchin, their atlas can help users, services providers, and
others interested in network operations, to understand the “various spaces of
online interaction and information” and get a “unique sense of a space that is
difficult to understand from navigation alone.” 120 Dodge and Kitchin use
cartography to classify and represent information that would otherwise be too
large and too complex to comprehend, especially in the case of cyberspace.
More interestingly, the authors are aware that any mapping in general and the
mapping of a brand new space like cyberspace in particular involve decisions
of inclusion and exclusion which will in fact construct a cyberspace tailored to
the cultural, historical, and judgmental values of the cartographers themselves.
They say:
It has long been recognized that mapping is a process of creating, rather than
revealing, knowledge…In other words, a map is imbued with the values and
judgements of the people who construct it. Moreover, they are undeniably a reflection
of the culture and broader historical and political contexts in which their creators live.
As such, maps are not objective, neutral artefacts but are constructed in order to
provide particular impressions to their readers.121

Steve Branigan, expert in computer and network security and vice president of
engineering at Lumeta Corporation has co-authored a paper entitled “What
Can you do with Traceroute?”122 in which the Unix network utility Traceroute
is used for mapping purposes. Lumeta Corp. has devised a visualization
algorithm in order to help them understand their daily databases. While the
generated visualizations take no account of geography, they do however
produce stunning color-coded images highlighting domain names,
autonomous systems, routeable/non-routeable network addresses, leaks in
corporate perimeters, mergers-and-acquisitions activities, small home
networks, and anomalies associated with them. Art galleries have expressed
interest in these generated visualizations, some of which were installed at the
24 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

entrance of the Glasgow Science Centre in July 2001.123

Lévy initially proposed to construct hypertextual maps through diagrams
and graphics but ended up getting bogged down by details and fell prey to the
false analogy of comparing cyberspace to real space. Quite simplistically, he
wrote:
One can also construct global two-dimensional maps which show only available paths
from one single node: whether it is the starting document, the root of the hypertext, or
the active current document. Let us imagine a road map of France where would be
represented only the roads leading from Bordeaux to other cities while in Bordeaux,
from Toulouse to other cities while in Toulouse, etc. At any time, visual complexity
would thus be reduced to the minimum.124

Yet Lévy then affirms, paradoxically, that “to the regular movement of the
page succeeds the perpetual movement of folding and unfolding of a
kaleidoscopic text.”125 How can a kaleidoscopic text be made analogical to a
map of Bordeaux and Toulouse?
Lévy—at least in his early writings,—Dodge, Kitchin, and Branigan,
among others, have undoubtedly pioneered the field of cybermapping yet,
upon looking at the maps produced, one can wonder about three intimately
related problems:
One, most of the maps are time-bound, i.e., they are either historical, de-
picting some network state dating a few years back or, on the contrary, so
“current” that they are only valid the moment they are produced. What is more
serious is that when they are printed they are already outdated. It is true that
the “Mappa Mundi” project gave updated, online maps, but the problem re-
mains the same. The issue of forecasting is also problematic: how can one
accurately predict network movements? Can the tools, terminology, and
methodology of weather forecasting be used in cybermapping with similar
results? The very changeability of networked technologies renders the above
mapping attempts at best a precarious endeavor.
Two, most of the maps presented tend more to be on the quantifiable side
and thus leave little place for theory. A theory, according to Webster’s Dic-
tionary, is “a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of
explanation for a class of phenomena” and “a particular conception or view of
something to be done or of the method of doing it; a system of rules or prin-
ciples.”126 What are the principles which can help us explain the phenomenon
of cyberspace? What is the particular conception or view of cybermapping and
the method of coming up with a mapping theory? More importantly, how do
we, the human species in the twenty-first century, use these maps to get our
bearings in cyberspace? The above maps are as useful to the cyberspace
navigator as a night photograph of car traffic on a busy lane. Dazzling, yes, but
 After the Break 25

how useful to the newcomer?

Three, the visually aesthetic appeal produced by such maps probably will,
in the long run, be detrimental to a serious attempt at mapping cyberspace.
Flashy and stunning postcards produced with sophisticated photographic
equipment do not do justice to what is presented to the naked eye (which, by
the way, is also a sophisticated photographic equipment complete with filters
and zooming lenses). To pursue the analogy above, a postcard, however
flashy, is only useful insofar as the newcomers are aware of the framework
lying behind the taking of the photograph, insofar as they know that behind the
tracer-like car lights there are actual cars, that the lights in the night sky,
produced by increased exposure time are, to the naked eye, a compilation of
stationary moments, insofar, finally, as they know that behind or below be-
wildering sights lies a city the inhabitants of which have learned to navigate
almost effortlessly. If postcards and photographs are esthetically pleasing, it is
because we know what lies behind them. In a world yet unknown to us like
cyberspace, we cannot yet afford this luxury.
Have we not yet fully realized the impact of cyberspace on our lives? Are
we amusing ourselves with pretty graphics instead of trying to look for inner
frameworks and mechanisms? Michel E. Doherty, Jr., in his “Marshall
McLuhan Meets William Gibson in ‘Cyberspace’,” raises a very pertinent
issue:
[S]ince the totality of (post)modern culture has not yet interiorized virtual technology,
we cannot define, much less critique the “realm” of cyberspace. In fact, if cyberspace
does not exist—at least not in ways we can yet talk about sensibly—then, hell!
What’s the point of talking about it at all? Well, cyberspace is being created—or
perhaps it is being discovered—and it is in the process of being interiorized.127

As we are the first generation of cybernauts, it is our duty to seriously map the
yet-uncharted territories of cyberspace. If this new space does not, as Doherty
says, exist in ways we can yet talk about sensibly, can we not at least read it as
a text is read and extract from it a grammar or, better, a grammatology of
cyberspace? McLuhan wrote that “Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to
master the grammar of print and typography. He was thus able to read off the
message of coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud
from a text that had been handed to him.”128
Cyberspace is the print and typography revolution of the twenty-first
century. Are we able to master its grammar and from there read the message of
coming change? Dyson accurately says that as the Renaissance maps reduced
the known three-dimensional world to its two-dimensional representation, the
technology of virtual reality is again reducing our two-dimensional ways of
mapping into a “numerical series composed of just two binaries.” This series
26 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

of reductions, from the Renaissance to the present age, has allowed, para-
doxically, the handling of the infinite horizons of cyberspace.129 It is in the
same vein that Massumi suggests a new concept of mapping better adapted to
the new virtual spaces, based on a topographical vision of cyberspace. De-
fining topology as “the science of self-varying deformation,” he concedes that
since a topological unity is multiple (because in constant deformation), it is
theoretically impossible to actually diagram and follow every step in a topo-
logical transformation.130 Massumi’s approach, then, is diametrically opposed
to that of Dodge and Kitchin in that it openly acknowledges the dynamic na-
ture of cyberspace and the problematics inherent in every mapping, and tacitly
expects that the issues surrounding the mapping of cyberspace will reshape
our concepts of mapping in general.
Where are we in now in the stage of cyberspace mapping? Even Dodge
and Kitchin acknowledge the fact that we are in the infancy of cybermapping,
saying that at present, it is fair to state that “cartographers of cyberspace are at
the same stage as the cartographers at the start of the Renaissance period,” in
addition to the fact that, unlike the Renaissance cartographers, we are not even
in possession of blueprints.131 Lévy, in a more recent reappraisal, says that the
form and content of cyberspace are “still partially undetermined,” and that the
mobile maps of these fluctuating spaces belong to terra incognita, adding,
with Massumi, that even if cybernauts were able to achieve the immobility
required to get more precise bearings, the virtual landscape itself would con-
tinue to flow, to swirl, and to transform the gazer.132 Lévy’s cartography, then,
short of being a topographical attempt, is content to map a “space of knowl-
edge,” a sort of “anthropological cartography.”133 To achieve this, Lévy has
come up, with his colleague Michel Authier, with the concept of the “Ciné-
carte,” a sort of hypercard which would trace the cybernauts’ progress in the
moving world of signification as they become part of the collective intelli-
gence of cyberspace; the hypercard would be the record of that interaction
between this collective intelligence and its navigation in the informational
universe.134 In 1997, Paul F. Starrs, in “The Sacred, the Regional, and the
Digital,” stressed that “cyberspace is one realm where geographers ought to
bestir themselves to consider how information has become tantamount to
space and is in the process of becoming an actual place.”135
Yet, unbridled theories can be as nefarious as no theories at all. Coun-
tering the hype generated by cyberspace, Cameron Bailey, at the ISEA 1995
conference, was sounding the warning siren: “Faced with the delirious pros-
pect of leaving our bodies behind for the cool swoon of digital communica-
tion, the leading theorists of cyberspace have addressed the philosophical
implications of a new technology by retreating to old ground.”136 Bailey is here
 After the Break 27

referring to the happy-go-lucky expeditions to a new world where major

concerns such as race, gender, and class are put behind. Similarly, theorists
have been gazing not at the moon but at the finger pointing to it, allowing
themselves to be misled by bright colors and fireworks. David Gelernter, in his
“The Second Coming—A manifesto,” articulates this danger:
“The network is the computer”—yes; but we’re less interested in computers all the
time. The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, not telescopes. The real topic in
computing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers we use
as telescopes and tuners.137

At this moment, there is no theory of cyberspace which can offer a solid

framework from which we can map our bearings and thence map our progress.
Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth constitutes an attempt at reading the
ways we can map cyberspace along the same lines offered by David Bell and
Barbara M. Kennedy in their Cybercultures Reader, which is to “understand
the ways in which cyberspace…is currently being experienced and imag-
ined.”138 Trying at the same time to keep away from the hype surrounding
cyberspace, it is helpful to keep in mind Behar’s wise warning that “with
tempered reflection, reasoned argument, and empirical study we can be saved
from the excesses of hype that so severely mystify and distort the actual im-
plications and consequences of cyberspace developments.”139
As a critical theorist, my approach will be governed by questions of
writing and as such I will treat cyberspace as an ultimate text which is being
constantly and infinitely re-written by its users. One of the recurrent ideas will
be that postmodernist and post-structuralist theories have suddenly seen
themselves actually translated into cyberspace. Cyberspace is thus the very
fertile testing ground of the seminal theories/writings of Walter Benjamin,
Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis
Borges, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Jean-François Lyo-
tard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Hakim Bey, and many others. Writ-
ing—Écriture in a Barthean sense—will form, along with the twin concepts of
myth and the city, the backbone of this investigation. Cyberspace, as I will try
to show throughout, fills the contemporary mythical void by re-creating an
already-there virtual reality through the magical/mythical medium of writing
with the city as model.
The following chapter, “Beginnings,” covers the development of cyber-
space up to the present time and also presents the history of cyberculture
studies;
Chapter three, “New Maps for a New Body,” looks at maps in general and
at mythical maps in particular in order to find out how they can lead to a better
understanding of cybermapping;
28 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Chapter four, “Cyberspace as Myth,” shows that myth, far from being
absent from our contemporary lives, has resurrected in cyberspace. Myth also
provides a working framework for a theory of cybermapping;
Chapter five, “Cyberspace as Écriture: the Metaverse,” forms, with
chapter four, the centerpiece and hub around which this whole investigation
rotates. Cyberspace, when approached through writing, proves to be yet an-
other textual space with its unique features. Cyberspace as a new form of
writing is mappable space;
Chapter six, “Cyberspace as City,” uses the city as model and locus of a
writing of myth and of a mythical writing; and
Chapter seven, “Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace,” investigates ways
in which issues of gender, race, class, authority and power, protest, anarchy
and resistance to information oppression can construct maps and islands in
cyberspace.

N O T E S

1 Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (New York: Penguin, 1988), 20.
2 Pierre Lévy, Les Technologies de l’intelligence: L’avenir de la pensée à l’ère
informatique (Paris: La Découverte, 1990), 18. All quotations from French sources
appearing below have been freely translated by me.
3 Ibid., 17.
4 Pierre Lévy, L’Intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (Paris: La
Découverte, 1997), 11.
5 Ibid., 11–12.
6 Ibid., 21–23.
7 Ibid., 25.
8 Pierre Lévy, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel? (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 10.
9 J. Hillis Miller, “Moving Critical Inquiry On,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004),
414–20, 415–16.
10 Marshall McLuhan, “Speed of Cultural Change,” College Composition and
Communication 9.1 (Feb. 1958), 16–20, 20.
11 Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove
Press, 1996), 3.
12 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), xi.
13 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1997), 278.
14 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1992), 1.
 After the Break 29

15 Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003),

695–718, 697.
16 Ibid., 701.
17 Lévy, Technologies, 64. See also Arturo Escobar’s essay, “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes
on the Anthropology of Cyberculture,” Current Anthropology 35.3 (Jun. 1994), 211–31,
which provides clear links between cyberculture and modernity/postmodernism and
problematizes, among other things, ways in which a post-structuralist understanding of
the body is to be constructed in cyberspace. Escobar’s paper also reviews various types
of cultural analysis conducted toward the articulation of what he calls an “anthropology
of cyberculture.”
18 J. Hillis Miller, “‘World Literature’ in the Age of Telecommunications,” World
Literature Today 74.3 (Summer 2000), 559–61, 559.
19 Bruce Sterling, “The Manifesto of January 3, 2000,” Whole Earth (Summer 1999), 4–9,
5.
20 Friedrich Kittler, “There is no Software,” Ctheory (Oct. 18, 1995), online at http://www.
ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=74, as article a032 [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
21 Lévy, Technologies, 135–36.
22 Marjorie Worthington, “Bodies that Natter: Virtual Translations and Transmissions of
the Physical,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.2 (Winter 2002), 192–208.
23 Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.
24 Ibid., 44.
25 Frances Dyson, “‘Space,’ ‘Being,’ and Other Fictions in the Domain of the Virtual,” in
The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, John
Beckmann, ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 27–45, 31.
26 Ibid., 33.
27 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 9–10.
28 Ibid., 265.
29 Marshall McLuhan, “Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media,” The
Journal of Economic History 20.4 (Dec. 1960), 566–75, 575.
30 Thomas Pynchon’s “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?” in The New York Times Book Review
(Oct. 28, 1984), 1, 40–41, gives an interesting overview of “Luddism” and how the
meaning has changed throughout the years. To Pynchon, even the most die-hard
Luddites will be hard-pressed to forsake their computers as knowledge is seen by all as
power.
31 Jodi Dean, “Virtual Fears,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24.4
(Summer 1999), 1069–78.
32 Ray Kurzweil, “The Human-Machine Merger: Why we will Spend Most of Our Time in
Virtual Reality in the 21st Century,” originally presented at the ACM Siggraph
Conference, Jul. 2000. Later published as “Merging Human and Machine,” Computer
Graphics World (Aug. 2000), 23–24.
33 Tyler Stevens, “‘Sinister Fruitiness’: Neuromancer, Internet Sexuality and the Turing
Test,” Studies in the Novel 28.3 (Fall 1996), 414–33, 414.
30 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

34 Janet Moursund, “SANCTUARY: Social Support on the Internet,” in Mapping

Cyberspace: Social Research on the Electronic Frontier, Joseph E. Behar, ed. (Dowling
College Press, 1997), 53–78, 61.
35 Lévy, Virtuel, 115.
36 Lévy, Technologies, 16.
37 Qtd in Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand up? Boundary
Stories about Virtual Cultures,” in The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara
M. Kennedy, eds. (London: Routledge, 2002, 504–28), 517.
38 Lévy, Technologies, 16.
39 Ibid., 12–13.
40 Dery, Escape, 14.
41 J. Hillis Miller, “Literary Study among the Ruins,” Diacritics 31.3 (Fall 2001), 57–66,
57.
42 Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (New York:
Gramercy Books, 1994), 1596. In this and other instances from the same source I have
not necessarily kept the original numbering of definitions, giving them sequentially
instead.
43 Paul Levinson, in his Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, on
and off Planet (London: Routledge, 2003), prefers to follow the pair “talking” and
“walking” as he traces the development of cyberspace as opposed to “real space.”
Levinson’s book is a clear diatribe against cyberspace and its excesses, as he writes in
his preface: “Cyberspace…exceeds its humanity when it challenges the core of
realspace, or the place where physical presence, not just exchange of information, is
essential” (xii).
44 Richard Norton, “What is Virtuality?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30.4
(Summer 1972), 499–505, 499.
45 Ibid., 500.
46 Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk:
Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London: Sage, 2000), 5.
47 Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class
(Montreal: New World Perspectives, 2001), 1.
48 Julio Bermudez and Debra Gondeck-Becker, “Emerging Architectures in the Virtual
Scape: Architecture of (Im)Possibilities,” Sixth International Symposium on Electronic
Art (ISEA), Montreal, Canada (Sep. 18–22, 1995).
49 Qtd. in Cheryl Kolak Dudek, “Fiber/Cyber/Text,” Surface Design Journal 26.2 (Winter
2002), 26–31, 31. The Eisenman original can be found in the CCA Competition for the
Design of Cities, Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
exhibited on Nov. 15, 2000–Apr. 1, 2001.
50 Philippe Queau, “Virtual Multiplicities,” Diogenes 46.183 (Fall 1998), 107–110, 107.
51 Lévy, Virtuel, 13.
52 Ibid., 69–76.
53 Ibid., 10.
54 Ibid., 10, 23.
 After the Break 31

55 Ibid., 15–16.
56 Ibid., 18.
57 Brian Massumi, “Line Parable for the Virtual (On the Superiority of the Analog),” in
Beckmann, Virtual Dimension, 305–21, 309.
58 Jaron Lanier, “Virtual Reality: A Techno-Metaphor with a Life of its Own,” Whole
Earth (Fall 1999), 16–18, 17.
59 Mark Poster, “Theorizing Virtual Reality: Baudrillard and Derrida,” in Cyberspace
Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, Marie-Laure Ryan, ed.
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 42–60, 44.
60 Geert Lovink, “From Speculative Media Theory to Net Criticism,” European Media Art
Festival, Osnabrück, Germany (May 7–11, 1997). Online at http://www.emaf.de/1997/
vortrag_e.html [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
61 David Silver, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies
1990–2000,” in Web Studies: Rewriting Media Studies for the Digital Age, David
Gauntlett, ed. (Oxford UP, 2000), 19–30. Fredric Jameson says in this context: “Besides
the nomadic horde, I believe that another concept in the toolkit of late Deleuze can be
seen as a variation on the ideal schizophrenic, and that is the enormously
influential—and also relatively incomprehensible—theme of virtuality, which has been
saluted as the first original philosophical conceptualization of the computer and
cyberspace” (Jameson, “Temporality,” 711).
62 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge,
1994), 9.
63 Ibid., 9.
64 Ibid., 21.
65 John Armitage, “Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology: The Politics of
Cyberculture in the Age of the Virtual Class,” Ctheory (Mar. 1, 1999), online at
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=111, as article a068 [Last accessed Oct. 12,
2006].
66 Bruce Sterling, “The Life and Death of Media,” Sixth International Symposium on
Electronic Art (ISEA), Montreal, Canada (Sep. 18–22, 1995).
67 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 2000), 30.
68 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text,” in Ryan, Cyberspace
Textuality, 78–107, 81.
69 Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 2001), 1.
70 Paul C. Adams, in “Cyberspace and Virtual Places,” Geographical Review 87.2 (Apr.
1997), 155–71, writes: “Gibson’s vision has been prodigious. Today his influence is
found in children’s cartoons, Japanese movies, contemporary novels, and even screen
savers—programs that turn an idle computer screen into graphic art” (165).
71 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 67.
72 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 55–56.
73 Ibid., 56.
32 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

74 Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Welcome to Cyberspace: What is it? Where is it? And how do
we get there?” Time (Spring 1995), 4–11, 4.
75 Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace, 5–6.
76 Lévy, Intelligence, 30.
77 Qtd in Elmer-DeWitt, “Welcome,” 8.
78 Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps,” in Bell and Kennedy, Cybercultures,
29–44, 29.
79 Ibid., 30.
80 Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality, 86.
81 Ibid., 14.
82 Heim, Metaphysics, 83.
83 Robert Nirre, “Spatial Discursions: Flames of the Digital and Ashes of the Real,”
Ctheory (Feb. 13, 2001), online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=134, as
article a092 [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006]. See also Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
84 Roy Ascott, “Moistmedia, Technoetics and the Three VRs,” Tenth International
Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Paris, France (Dec. 7–10, 2000), proceedings
online at http://www.isea2000.com/ [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
85 Roy Ascott, “Arts Education @ the Edge of the Net: The Future Will be Moist!” Arts
Education Policy Review 102.3 (Jan.-Feb. 2001), 9–10, 9.
86 Hans Moravec, “The Senses Have no Future,” in Beckmann, Virtual Dimension, 85–95.
87 Lévy, Technologies, 62.
88 Ibid., 219.
89 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille Plateaux
(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), 9.
90 Dyson, “Space,” 31.
91 Webster’s, 884–885.
92 Jason Haslam, in “Coded Discourse: Romancing the (Electronic) Shadow in The
Matrix1,” College Literature 32.3 (Summer 2005), 92–115, writes in this context that
“critics and fans of both the film and the subgenre have portrayed The Matrix as the first
successful filmic translation of the imagery of cyberpunk, which is usually seen as being
founded by, and epitomized in, William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer” (92).
93 Gibson, Neuromancer, 81.
94 Ibid, 315–16.
95 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 96–97.
96 William Gibson, Count Zero (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 62.
97 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 105.
98 Ray Kurzweil, “Merging Human and Machine,” Computer Graphics World (Aug.
2003), 23–24.
99 Lévy, Technologies, 137.
100 Ibid., 142.
101 Webster’s, 1329.
 After the Break 33

102 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 3.

103 Ibid., 6.
104 Ibid., 7.
105 Ibid., 12–13.
106 See also Robin Hanson’s “How to Live in a Simulation,” Journal of Evolution and
Technology 7 (Sep. 2001). Hanson poses the problem of whether we can know for sure
that we are not living in a simulation ourselves. Others, like Brian Massumi in his
“Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari,” Copyright 1
(1987), seriously doubt Baudrillard’s views, disposing of them as fun reading and hyper
cynicism. From a different angle, Laura J. Huey, in her “Policing the Abstract: Some
Observations on Policing Cyberspace,” Canadian Journal of Criminology 44.3 (Jul.
2002), is keen on assuring the judicial body that cyberspace is not mere simulacra, and
that while cyberspace is an imperfect copy of the world, its spaces do mirror and
duplicate existing realities of oppression and resistance.
107 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 159.
108 Gibson, Count Zero, 9–10.
109 Ibid., 24–25.
110 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 164.
111 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 11.
112 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 200.
113 Espen Aarseth, “Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock: The
Temporality of Ergodic Art,” in Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality, 31–41, 31.
114 Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace, 1.
115 Still online at http://www.mappa.mundi.net and also at http://mundi.net/maps [Last
accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
116 According to “Domain Name School: The Domain Name Educator” online at http://
www. domainnameschool.com/domainnames.htm [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
117 Martin Dodge, “Welcome to Cyber-Geography Research,” “About” section, online at
http://www.cybergeography.org/about.html [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
118 Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, Atlas of Cyberspace (London: Addison-Wesley, 2001).
119 Rob Kitchin, “About the Book,” online at http://www.kitchin.org/atlas/about.html [Last
accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
120 Dodge and Kitchin, Atlas, 2.
121 Ibid., 3.
122 Steve Branigan et al., “What Can you do with Traceroute?” IEEE Internet Computing
5.5 (Sep.–Oct. 2001), 96.
123 “Lumeta’s Brilliant Internet Map Featured at Glasgow Science Centre; Queen Elizabeth
in Attendance for Centre’s Grand Opening,” Business Wire (Jul. 17, 2001).
124 Lévy, Technologies, 43.
125 Ibid., 47.
126 Webster’s, 1471.
34 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

127 Michael E. Doherty, Jr., “Marshall McLuhan Meets William Gibson in ‘Cyberspace’,”
CMC Magazine (Sep. 1, 1995), 4.
128 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 13.
129 Dyson, “Space,” 32–33.
130 Massumi, “Line Parable,” 306.
131 Dodge and Kitchin, Mapping, 71.
132 Lévy, Intelligence, 9–13.
133 Ibid., 147.
134 Ibid., 153, 183–85.
135 Paul F. Starrs, “The Sacred, the Regional, and the Digital,” The Geographical Review
87.2 (Apr. 1997), 193–218, 198.
136 Cameron Bailey, “Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace,” Sixth International
Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Montreal, Canada (Sep. 18–22, 1995), later
published in Immersed in Technology, Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod, eds.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 29–50.
137 David Gelernter, “The Second Coming–A manifesto,” Edge 70 (Jun. 15–19, 2000).
Online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge70.html [Last accessed Oct. 12,
2006].
138 Bell and Kennedy, Cybercultures, 1.
139 Behar, Mapping Cyberspace, 5.
C H A P T E R T W O

Beginnings

We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s
turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of
closure. Modernity was ending.
William Gibson, Virtual Light1

C
yberspace has basically been depicted, until now, in three forms: as
text-only, as text and graphics, and as graphics-only. The differences
have been historical, technological, and preferential. Historically, the
processor power necessary to produce smooth real-time graphics was lacking
and text-only was the quickest and most stable way to present other worlds. As
a consequence of text-only output, users had to input their interactions with
the program in text as well.2 As processor power increased, text output was
matched with still graphics which would change as environments changed.
With the introduction of the mouse, “clickable” graphics became the fashion
and gradually took the place of text input. Graphics-only games launched the
whole simulation industry into a new age where real-time graphical exposure
was paramount to a totally immersing experience. Yet, “pockets of resistance”
are still to be found, mainly comprised of purists who vehemently advocate
text-only as the acme of cyberspace and the real realm of the mind.3 I will
show later how text, despite the vagaries or representation, has been and still is
the prime element in cyberspace.
Cyberspace as technology can be traced back to the 1950s in non-digital
form with a company called Avalon Hill which kept players awake for hours,
even days, painstakingly engaging, on detailed table-top maps, in strategic and
tactical warfare recreating battles from Gettysburg to Stalingrad. Players
would go through intricate rules, timetables, and a myriad other variables
regulating movement, terrain, line of sight, weather conditions, wind speed,
etc. In 1973, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented a new game which was
to galvanize table-top players all over the world and create a whole new
36 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

gaming genre known as RPG (Role-Playing Game): “Dungeons and Drag-

ons.” As opposed to the earlier table-top games, Dungeons and Dragons does
not use a board and the only map is held by the “Dungeon Master” who di-
vulges to the players their bearings as they progressively move from one area
to another. The Dungeon Master doubles as storyteller since the players have
only her/him to rely on while they fill a narrative space with their choices and
actions. A typical D&D game would begin with the Dungeon Master giving a
brief overview of the history of the place, whether it is a castle, a forest, or an
antique city, whetting the players’ appetite with a description of the fabulous
treasures hidden therein, and then the dialogues would typically begin in the
following fashion:
–DM: You come out of the forest and you just see the castle of Mangoli in front of
you. It is a huge building with high smooth walls surrounded by a moat. The path
through which you have arrived stops in front of a gate. Nobody seems to be there.
What do you want to do now?

–Player 1: (looking at the other players) We decide to come closer, OK?

–Players 2 and 3: OK, we come closer.

–DM: Fine. The moment you cross the gate an iron grating suddenly falls behind you
and blocks your way back.

–Player 3: Zounds! We should have taken a wood log from the forest and we could
have put it below the gate to keep a way out!

–DM: While you’re talking, from the gate to your left has just sprung out a small
battalion of orcs. There are eight of them.4

As seen from the typical encounter above, most of the game is played in the
imagination of the players. One of the early D&D manuals has this to say
about imagination:
The Dungeon Master imagines the setting, the story, the map of the dungeon where
the players will be. He materializes the dungeon in a drawing. The players imagine
themselves to be the characters who will enter the dungeon and play there…Potential
spectators follow in imagination the great adventures also taking place in
imagination!5

As to the dungeon map, carefully hidden by the DM and revealed only as the
players uncover new ground, the manual says the following: “The dungeon is
the play area, drawn as a detailed map, inside of which will take place the
actions and the combats the characters will go through. On this map is marked
the placement of traps, treasures, and monsters.”6 Detailed instructions are
given to the DM for the design of the dungeon and for the display of only bits
 Beginnings 37

of the map to the players, never the whole plan; as the players advance in the
dungeon(s), old bits are withdrawn and new ones given.7 More recently, the
Dungeon Master’s Guide, published by the “official” Wizards of the Coast,
gives the following advice to the DM: “When one of the players is drawing a
map as the characters explore a new place, give her a break. Describe the
layout of the place in as much detail as she wants, including dimensions of
rooms,” but also warns: “Of course, when the PCs [player characters] are lost
in a dungeon or walking through fog, the whole point of the situation is that
they don’t know where they are (or where they’re going). In cases such as
these, don’t take pains to help the mapper.”8
Table-top games, as they developed into D&D and RPGs on their way to
becoming computer games, helped place—or replace—in the forefront three
interconnected elements which are still key features of any cybermapping
concept: one, myth suddenly came to be essential, as magic and fantasy realms
proved to be the main attraction to players; two, the storytelling element be-
came the only way to move the story forward: not only did the DM have to
verbally describe the setting and the action, but the players also had to tell each
others and the DM what they wanted to do—with the advent of the computer,
speaking will be replaced by typing or, in other words, by writing; three, the
concept of mapping, probably taken from the fog-of-war uncertainty of actual
war games, evolved into something which will stay, in one form or another,
the main problem to be dealt with in cyberspace: the map, instead of remaining
a stationary entity, became a dynamic positioning device following the players
in the moment, thus forcing them, first, to rely on their memory in order to
remember what paths had already been taken and second, to rely on their
imagination in order to anticipate what might lie ahead. These three elements,
namely, myth, writing, and the dynamic nature of the map are, again, indis-
sociable features of cybermapping.
With the spiriting away of the static, conventional map, the players’ ex-
perience took on a slightly ethereal quality and forced participants to interi-
orize their bearings to the extent that they felt themselves actually inside the
dungeon, actually fighting monsters and looting treasures.9 Such translation
might explain the attraction the game has held over players up until now with
clubs and federations all over the world. But a hard blow was in store for the
pen-and-paper purists: the coming of the computer on the scene would further
change the way mapping was conceived.
In 1972, computer map plotter Will Crowther, husband of Pat Crowther
who had found a secret passage in one of the most famous caves in the Bed-
quilt Cave area in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, produced the first of what
would be a long and venerable line of “Interactive Fiction” (IF) games, the
38 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

famous “Advent.” In the words of Graham Nelson—the creator of Inform, one

of the most famous development systems for the writing of text adven-
tures,—Will Crowther “invented a new category of computer program and of
literature,” a gaming genre rich in levels, details, and treasures.10
In 1976, Don Woods, working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, discovered Crowther’s game on what was then the ARPANET
network and offered to rework the cave system and stock it with more
“magical” items and puzzles. Nelson judiciously remarked, in The Inform
Designer’s Manual, that “there is a Crowther and a Woods in every designer,
the one intent on recreating an experienced world, the other with a really neat
puzzle which ought to fit somewhere.”11 This marked the starting point, in
cyberspace, of the actualization of the age-old dichotomy between reality and
virtuality, between the actual and the potential, and between static and dy-
namic concepts of mapping.
By 1977, “Advent” was circulating everywhere and quickly became
something of an addiction. The latest incarnation of the game can now be
found online at the Interactive Fiction Archive, the pilgrimage place for IF
aficionados created by Volker Blasius and maintained by David Kinder and
Stephen Granade.12 One of the latest versions, called “Adventure: The Inter-
active Original,” is dutifully credited to Will Crowther and Don Woods but
also credits Donalk Ekman, David M. Baggett, and Graham Nelson for re-
constructing it. The game begins in typical, time-honored IF fashion:
At End of Road

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a
forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

>

The > sign prompts the players to input, through the keyboard, whatever they
want to do and the map, again, is withheld from the player, only to be given on
the spot after such commands as “look” or “examine place.” Yet the computer,
taking the place of the DM, was different in two ways: first, it lacked the
human element and blindly enforced the rules ascribed to it by the
programmer and, second, the team-spirit which reigned in D&D simply
disappeared. The player had become a single, solitary wanderer in the mazes
of caves churned out on-screen by “Advent.” Instead of discussing their
actions, players had to make do with the program’s limited vocabulary, called
the “parser,” and soon learned they could also input abbreviated commands
such as “n” for north, “s” for south, “w” for west, “e” for east, “d” for down,
and “u” for up in order to move around the caves. Players were free to draw
 Beginnings 39

their own maps as the game advanced since it invariably involved a lot of
back-tracking. In fact, such was the need for mapping that additional software
was later specifically designed to help in the drawing of rooms, hallways, and
other map features. The “Frobot Magic Adventure Mapper,” the “Interactive
Fiction Mapper,” “Mapper,” and “MapMaker,” to name just some of the most
widely used, added a new dimension to mapping by spiriting away the last
remnant of “physicality” from the game, in this case the pencil and paper.
Mapping was done either by entering information onto the mapping software,
or was performed automatically on screen, the player having only to step into a
room or a hallway in order for the mapping software to update the digital map.
Whichever the method, mapping had entered cyberspace. As Mark J. P. Wolf
pointed out in this context, the player “has a stake in the navigation of space,
as knowledge of the video game’s space is often crucial to a good
performance.” 13 Furthermore, what were noisy, sometimes boisterous
gatherings around a big table laden with paper, pencils, charts, and the
obligatory drinks and sandwiches, plus the continuously rattling sound of
unusually-shaped dice, became a totally silent head-to-head exchange of
written words. It had, in fact, become a contest of writing.
Yet what drew players away from the social gatherings of D&D was a
certain kind of magic which was lacking from the human-to-human encoun-
ters: what was probably the illusion—illusion because behind the “machine”
existed a very human game designer—of trying to “beat the machine,” trying
to overcome not a human mind with all its frailties and idiosyncrasies, but the
cool, inert, unthinking force of matter, binary electrical signals hiding beneath
human-like written words. Mankind’s greatest dream, that of mind controlling
matter was, for the first time in the history of humanity, at the fingertips of
almost any individual. Players became not only adventurers in the game they
were playing, but also humans re-enacting the age-old ritual of mind over
brute force. Back in the 1970s, cyberspace indeed began to fill the mythical
void by re-creating virtual reality through the magical medium of writing.
But cyberspace, with “Advent,” was little more than a makeshift space
with boundaries pre-set by the programmer and with characters the responses
of which were limited to the extent of their parser. When all was said and
done, when puzzles were solved and treasures scavenged, there was little to do
in IF apart from signing off for good and beginning a new game. Surely, this
could not be all of cyberspace. Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, at the
University of Essex, took over where “Advent” had left and devised, in 1979,
“Essex MUD,” short for “Essex Multi-User Dungeon.” The Essex MUD was
only the first of many MUDs (later on the “Dungeon” was transformed, ele-
gantly, into “Dimension” as it had to acquire, for many, more respectability) to
40 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

spring later, lasting until the late 1980s. To the usual mapping descriptions of
“Advent” was added a crucial change: players were no longer solitarily
fighting computer-generated orcs and goblins; they connected through phone
lines and/or networks and met, through their characters, together. The realms
were now filled with human beings and it is from that time on that cyberspace
became a social reality. Later, the gaming elements were found to attract less
participants than expected, and little by little users would meet to chat and
discuss other issues as well. MUDs took a new turn in 1990 with the creation,
by Pavel Curtis, of LambdaMOO, the first social MUD accommodating users
who would construct a real world in cyberspace. MUDs that were devoted to
gaming quickly saw the potentials of social gathering in cyberspace and fol-
lowed suit, producing a bevy of MUDs devoted to education, programming,
science, anthropology, literature, and other fields. But the map was still there,
and it was indispensable. What had been a hitherto mythical space inhabited
by unreal denizens and fantastically convoluted mazes filled with deadly traps
was transformed, overnight, into a similar meeting place where, instead, se-
rious academic discussions were being held.
In fact, more than twenty-five years after the creation of “Essex MUD,”
immersive online communities are alive and kicking. The first electronic ur-
ban environment, “Habitat,” was designed in 1986 and could accommodate
20,000 users simultaneously. “Regions,” as they were called, were inhabited
by “toons,” representations of users as blocky images with a torso, legs, arms,
and head. They could also be represented as taking different positions such as
standing and walking. The landscape where these toons—also called “ava-
tars,” but more on this later—existed was made up of simplistic renditions of
houses on green grass under a blue sky. As Michael Ostwald remarked,
“Habitat became more than a poorly rendered computer game, it was an in-
teractive environment, a place with its own currency, newspaper and tradi-
tions.”14
The most famous of these new cyber-environments is undoubtedly “Ac-
tive Worlds,” 15 started in 1995, and now accessed through the Internet at
http://www.activeworlds.com. In their own words, Active Worlds,
the web’s most powerful Virtual Reality experience, lets you visit and chat in
incredible 3D worlds that are built by other users. Think you have what it takes to
build your own world or Virtual Reality game? Active Worlds is the place for you,
where in minutes you can create fascinating 3D worlds that others can visit and chat
in. The Active Worlds Universe is a community of hundreds of thousands of users
that chat and build 3D virtual reality environments in millions of square kilometers of
virtual territory.16

Virtually anything can be done on Active Worlds. For business-oriented users,

 Beginnings 41

Active Worlds can help them “[c]reate massive amounts of buzz, sell
products, support customers…perform interactive product demos, and
conduct on-line corporate training and other e-learning initiatives.” For
shoppers, a lot is offered:
If you love to shop you will find plenty to do in Active Worlds. @mart, the first “real”
3D virtual mall in cyberspace is designed to resemble a modern shopping mall…With
over 100 stores selling a wide range of products, @mart is a unique e-commerce
experience.

Since Active Worlds is a full cyberspace world, customers can buy either
“traditional” products for their “real life” needs or “virtual” products they can
use in Active Worlds. For the gaming enthusiast, the choices are only limited
by the imagination, ranging from trivia games to bowling, soccer, chess, and
bingo.
The educational side is not forgotten, though, witness the creation of
whole worlds called “Active Worlds Educational Universe” (AWEDU) which
host, in full graphical rendering, simulations of architecture departments from
famous universities to science labs and ThinkQuest projects. Participants
include the Art Center College of Design (California), Bologna University, the
Boston Architectural Center, Canterbury Christ Church University College,
Cornell University, George Washington University, Harvard University,
Indiana University, Loyola University, the National Defense University, the
University of California, the University of Hong Kong, and many others. The
spatial and mapping configuration of Active Worlds is also impressive,
boasting more than “1000 3D virtual reality worlds.”
Interestingly, the most popular worlds are those which display mythical or
fantastic elements: “Mars,” “Metatropolis,” “Atlantis,” “Godzilla,” “The 13th
Floor,” “Pollen World,” “Fantasy World,” “Castles Worlds,” “Knights
World,” “Patagonia,” “AD&DRPG” (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Role
Playing Game), “Ashmore,” “Avalon,” “Borg,” “Destiny,” “Kakariko,”
“Mutation,” etc.
But is Active Worlds actually a workable cyberspace solution? According
to Active World statistics, there are currently over 1.5 million individual users
worldwide, making more than 1,000,000 hits to their universe per day, with
more than 40,000 users having registered as “citizens.” Sky maps of Alpha-
World, the earliest and most famous world, are on display showing the
population changes from 1996 to 2001 (after 2001, and in Active Worlds’ own
words, AlphaWorld maps became too large to be displayed online) . The total
area of AlphaWorld covers about 400sq kilometers, and would take two hours
for an avatar (the player’s persona in cyberspace) to walk directly from one
end to another.
42 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Interaction between citizens (users who have paid their joining fees) or
between citizens and tourists (users who have not paid fees and who are re-
stricted to certain areas) is simple: once the Active World software is
downloaded and installed, a graphical user interface (GUI) runs in a screen
showing the area in front of the user, like in first-person shooters, and a
communication area, like the one in chat rooms. Users move around with their
avatar names hovering above their head. To communicate, users can click on
other users and type the message in the chat area, or they can simply choose
from a list of names and compose the message. Ralph Schroeder, Avon Huxor
and Andy Smith conducted some insightful research on the geography and
social interaction in Active Worlds. Their focus, though, was on spatial layout,
transportation and mobility, and time. They accurately pinpoint the myth of
the frontier that shaped the American society as one of the prime movers in the
population boom of Active Worlds (at the time of their writing the article, in
2001, there were 500 worlds compared to more than 1000 now). The physical
geography of AlphaWorld is a simple one: it is a flat plain of virtual land
429,038 x 429,038 km in size, 4.4% larger than California. Navigation is
based on a Cartesian system with the center of AlphaWorld at coordinates 0,0,
known as Ground Zero. Things function pretty much like in real life with, of
course, all the liberties afforded by being disembodied in cyberspace. Dis-
tances can be quickly covered by flying. Citizens can build permanent resi-
dences after claiming virtual land according to Active Worlds regulations. A
newspaper, “The New World Times,” is issued; an Alpha World Police De-
partment monitors irregularities such as “avabuse,” or avatar abuse, mainly
done through the medium of writing.17 It is clear that even now, at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century—and more than twenty years after “Ad-
vent,”—myth and writing make up two of the most important pillars of
successful cyberspace construction.
Interactive Fiction, in the meantime, was not going to lose ground to the
graphical revolution that was slowly sweeping the market as processors grew
in computing power and decreased in price. In 1979, students at MIT founded
Infocom, the company destined to become synonymous with professional
commercial IF. In 1980, “Zork: The Great Underground Empire” became the
most famous IF game of all times, with an opening that soon became the stuff
of legends:
West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

>
 Beginnings 43

“Zork” was followed by other Infocom successes like “Arthur,” “Border

Zone,” “Bureaucracy,” “Deadline,” “Enchanter,” “Sorcerer,” “Spellbreaker,”
“Lurking horror,” “Planetfall,” and “Suspended.” Other companies soon
followed in the wake of Infocom’s success: Level 9, Scott Adams’ Adventure
International, Topologika, Magnetic Scrolls, Artic Adventures, Firebird,
Infogrammes, etc. The years between 1982 and 1986 were the golden years of
text adventures, yet it soon became clear that text-only games could not hold
long in front of the more immersing graphical games unleashed on the market.
Ever since the arrival of “Doom,” “Quake,” “Unreal,” “Jedi Knight” and their
sequels, IF went into a hibernation period, with most of the early gaming
companies ceasing to publish text-based games. With graphically-intensive
games such as “Morrowind,” “Gothic” I and II (the third episode is scheduled
to come out in late 2006) and “Oblivion,” where players are let loose in an
environment where they decide what to do and what quests to follow and
whether they will stay in one game location as long as they wish or not, the
“dynamic” nature of gaming has, with the addition of luscious graphics,
acquired new dimensions.18
Paradoxically, however, the boom in graphical games produced a
counter-culture which yearned for a more purist approach to gaming and
which valued the imagination boost provided by text-only adventures where
players actually write their actions and movements and receive written feed-
back on them. Cyberspace had become so much like reality that it lost its
appeal. Users were expected to make a few mouse moves, click a few times,
and the job was done. Photo-realistic renditions of users, earlier an asset, now
became stale and unattractive. The magic was leaking somewhere, and the
culprit was probably too much “eye-candy” and too much realism. If cyber-
space were to became too realistic, then it would cease to be cyberspace and
would be another real-life medium like television, only more interactive. But
cyberspace had so much potential that such a fate has been, so far, averted,
witness, among other things, a resurgence of interest in IF. Indeed, it is in-
teresting to notice that, alongside giant strides on the graphical scene, a par-
allel boom can be witnessed in the opposite camp, that of text-only interactive
fiction. Since 1995, a yearly IF competition, engineered by Gerry Kevin
Wilson, has been gaining momentum: 12 IF games were entered in 1995, 26 in
1996, 34 in 1997, 27 in 1998, 37 in 1999, 53 in 2000, 51 in 2001, 38 in 2002,
30 in 2003, 36 in 2004, 36 in 2005, and 43 in 2006 (the results of the 2006
competition should be out toward the end of that year).19 Gems such as “An-
chorhead,” “Christminster,” “Curses,” “Edifice,” “Galatea,” “Photopia,” and
“Rameses,” to name a few, have propelled IF to the highest standards of fic-
tion writing, and have rejuvenated interest in a genre where imagination,
44 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

myth, and writing reign without rivals.

Indeed, movement along ephemeral map locations is probably what IF
users will spend most of their time doing. As Lev Manovich observes in “The
Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds,” the new technologies are taking cybernauts
back to “ancient forms of narrative” where the hero’s movements in space
define the plot.20 What Manovich comes very close to but does not indicate is
that ancient forms of narrative were built on the twin elements of myth and
storytelling, the recurring pair which, as I am trying to show throughout in this
book, combine to construct cyberspace and provide a framework for mapping
it. It is safe to pronounce that most, if not all, of the above representations of
cyberspace, from D&D to MUDs to IFs, can be grouped under the term of
“fiction,” very basically defined as “the class of literature comprising works of
imaginative narration, esp. in prose form.”21 Active Worlds fits the definition
well: although it is based on reality, it is a world fully created from the
imagination, not presented as fact, and dependent for its existence and good
functioning on writing and reading; it can thus be called literature in the loose
sense of the word.
The development of the computer industry and the concomitant need for
anchoring the cybernauts’ bearings have been paralleled by the development
of new literary genres that specifically deal with the possibilities inherent in
cyberspace. In fact, it should come as no surprise, after the above, that fiction
is the moving force behind many of the current concepts of cyberspace. In-
deed, Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash have, al-
most all by themselves, constructed the cyberspace scene and have become
cult classics. Dodge and Kitchin say:
Cyberpunk recognized and explored our new post-modern condition through a
literary vehicle that is itself decidedly post-modern…[Gibson and Stephenson] have
been particularly influential in shaping the development, visual interface and spatial
organization of cyberspace, and in articulating new geographic imaginations of
emerging spaces such as the Internet. Indeed, it is now claimed by some that recent
developments in both computing and society can be seen as an attempt to put their
fictional visions into practice.22

The word “novel” comes from the Latin nōvus, meaning “new,”23 and
Gibson’s Neuromancer is, indeed, a “new” “romance,” for, if we look up the
definition of “romance” we find that it is “a narrative depicting heroic or
marvelous achievements, colorful events or scenes, chivalrous devotion, un-
usual or even supernatural experiences, or other matters of a kind to appeal to
the imagination.”24 Neuromancer is almost all of the above. It is, of course, a
narrative which depicts the heroic and marvelous achievements of a hero,
Case, who, amidst many colorful events and more fantastic scenes, chival-
 Beginnings 45

rously devotes himself to the rescue of two women, one of them dead and
spirited to the world of the matrix. In an Orpheus-like sacrifice, Case “jacks”
into the matrix and encounters his lost love. The events are, to say the least,
unusual and supernatural, and the end result is definitely appealing to the
imagination. If one adds the term “new” to Gibson’s “romance,” a new literary
genre, the “cyberpunk” novel, has indeed emerged from his novel and con-
tinues, albeit in a different form, to the present day. 25 Jameson, talking about
attempts to think “the impossible totality of the contemporary world system,”
characterizes Gibson’s novel as “a new type of science fiction, called cyber-
punk,” an “exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual or
aural postmodern production” expressing nothing less than “global paranoia
itself.”26
What theorists of cyberspace owe Gibson is immense. It was probably
Neuromancer which expressed, for the first time, the joy and exhilaration of
being in cyberspace in contrast to real life: “In the bars he’d frequented as a
cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the
flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”27 The
way cyberspace is pictured might have come from descriptions like the fol-
lowing: “Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal
point…If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form,”28 and
Case’s cyber-fight with the AI defense system is an encounter of epic pro-
portions delivered with a prose that sounds like poetry and a description where
synesthesia blurs the boundaries of the senses: “The roof of his mouth cleaved
painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the
taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against
the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down.”29 A
kind of epiphany awaits Case as he enters into the heart of cyberspace. In
almost mystical overtones, he surrenders to the crushing emptiness and real-
izes that cyberspace, just like a hologram, contains the sum of everything in
every parcel of it. Omniscience, the prerogative of God, is granted to the ma-
trix “cowboy”:
He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded
in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was
Neuromancer)…He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper
of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset
beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).30

Gibson, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, toys with this idea of god-in-cyberspace,

leaving the reader to decide whether the matrix has a god which existed before
it or whether humans, through the matrix, gave it a god:
46 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

‘The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that
the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose
characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a “hidden people”. The
other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility
on the part of the matrix itself.”

‘That the matrix is God?’

‘In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the

mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being’s omniscience and
omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix.’

‘If it has limits, it isn’t omnipotent.’

‘Exactly…Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human

agency.’31

When Case, at the end of the novel, thinks that he has lost Linda forever, he
suddenly discovers, in cyberspace, the truth of the matter:
And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the Eastern
Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the
very edge of one of the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make out the
boy’s grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera’s.
Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind
her, arm across her shoulders, was himself.32

His earlier trip to the matrix and his encounter with Linda had left a trace on
the “vast steps of data.” Linda was not dead, after all, and his visit to her left
not only a mark but his whole self. The old dream of parallel lives, of missed
opportunities being granted anew and, most importantly, the eternal dream of
immortality, are fulfilled. There, in cyberspace, everything is possible and
nothing ever disappears. Memory, forever retained in data banks, is the great
preserver. Compared to this, reality is only a pale shadow of this grand utopian
world called cyberspace.
Neuromancer is, from the excerpts above, what every attempt at de-
scribing cyberspace boils down to: the battle between the flesh and the spirit,
the artistic purity of lines, the mystical synesthesia or the drug-like confusion
of sense, the mystically ethereal weightlessness, the feeling of omniscience,
and the illusion of immortality. Theology, art, poetry, mysticism, power, and
the ontological tragedy of being, all of these vie in Neuromancer to produce a
discourse which will form the backbone of cyberspace.
Published in 1992, Stephenson’s Snow Crash takes Gibson’s Neuro-
mancer one step further and adds a much-needed dose of humor to make cy-
berspace more palatable to the mainstream user. The hero of the novel, “Hiro
 Beginnings 47

Protagonist,” is described as “[l]ast of the freelance hackers, Greatest sword

fighter in the world…Specializing in software-related intel (music, movies &
microcode).”33 The pun on Hiro’s name is, of course, a realization that writing
can offer degrees of play that are not allowed in other modes, as Derrida
clearly showed with his coining of “différance” to rhyme with “difference.”
Hiro’s Japanese links allow him to “hack” his way out of difficult situations,
both in real life and in virtual reality, both as a katana master and a software
guru.
Hiro’s job, simply put, is to get information, any kind of information, store
it, and make it available to whoever wants it later, for, in the world of Snow
Crash, information is vital. As information is a commodity that is actively
sought and dearly paid, cyberspace is not Gibson’s elitist and ul-
tra-sophisticated construct but a place where everybody can go. This place is
accessed by jacking into the computer and donning special goggles:
The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro’s view of Reality. By drawing a
slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made
three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be
made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K
pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo
digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a
perfectly realistic soundtrack.34

In contrast to Gibson’s matrix, Stephenson’s 3-D world is, even to the

layperson, immediately translatable into a tangible technology, with parts and
terminology known to all.35 Stephenson goes to great lengths to explain the
differences between this virtual construct, called the Metaverse, and real life:
So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his
computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo,
this imaginary place is know as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the
Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.36

Compared to the dismal reality of Hiro’s real life accommodation, the

Metaverse is heaven. In fact, much of what has already been said about Active
Worlds can be found in the description and the functioning of the Metaverse,
almost down to the rules laid out for land acquisition, building, and human
interaction, and down to the liberties cyberspace can grant, including
“free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.”37
Of course, all of the Metaverse’s liberties with the physical and biological
constraints of reality are only a programmer’s show, the writing of a piece of
incredibly complex code, but a piece of writing nonetheless. Stephenson, in
the midst of a relaxed prose, is keen on reminding this fact to his readers:
48 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who

recognizes it more readily than his own mother’s date of birth: It happens to be a
power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is
equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the
foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important
number because that’s how many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits
is 0, and the other is 1.38

In the Metaverse, avatars are only pieces of software:

They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the
Metaverse…Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your
equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten
out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally
applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the
Metaverse.39

As events unfold in the novel, Hiro, both as avatar and as real physical person,
has to counteract the evil represented by Raven in and out of the Metaverse,
provoking interesting questions about the nature of what we call reality and
what we recognize now as cyberspace.
But things are never simple in cyberspace. Raven is the chief instrument in
bringing an information virus that affects hackers through the Metaverse:
cyberspace is not only a simulation, it is most importantly a portal through
which information, the essential element in the universe, can circulate. As
such, the battle is fought in and out of the Metaverse, in and out of the written
code, against a writing which wants to write off the data banks of those who
specialize in this writing, namely, hackers. A counter-writing, this virus,
called Snow Crash in the novel, parasites the writing of software and, by the
same token, the writing of the Metaverse itself.
Snow Crash shows, maybe in a more lucid way than Neuromancer, that
cyberspace—the Metaverse—is not necessarily a fake rendition of reality, and
is maybe not the ultimate reality behind our everyday physical dimension. But
the lack of distinction between the two worlds poses interesting questions
about the actual reality of both. In an imaginative tour de force, Stephenson
has a character called Ng wired to the Metaverse while simultaneously living,
and occasionally driving, in real life, a tank-like van. Since Ng’s real body is
wired shut, he can only control his van through the Metaverse, from multiple
monitors set in his cyberspace home, a French colonial villa in prewar Viet-
nam. In this absolute reversal, Ng’s physical body is almost non-existent, a
cumbersome and heavy tool controlled almost exclusively from the Metaverse
through cameras relaying information to cyber-monitors.40 Can the represen-
tation of the body, then, be only a medium through which information circu-
 Beginnings 49

lates and is stored, whether in real life or in cyberspace?

N O T E S

1 William Gibson, Virtual Light (London: Penguin, 1994), 89–90.

2 The ramifications of such writing processes will be made clear as this investigation
proceeds.
3 Even at the time of writing, countless numbers of people of all ages are playing “rogue”
or “rogue-like” games like “NetHack,” “Moria,” “Adom,” “Angband,” “Alphaman,”
“Kharne,” “Ragnarok,” “Saladir,” “Zangband,” and others too numerous to mention
where, on a DOS-like screen, heroes fight monsters in diverse environments, all
represented as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
characters. Graphic renderings with sound effect and music have been recently added,
but the appeal of the game has quickly suffered as a consequence.
4 Adapted from Mathilde Maraninchi, Donjons et Dragons: Le Jeu de rôle et de stratégie
de la nouvelle génération (Paris: Solar, 1982), 9–10.
5 Ibid., 11.
6 Ibid., 11.
7 Ibid., 61.
8 Dungeon Master’s Guide: Core Rulebook II v.3.5 (Renton: Wizards of the Coast, 2003),
15.
9 Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (NY: Henry Holt,
1999), and Graham Nelson’s The Inform Designer’s Manual, 4th edition (St. Charles:
The Interactive Fiction Library, 2001), online at http://inform-fiction.org/manual/ [Last
accessed Oct. 12, 2006], especially his chapter 46, 342–63, of the PDF manual, entitled
“A Short History of Interactive Fiction,” contain interesting details on the history of
virtual worlds and on the concept of mapping, and helped me edge my way, in some
places, through the maze of companies and platforms which sprang up in the early days
of computer gaming. Since it is not the purpose of this research to give a full history of
the development of cyber-gaming–there are better books on the subject like the ones
cited above–I have only followed the cybermapping trail. Other sources come from my
personal collection of games, both table-top and digital.
10 Nelson, 344.
11 Nelson, 345.
12 Online at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, at http://www.ifarchive.org/, and at other mirrors.
13 Mark J. P. Wolf, “Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space
in Video Games,” Film Quarterly 51.1 (Autumn 1997), 11–23, 13.
14 Michael Ostwald, “Virtual Urban Futures,” in Bell and Kenney, Cybercultures, 658–75,
670.
50 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

15 The company’s name is spelled “Activeworlds,” and the simulated realms “Active
Worlds.”
16 This and following references can be found online at http://www.activeworlds.com
[Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
17 Ralph Schroeder, Avon Huxor and Andy Smith, “Activeworlds: Geography and Social
Interaction in Virtual Reality,” Futures 33.7 (Sep. 2001), 569–87.
18 Two good chronologies of the development of the Internet can be found in Dery,
Escape, 4–8, and in Dodge and Kitchin, Mapping, 6–12.
19 See http://www.ifcomp.org [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006] for the latest competition
news and archives.
20 Lev Manovich, “The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds: Report from Los Angeles,” in
Digital Delirium, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds. (Montréal: New World
Perspectives, 2001), 288–300, 290–91.
21 Webster’s, 527.
22 Dodge and Kitchin, Atlas, 229.
23 Bernard Auzanneau and Yves Avril, Dictionnaire latin de poche (Paris: Le Livre de
poche, 2000), 405.
24 Webster’s, 1242.
25 See Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (NY: Arbor House,
1986).
26 Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.
27 Gibson, Neuromancer, 12.
28 Ibid., 216.
29 Ibid., 304.
30 Ibid., 304–305.
31 Gibson, Mona Lisa, 138.
32 Gibson, Neuromancer, 317.
33 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 17.
34 Ibid., 22.
35 True, Stephenson had the advantage of a technology which, since Gibson’s
Neuromancer, had not only grown exponentially, but had also become practically—and
more intuitively—available to a wider population.
36 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 22.
37 Ibid., 23.
38 Ibid., 23.
39 Ibid., 34. See also John C. Briggs, “Virtual Reality is getting Real: Prepare to Meet your
Clone,” The Futurist 36.3 (May-Jun. 2002), 34–41.
40 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 206–12.
C H A P T E R T H R E E

New Maps for a New Body

Disdain the flesh: blood and bones and network, a twisted skein of nerves, veins,
arteries.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations1

If, today, there can be such an intense fascination with the fate of the body, might this
not be because the body no longer exists?
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Body Invaders2

H
umanity’s old dream to go beyond the limitations of the body finds in
cyberspace an interesting testing ground: no longer the prisoner of an
unreliable and vexing body destined to perish, the cyberbody
promises access to immortality. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker ask the
following: “Why then be sad as the body is unplugged from the planet? What
is this if not the more ancient philosophical movement of immanence to
transcendence as the body is on its way to being exteriorized again?” 3
Exteriorized to be reborn in other shapes, in other combinations, in other
configurations. To Dyson, cybernauts are not in the present, for they are
entering a part of the future; they are not humans, for they are cyborgs,
half-beings half-machines; they are not on the earth, for they have entered into
a digital realm; and they are not in their bodies anymore, for they are
approaching what can be seen as pure mind. The new spaces where humans
are treading are “apocalyptic,” “nihilistic,” “impossible,” and presuppose “the
end of organic life.”4 Lévy talks of the new body in cyberspace as being
already “other,” as already exchanging identities with the other bodies around
it:
We are at the same time here and there thanks to the techniques of communication
and telepresence. Medical imaging has made our organic interiority transparent.
Grafts and prostheses are mixing us to others and to artefacts…We are altering our
52 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

individual metabolisms with drugs…Reproduction, immunity against diseases, the

regulation of emotions, all these performances hitherto private have become public
capacities, exchangeable, externalized.5

This new body, which Lévy calls the “hyperbody,” is a multiple body the
frontiers or limits of which have become blurred. Each new technology is
adding like a new kind of skin to the actual visible skin; bodies are becoming
disseminated toward the outside, and each individual body is becoming part
and parcel of an immense hyperbody both hybridized and globalized.
Humanity’s hyberbody “extends its chimerical tissues between the
epidermises, between the spaces, beyond the frontiers and the oceans, from
one shore to the other of the river of life.” 6 On the verge of becoming
etherealized, the virtual body—the “hyberbody,”—becomes, to Lévy, pure
speed, forever surging upward, a “glorious body” akin to that of the free-faller
and the surfer. 7 Far from being a “disincarnation,” the passage from the
physical to the virtual is seen as a “reinvention, a reincarnation, a
multiplication, a vectorization, a heterogenesis of the human,”8 Like Mikhail
Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, the centrifugal effect of the new technologies is
multiplying the body’s voices in kaleidoscopic fashion. As such, the human
body is also, like the computers which heralded the age of the virtual, the site
of hacking practices, the locus of a frenzied obsession with changing,
reworking, and re-programming the human body in order to make it work, as a
program, better, faster, with fewer of the bugs it originally came with (one is
tempted to say shipped with). To Gareth Branwyn, the body is indeed
becoming a hack site, a “nexus where humanity and technology are forging
new and powerful relationships.”9
To others, the presence of the body cannot be cancelled and driven out of
the cyberspace equation: we experience cyberspace, after all, because we have
a very physical brain and physical senses without which we would be dead,
lifeless bodies. Karen A. Franck voices this sobering reality of the physicality
of the body in virtual reality:
My physical body will occupy the virtual and physical worlds simultaneously; actions
I take will have consequences, albeit different ones, in both worlds. As in the physical
world, so in the virtual: perception will be active, depending upon actual or
anticipated physical movements.10

Lawrence Lessig, in “The Zones of Cyberspace,” sees both realms as places:

Cyberspace is a place. People live there. They experience all the sorts of things that
they experience in real space, there. For some, they experience more…While they are
in that place, cyberspace, they are also here. They are at a terminal screen, eating
chips, ignoring the phone. They are downstairs on the computer, late at night, while
 New Maps for a New Body 53

their husbands are asleep.11

The antipodes of pure mind and pure body, of pure ethereality and of pure
physicality, this still raises the question of bearings: whether cybernauts are
free-floating, desincarnated entities, or bodies firmly anchored to a physical
body and to a physical location, the problem of mapping is unavoidable. At the
ISEA2000 conference, Lucia Leão raised the following questions: “[C]an we
map the cyberspace? What kinds of maps are being created? Do these maps
have any use? Do they rescue their old function, which was to help the navi-
gator?” Leão then proceeds to give an introduction to cartography from
Ptolemy to the labyrinth theme and its variants and then attempts a classifi-
cation of cyberspace maps, citing “infrastructure maps,” “traceroutes maps,”
“websites maps,” “surf maps,” “internet visualization maps,” and “conceptual
or topographical maps,” ending with reflections on artists and maps.12 For all
the useful information presented, however, Leão fails to answer her own
questions, stopping short of really exploring the affinities obviously present
between cyberspace and myth.
But why is talk about cybermapping so difficult, or why does the issue
evade any further exploration and slips, like quicksilver, the moment one tries
to catch it? Is cyberspace, after all, so drastically different a dimension that
language is bound to falter as soon as it tries to picture this other realm? Mi-
chel Serres begins his book Atlas with the following questions: “Without a
plan, how to visit the city? Here we are, lost in the mountains or at sea,
sometimes even on the road, without a guide. Where are we and what to do?
Yes, where to pass by and where to go?”13 Short of a specific plan for the city,
for our city is virtual and multiple, we will strive to devise a practice and a
strategy of mapping cyberspace.
But first, how badly do we need a map? Can we keep on switching from
one reality to another, taking for reference point our everyday real-life bear-
ings? Manovich believes that virtual worlds are accessed through constant,
repetitive shifts between illusion and suspense, or between their own illusory
spaces and real space. From a Brechtian angle, distance is essential as we are
constantly reminded of the artificiality and constructedness of virtual worlds:
we ceaselessly shift between our screens and the world around us. But even
Manovich is aware of the ephemerality of this view, wondering whether cy-
berspace will remain the construction site we know now or whether it will
engulf everything around us.
Indeed, what will happen when there will be no other space to turn our
sight to, when all around will be only cyberspace? Are we now living in the
twilight zone where we can almost seamlessly slide from one reality to an-
other, unaware of the challenges ahead? Are we the last generation to enjoy
54 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

the ability to return to real life and to our real physical body? Baudrillard
thinks that simulation, unlike the mechanical prosthetic appendages of the
previous technologies which needed the immediate feedback of the body, is
capable of wrenching us from the physical for good:
[W]hen one reaches a point of no return (deadend) in simulation, that is to say when
the prosthesis goes deeper, is interiorized in, infiltrates the anonymous and
micro-molecular heart of the body, as soon as it is imposed on the body itself as the
“original” model, burning all the previous symbolic circuits, the only possible body
the immutable repetition of the prosthesis, then it is the end of the body, of its history,
and of its vicissitudes. The individual is no longer anything but a cancerous metastasis
of its base formula.14

To Baudrillard, when geographic and spatial exploration are brought to an end

by the disappearance of virgin territories, the principle of reality itself
disappears; when imagination has nowhere to fly to, when the map we have
currently drawn is covering the whole earth, when satellites have swept every
single inch of our planet, reality is deprived of its necessary counterpart,
imagination, and ceases to exist as well. Talking about the space race,
Baudrillard says that it “constitutes an irreversible crossing toward the loss of
the terrestrial referential.” 15 Will cyberspace, once firmly established, also
constitute an irreversible crossing toward the loss of the reality referential, or
will it provide another kind of reality?
Paul Virilio, however, is more scathing in his attacks on the looming
virtual landscape and heralds the end of movement as we know it and the
advent of a hegemony of time:
To pilot space, CYBERSPACE, like one used to pilot an automotive vehicle, here is
indeed the great aesthetic mutation of the techniques of INFORMATION. To transfer
to the near environment the control which was hitherto being exercised on the
“object,” the means of movement, and this thanks to the acquisition of a “fractal”
dimension, not of space but of time; of a real time which now permits to virtualize the
proximity of an individual through a procedure that enslaves movement, here is really
the most stupefying utilization of interactivity.16

As the movable real space of cybernauts shrinks, humans lose the use of
locomotion, and Virilio presents the frightening image of what might happen
when, equipped with the modern prostheses, they finally become “invalid,”
bringing to them the world instead of going toward it. Similar to a “squirrel in
its cage,” we helplessly witness the “mobile advance of things” around us.17
How will mapping be of any use when, still according to Virilio, virtual space
will be nothing like space but only a software program? A kind of reversal, a
shrinking of space will take place:
 New Maps for a New Body 55

Therefore, four centuries after the invention of Galileo’s telescope and thanks to the
prowess of tele-astronautics, the astronaut will travel from his room, calling to
himself stars controlled less by the effects of gravitational attraction than by those of
the reality generator.18

But Virilio does not lose sight, amidst these rather apocalyptic predictions, of
the question of cybermapping, to him still an almost insurmountable problem,
what he calls “the precise physical localization of the virtual object,” and adds:
“Delocalization” in turn producing an uncertainty as to the place of effective action,
prepositioning becomes impossible, thus putting into question the principle of
anticipation. The WHERE? abandoning its priority over the WHEN? and the HOW?
there remains a doubt, less about the efficacy of the verisimilitude of “virtual reality”
than about the nature of its localization, and thus on the actual possibilities of control
of the virtual environment.19

Virtual reality, because it delocalizes the physical subject, is not the simplistic
navigation in cyberspace; it is in fact the progressive “AMPLIFICATION OF
THE OPTICAL THICKNESS of real world appearances,”20 a thickening of
reality in order to give space to what is called globalization, a duplication of
the reality of the world.
But whether we agree with Virilio or not, the fact remains that cyberspace
is not going to disappear; Neil Spiller, addressing Virilio’s vehement attacks,
remarks that cyberspace “cannot be uninvented,” and that it is now a gradually
ubiquitous feature of our lives. More, Spiller chooses to look at ways in which
this delocalization so feared by Virilio can be put to positive uses. Spiller
believes that the mere existence of cyberspace “makes us address what it
means to be human,” and adds that it “expands our facility to learn, to connect
ideas and to talk and meet people.”21
Lévy, again, takes up the challenge posed by deterritorialization and
builds his theory of collective intelligence precisely on this point: social links
are better built on the relationship to knowledge, and this relationship can best
extend and expand in a “deterritorialized civility,” the merger between the
power of contemporary technology and the most intimate of subjectivities.22
To the deterritorialization of economic, human, and informational currents,
Lévy is proposing to answer with a deterritorialization of humanization itself
and specifically answers Baudrillard’s “kind of universal disappearance” and
Virilio’s “terrifying implosion of space-time”:
This book [Qu’est-ce que le Virtuel?] defends a different hypothesis, not
catastrophist: among the cultural evolutions working at the turn of this third
millennium—and despite their undeniably somber or terrible aspects—is being
expressed a pursuit of hominization.”23
56 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Hominization can be an evolutionary process whereby humans can, if need be,

shed their bodily envelope and freely roam in realms of pure mind and pure
interactivity.
As is evident from the above, positioning in cyberspace is not a mere ex-
ercise in either theory or cartography. It is an essential element with
far-reaching ontological repercussions: if positioning is indeed blurred, pre-
positioning is impossible, and anticipation is halted. If anticipation is put to a
stop, is the cybernaut destined to blindly follow the path drawn by software
programmers? In a place where bearings are unmoorable, control, if any, has
to be delegated to somebody else.
Foucauldian critics might here be tempted to argue that control has always
been in the hands of somebody else anyway, and that cyberspace is just an-
other dimension where control shifts from the physical to the virtual. Of
course, in cyberspace, Bentham’s/Foucault’s panopticon is a dream come true
and virtual reality is the surveillance hunting grounds par excellence. Michel
de Certeau’s seminal book, The Practice of Everyday Life, was meant, among
other things, to counter this Foucauldian tendency and now, more than twenty
years after its publication, the pertinent questions it raised are still valid. To de
Certeau, individuals can—and indeed, continuously do—thwart methods of
control imposed by power centers by “ways of operating” and reappropriating
“the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production,” sometimes
clandestinely through the “dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of
groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’.” 24 De
Certeau’s aim in The Practice of Everyday Life is to show that, notwith-
standing the mind-bogglingly efficient apparatus put in place by centers of
power, individual users, on the micro-level of everyday life and actions, do in
fact stand a chance to write their own lives as narratives through a multitude of
tactics such as walking in the city, using language, and other actions located
mainly in a peculiar strategy of space. De Certeau’s micro-level of resistance,
as I will show later in more detail, can be seen here also as an answer to Vi-
rilio’s end-of-days scenario.
What is important is the way de Certeau sees space and maps in the con-
text of story-making or the writing of narratives: everyday, stories “traverse
and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences
and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.”25 If Virilio does not
see any resistance roles in the individual except as an invalid immobilized in
front of virtual reality, de Certeau is aware that as long as users construct
narratives, they are in fact organizing space, defining boundaries, indeed po-
sitioning and thus prepositioning themselves and anticipating as well. To de
Certeau, “[e]very story is a travel story—a spatial practice.”26 Furthermore, de
 New Maps for a New Body 57

Certeau makes a crucial distinction between space and place, and what catches
our attention is that Virilio’s space is indeed nothing more than a sterile and
passive place where users are potential prisoners. A place is an order where
things are distributed, where things are neatly classified, where no two things
occupy the same place; it is distinct and stable. Being in a place is “just being
there,” inert and lifeless as an object. Space, on the contrary, is dynamic, it is
the locus of vectors of direction, velocities and time variables, where people
and things intersect and dynamically interact. Being in space is practicing a
place, operating in it and through it, and sometimes against it. A street, for
example, is constructed geometrically, as a place, but it becomes a space the
moment pedestrians walk on it; a text is a place waiting to be practiced through
the act of reading. To de Certeau, everyday users construct stories on and
about the places they are living in and transform them into spaces.27
Spaces and places are linked by de Certeau to tours and maps: in a study
conducted in 1975 by C. Linde and W. Labov in New York, users are asked to
describe their apartments.28 Taking this study as an example, de Certeau points
out that two ways of description are used: the tour and the map. The tour is an
active, operational narrative which says that “if you turn left, you will see this
and that.” On the contrary, the map is a static localization of the kind “the
bedroom is to the left of the kitchen.” It is obvious to de Certeau that the tour is
linked to space in terms of operation and is really a speech act, whereas the
map is linked to place and does nothing. A map is only seeing, it is a tableau;
space is acting and movement.29 Cybernauts will quickly recognize their own
presence in cyberspace as belonging to the spatial type: the most common
example of speech acts, of narratives in space, is the universal injunction:
“click on this link, and you will be taken to this or that site” or “type your
name and you will be registered.” Hardly a lot of interactivity, agreed, but the
point is that, contrary to what Virilio wants to portray, cybernauts, like their
real-life counterparts the pedestrians, use tactics whereby their location in a
place, however intangible, however “delocalized” it is, is immediately trans-
formed into a proairetic space linked to a narrative, no matter how short or
how insignificant it appears to be.
Yet even de Certeau is either unwilling to take his own theory further, or is
unaware of the potentiality present in terms of cyberspace mapping. Falling
under the illusion that it is only in real place that ways of resistance (space) can
be applied, he bemoans the fact that the map, since the “birth of the modern
scientific discourse,” has been slowly moving away from its initial tour-like
and space-writing quality, and the end of the atlas as tour is deplored:
The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together
to form the tableau of a “state” of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its
58 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the
result or the necessary condition. It remains alone on the stage. The tour describers
have disappeared.30

Yet de Certeau is aware that users are, in the final analysis, always able to
transform places into space, static maps into tours. Still, are we the “posterity”
who will produce anew the tour-like quality of cyberspace through our
re-writing of spatial narratives? As de Certeau points out, users rely on history
and memory to construct stories that will re-colonize places and re-spatialize
them: “As operations on places, stories also play the everyday role of a mobile
and magisterial tribunal in cases concerning their delimitation.”31 This means
that story-telling marks out boundaries, actually localizing what is hitherto
simply a place or, to answer Virilio, what the current threat is, that of
“delocalization.” The user is indeed a bricoleur who uses the available means
at hand in order to construct a space that is forged by memories of past actions,
events, and figures. In cyberspace terms, hackers are de facto bricoleurs who
continuously construct a space out of the already-there places defined by rules
and regulations.32
It is to Barthes and Derrida that I will turn for another interesting prob-
lematization of the issue at hand, away from apocalyptic scenarios that detract
from dealing with what is probably an unavoidable shift in the ways we per-
ceive space in and out of reality. Barthes’ statement quoted above, “[i]t is not
the ‘person’ of the other which is necessary to me, it is space: the possibility of
a dialectic of desire, of an unpredictability of jouissance,”33 can be read with
the de Certeau distinction in mind. The concepts of fissure and schizophrenia
are essential elements with Barthes. Every writer is at the middle point be-
tween madness and sanity, between abnormality and normality, between what
is not and what is, between absence and presence. Barthes’ famous statement:
“Any writer will thus say: mad I cannot be, sane I deign not to be, neurotic I
am”34 can be fruitfully applied to the search for new maps for the new body.
The fissure which exists—and which is lamented by so many—between real
life and cyberspace is an essential, almost inherent component of things.
Without it, the seduction of either will be impossible. Talking about the
Marquis de Sade’s écriture, Barthes masterfully writes:
Sade: the pleasure of reading obviously comes from certain ruptures (or from certain
collisions): antipathetical codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) enter in
contact…As the theory of the text says: the language is redistributed. Indeed this
redistribution is always made by cutting. Two edges are traced: one good edge,
conforming, plagiaristic (it is a matter of copying the language in its canonical state,
as it was fixed by the school, by good usage, by literature, by culture), and another
edge, mobile, empty (ready to take any contours), which is never but the locus of its
own effect: there where the death of the language is glimpsed.35
 New Maps for a New Body 59

The attraction of cyberspace and the pleasure obviously derived by cybernauts

come, in Barthean terms, from the constant ruptures between the two worlds,
from seeing, at the same time, the two edges of reality and virtuality coming so
close together, rubbing sides. The first edge, the “good” one, conformist,
plagiaristic since it copies and re-copies itself, is real life, the model by which
other worlds are judged, the canon of acceptability; the other edge, mobile and
empty, bad and dangerous to some, is virtual reality, the first real competitor to
real life in the history of humanity. But what is interesting for Barthes is the
fact that neither real life—what he calls in a different context “culture”—nor
cyberspace—its destruction—is the locus of attraction. It is the continuous
moving from one to the other which seduces us and, what is more, which
carries signification:
These two edges, the compromise they put to play, are necessary. Neither culture nor
its destruction is erotic, it is the crack of the one and the other which is. The pleasure
of the text is like that untenable instant, impossible, purely Romanesque, which the
libertine tastes at the end of a bold move, cutting the rope which hangs him, at the
very moment of his pleasure.36

As such, cyberspace is truly a product of modernity and the tangible sequel or

by-product of postmodern and post-structuralist theories. Barthes associates
modernity with the duplicity present whenever two edges compete for
supremacy:
The subversive edge might appear to be privileged because it is the edge of violence;
but it is not violence which impresses pleasure; destruction does not interest it; what it
wants is the place of a loss, it is the fissure, the cut, the deflation, the fading which
grabs the subject in the heart of jouissance.37

Cyberspace is the product of the last half of the twentieth century; it appears to
many as a subversive agent which threatens to destroy our culture by the sheer
violence of its immersing nature, its lack of compromise with reality and its
awesome threat to the body. Yet it is not this violence to the body and to reality
which keeps it coming and seizing cybernauts, it is the “fading,” the line
in-between, the twilight zone, the place(s) where loss is about to occur but
which never does, the suspense, the uncertainty of the game being played.
It is worthwhile noting that de Certeau and Barthes, the first with his no-
tion of space as a narrative practice, the second with his notion of the pleasure
of the text, ascribe to writing a prominent role. Barthes makes another useful
distinction in his seminal S/Z, that between readerly and writerly texts. The
distinction is crucial in understanding the theory behind cyberspace mapping.
De Certeau’s binaries of place/space, map/tour, seeing/acting, and tab-
leau/movement can make Barthes’ readerly/writerly pair more appropriate in
60 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

the context of cyberspace mapping. If real life is a place, a map, an inert tab-
leau, then the user is in passive mode:
This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness—he is intransitive; he is, in
short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic
of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor
freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a
referendum…We call any readerly text a classic text.38

But the question is: is real life a “classic text”? Are we overly “serious” and
obsessed with the mania of searching for signifieds at all cost? Is our being in
real life nothing more than a “referendum”? One of cyberspace’s undeniable
virtues is to force us to problematize our views of classical reality.
Uncannily, Barthes’ description of writerly texts almost reads like a con-
temporary account of cyberspace:
[T]he writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time finding it in a bookstore.
Further, its model being a productive (and no longer a representative) one, it
demolishes any criticism which, once produced, would mix with it: to re-write the
writerly text would consist only in disseminating it, in dispersing it within the field of
infinite difference.39

Indeed, where is cyberspace? Serres’ “Where are we and what to do? Yes,
where to pass by and where to go?” quoted above rings throughout
cyberspace; we have come across cyberspace qua simulation by accident,
fleetingly. It is not a thing which one can put a finger on.
Our maps of cyberspace cannot be unitary or unifying, hence my attempt
to stay clear from such endeavors; our maps, born from language, expressed in
language, a writerly production which defies attempts at place-like localiza-
tions, are always, and forever, plural. Barthes writes the following which can
be read as a description of the present Internet:
To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning,
but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it…In this ideal text, the
networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the
rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning;
it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be
authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the
eye can reach, they are indeterminable.40

In other words, to map cyberspace (to “interpret a text”) is not to give it a

stable signifying status but, on the contrary, to come up with a framework
which will take into account its inherent plurality, thereby allowing the many
networks to interact freely in a “galaxy of signifiers.” Serres’ question “Where
are we and what to do? Yes, where to pass by and where to go?” hence
 New Maps for a New Body 61

acquires yet another meaning, and he finally answers—albeit indirectly—his

questions by rapturously declaring:
This burning dance of moving foliage, these quick tongues, bi-forked, moving, of
flames high and low, this map, unstable and stable, written on incandescent layers,
how to name it?…The golden bough, with which we cross real earth and virtual
spaces, heaven or hell, without getting lost? The intuition which begins or the fire
which destroys? The column of fire which guides in the desert? The burning bush on
the top of the mountain? Or the fire of the Spirit, in the morning of the Pentecost,
about which it is written that those who receive it will speak in tongues.41

Once again, Serres’ use of myth (James Frazer’s Golden Bough and the
Biblical allusions) is striking in the context of such a contemporary topic as
cyberspace, and is yet another pointer toward the relationship between
cybermapping, writing, and myth.
Barthes’ concept of the productive play with the text is echoed, though
differently, by Derrida. To the latter, binary systems always revolve, in
western thought, around the perception that one component in the pair is
preferable to the other, one held as the center and the other relegated to the
margin. The center has been thought of as the stable unity which is able to
keep the whole system in order. Without it, chaos would ensue. In Barthean
terms, the center has taken the role of a readerly outlook and has limited at-
tempts at writerly production. Derrida is aware of the stifling nature of the
concept of center and its effect on structure:
[S]tructure…has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it
a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this
center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact
conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing
principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure.42

In other words, the structure of our mapping methodology began, as de

Certeau points out, as a narrative game where maps, though not accurate by
modern standards, were nonetheless useful as they told stories of events, of
myths, and of heroes. The Columns of Hercules marked the end of the known
world, sirens were thought to inhabit specific seas, and later leviathans roamed
the deep, wreaking havoc on boats and ships. As the tour died out, the map
took over the structure and a firm center was established. The function of the
center, as Derrida says above, was to organize a body of hitherto un-mappable
elements, or of elements which could not, in a culture where certainty is to be
the basis of all things, fit in the overall picture. An accurate map it is indeed,
but only a readerly one where personal or communal narratives are barred
from entry. In such a map, the free play of the structure is limited and cannot
62 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

account for aberrant maps such as those of cyberspace.

This is probably the reason why attempts at cybermapping have only
succeeded in producing ephemeral and/or aesthetically-pleasing drawings,
and no concrete theory or framework. Drawings are safe in the sense that they
do not threaten the center of our mapping methodologies which rely on ob-
servable, stable, and quantifiable categories. It is sad that what began as sin-
cere attempts at mapping cyberspace is now relegated to the world of art and
hung at museums, simply because these attempts potentially threaten the es-
sence of western thought, namely, presence, under whatever guise it has ap-
peared in history. Derrida says:
[A]ll the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always
designated an invariable presence—eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence,
existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man,
and so forth.43

It is interesting to note that all the above names are threatened, in one way or
another, by cyberspace: presence, mainly, is the one term which is invariably
used to counter the “absence” of cyberspace, for the latter is thought of as
“unreal,” “virtual,” “fake,” a “simulation,” etc; cyberspace has no real
essence, for it is only a software program; it has no substance except in our
imagination; we as humans lose our specific subjectivity, and identities are
effortlessly switched, the biggest fear being a total loss of individuality in the
apocalyptic vision of an all-containing giant brain; finally it is the essence
itself of God which is threatened by cyberspace for He is the one who creates
worlds and who are we mortals to play His game? The presence of an ultimate
signified which could, in a universe thought to be at the mercy of chaos and
uncertainty, be referred to is essential. This presence, whether God or Reality,
has necessitated the notion of center which has probably been the single most
important concept of Western philosophy, and when Derrida attacked the
hegemony of the center, he also disrupted Western culture’s notion of reality.
What cyberspace is allowing us now, practically, to do, is to apply
deconstructive criticism on the ways in which we view reality. What were
hitherto theoretical forays accessible only to the academic elite is now openly
offering itself to the gaze and practice of millions of cybernauts. Derrida hails
the break in the following words:
Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site,
that was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite
number of sign-substitutions came into play.44

The center of cyberspace has “no natural site,” and as space it is, in the same
 New Maps for a New Body 63

way as de Certeau points out, a “nonlocus” where an infinite and ever-growing

number of signifiers compete with one another. Again, it is through narrative,
through language, that the center is de-centered and structure is permitted,
after a long absence, to freely express itself and dance the dance of ludicity:
This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment
when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse…that is to
say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is
never absolutely present outside a system of differences.45

In other words, the new system contains the ultimate signified inside of it, i.e.,
cyberspace contains within itself real life, the latter, as central signified for
thousands of years, “never absolutely present” outside the system. When the
transcendental signified is securely brought back from outside to the inside of
the equation, the structure can once more allow itself to be produced
dynamically and in a writerly manner as a discourse which orbits not around
meaning but around signification, i.e., as a discourse which is not obsessed
anymore by a search for signifieds and stable binary structures located on a
Cartesian grid, but which is content to witness the play of signifiers in a
de-centered continuum. Indeed, as Derrida magisterially says: “The absence
of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of
signification infinitely.”46
We can now put in a better context Barthes’ statement quoted above that
the writerly “demolishes any criticism,” for if the absence of the transcen-
dental signified infinitely extends the play of signification, it is clear that any
attempts at actually mapping cyberspace, at trying to pinpoint the topography
of a system which has caused a fundamental rupture in western culture itself,
are bound to fall short of the mark. At best, the results will be relegated to the
museum of oddities. And this is the main reason why this study is only looking
toward a theory of cybermapping, and not at it, for it is only through a gaze
that averts itself and avoids looking directly at the object that more, not less,
can be seen. Derrida’s comments on the Internet as an averted gaze which sees
more than it appears to is very appropriate. In an interview in August 1996, he
said:
The computer installs a new place: one is there more easily projected toward the
exterior, toward the spectacle, toward the face of the written thus snatched from the
presumed intimacy of writing, following a trajectory of extraneousness…in this new
experience of specular reflection, there is more outside and there is no outside
anymore…Think of the “addiction” of those who travel, day and night, in this WWW.
They can no longer do without these journeys across the world by sailing—and
without the sail/veil which crosses them or freezes them in its turn.47
64 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

A system where the map, the mapper, and the act of mapping are confounded,
where the infinity of spaces, instead of conjuring up images of apocalypse,
enlarges our consciousness and our vision of reality and virtuality alike.
The above echo not only Gibson’s depiction of cyberspace as “the infinite
neuroelectronic void of the matrix,”48 but also Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille
Plateaux and their concept of the rhizome. The famous opening lines of the
introduction to Mille Plateaux, quoted previously, summarizes the way in
which plurality and multiplicity are dealt with, and it is interesting to see how
Deleuze and Guattari apply their theory of the rhizome to mapping. To begin
with, Mille Plateaux tries, with the rhizome, to steer clear of binary opposi-
tions, those of the “tree” model, and of pseudo-multiplicities, those of the
“root” model, itself a hidden version of the first. The third model, the “rhi-
zome,” offers solutions that parallel those presented by Barthes, Derrida, de
Certeau and Serres, and affords new vistas for a theory of cyberspace map-
ping. The first and second principles of the rhizome read, here again, like a
description of Internet hypertextuality, for in order to fulfill the demands of
connection and heterogeneity, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to
any other point, and indeed must be so,” and a rhizome “can be cut, broken at
any point,” and “takes over following this or that line of itself and other lines
as well.”49
As far as rhizomatic mapping is concerned, Mille Plateaux makes clear
the distinction between cartography and decalcomania. The decal is a mere
imitation which aims at keeping the status quo before the coupure mentioned
previously, having the model of the tree at its center:
All the logic of the tree is a logic of the decal and of reproduction…It consists in
decaling something given as already done, from a structure which surcodes or from an
axis which supports. The tree articulates and hierarchizes decals, the decals are like
the leaves of a tree.50

The tree model works like Nietzsche’s Apollo veil in The Birth of Tragedy: it
nourishes itself from illusions as to the nature of the world and of reality,
attempting to close the eyes to the violence and ultimate uncertainty of raw
life. The rhizome, on the other hand, can be likened to Nietzsche’s Dionysian
furor as both involve an energy which is the opposite of a mere Apollonian
reproduction of reality:
Very different is the rhizome, map and not decal. To make a map, and not a
decal…The map is conducive to the connection of fields, to the de-blocking of bodies
without organs, to their maximal opening on a plane of consistency. The map is itself
part of the rhizome. It is open, it is connectible in all its dimensions, it can be taken
apart, it is reversible and susceptible to constantly receiving modifications. It can be
torn, thrown over; it can adapt to all kinds of montages, can be put into effect by an
 New Maps for a New Body 65

individual, a group, a social formation.51

Cyberspace is indeed a realm with multiple entrances, never the same,

constantly changing and morphing into one another. The map is a writerly
production, the decal a readerly one: “The map is performance, the decal
always brings one back to a so-called ‘competence’.” The map, a Dionysian
manifestation, cannot be stopped in its flow. Only the decal can do so. What is
needed is to go through the inverse operation, that of linking the decals to the
map and of bringing back the roots or the trees to the rhizomes.52 In other
words, if the rhizome is cyberspace and the trees and roots are real life, what
can be done is to link back the decal to the map, i.e., to bring back real life to
cyberspace, and to realize that cyberspace, as origin of desire, as Dionysian
realm, as the multi-entrance rhizomatic mode, can be the real map which our
reality pitifully decals.
In the same context, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the distinction be-
tween smooth and striated spaces, the first as nomadic, the second as seden-
tary; the first as war machine, the second as state apparatus. Smooth space is of
a Dionysian nature, forever in movement, wild and unaccountable; striated
space is the Apollonian order, the satisfaction of having laid out rules which
explain otherwise uncontrollable phenomena. For our argument, it is imme-
diately clear that smooth space is cyberspace/virtual reality, and that striated
space is real life. Although the two spaces are distinct, there are times when, as
with everything else, clear-cut boundaries disappear and, what is more,
sometimes even the distinction is blurred. Deleuze and Guattari write that “the
two spaces exist only through their mixing with one another: smooth space is
ceaselessly translated and crossed by striated space; striated space is con-
stantly reversed, taken back to smooth space.”53 The same concerns animate
this study. Is cyberspace one fully autonomous mode which can be either
wholeheartedly adopted or vehemently attacked as sham and illusion? Can
cyberspace be thrown back to oblivion, as if nothing had happened? If not, and
cyberspace is taken to represent another kind of existential status, where can
we draw the limits between this mode and the mode we have lived in so far? Is
everyday life crossed by cyberspace as much as cyberspace is crossed by
everyday life? Deleuze and Guattari propose, in Mille Plateaux, different
models which can help in disentangling some of the above conundrums, such
as the technological, the musical, the maritime, and the mathematical ones.
The maritime model is of interest here since cyberspace, in many ways, offers
in its present stage analogies with the sea (we speak of “surfing” the Net) as far
as representational and cartographic issues are concerned. Deleuze and
Guattari identify the maritime spaces with, expectedly, smooth spaces, where
the points, characteristic of striated spaces (points help anchoring and ordering
66 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

our bearings), are replaced by trajectories:

In smooth space, the line is thus a vector, a direction and not a dimension or a metrical
determination. It is a space constructed by local operations with changes of direction.
These direction changes can be caused by the nature of the itinerary itself…but then
can also be more caused by the variability of the goal or point to be reached.54

The analogy with the Internet is clear: when we “surf” the Net we do not move
from one point to another in a pre-determined manner. The space we construct
while we are in cyberspace is governed by the laws of uncertainty and
surprise. Searches deviate, sometimes fantastically, from their initial starting
point; pages are visited through hyperlinks posted on other pages; options and
ideas spring up phantasmagorically as more and more links are followed. As
in a sea voyage, surfing the Internet is to fall prey to the unpredictability of the
medium itself. And as the sea was both the most difficult space to map and the
space which needed mapping most, so is cyberspace. And as cyberspace is
now a special problem that has to be dealt with, so was the sea until the year
1440, which figures as the title of a chapter in Mille Plateaux, “1440 – The
Smooth and the Striated.” 1440 marks the year of the definitive striation
through the twin concepts of the point and the map:
[T]he sea is the smooth space par excellence, and yet it is the one that has, from the
earliest times, found itself confronted to the exigencies of a gradually stricter striating
process…Maritime space has been striated in function of two acquisitions,
astronomical and geographical: the point, obtained by a number of calculations from
an exact observation of the stars and the sun; the map, which crosses the meridians
and the parallels, the longitudes and the latitudes, thus criss-crossing the known or
unknown regions.55

But then, after this striating process, the sea—and, by the same reasoning,
cyberspace—slowly regains its smooth nature, as it becomes the haven of
nuclear submarines and spy satellites and as such controls, “in the strangest of
reversals,” the striated land. If cyberspace, the “smoothest” of all spaces so far,
acquires bearings, points, and a map, and is eventually striated, criss-crossed
by lines which would determine positions and dimensions instead of
directions and vectors, will it become, by the same paradox, the most
awesome power known to human civilization? As opposed to Virilio’s fear of
“delocalization,” “prepositioning,” and “anticipation,” Deleuze and Guattari
propose a new definition of “deterritorialization”—the term is taken from
Virilio—as being the major feature of smooth spaces; indeed, the smooth
“always possesses a force of deterritorialization superior to the striated.”
Deterritorialization is the movement by which one leaves the territory, leaving
the beaten track for nomadic existence again.56
 New Maps for a New Body 67

Bell, in his introduction to The CyberCultures Reader, also chooses to use

the term rhizomatic to describe the “infinite, uncentred, root-like structure” of
cyberspace, whether it is apprehended cartographically or schematically.57
Mark Nunes, likewise, adopts the Deleuze and Guattari scheme in the context
of virtual topographies but states an obvious Foucauldian principle when he
says that the concept of striated spaces and grids is a function of all centers of
power, not only of totalitarian ones, as it stems from the universal desire to
render the world “comprehensible and controllable.” 58 In the same vein,
Spiller goes as far as recognizing that the concept of the rhizome as a
“non-hierarchical system that is uncentred and without definable control” has
been adopted as model by cyberculture: the moment computers are linked
together, the movement of information flows in all kinds of ways in a rhizo-
matic system which is “in continuous motion, and forever changing, con-
necting and realigning.”59 Lévy cuts to the heart of the problem when he says
that the “Space of knowledge,” meaning cyberspace, “does not exist.” It is a
“u-topia, a non-place,” nowhere realized yet already virtual, waiting to be
born. In terms similar to those used by Deleuze and Guattari, Lévy elaborates
on this non-place: “It is already present, but hidden, dispersed, unidentifiable,
mixed, shooting rhizomes here and there; it emerges like stains, in dashed
lines, as filigrane; it blinks without having yet built its autonomy, its irre-
versibility.”60
Yet not everybody is ready to accept metaphorical descriptions like the
above. Guy C. Jules Van Belle and Ronald Soetaert, in their “Breakdown into
the Virtual User-Involved Design and Learning,” mercilessly attack Deleuze
and Guattari—and would probably attack Baudrillard, Virilio, de Certeau,
Barthes, Serres and Derrida—for willful obscurantism and “abstract rhetoric
to explain nothing other than what others were talking about much more
clearly and influentially, some 20 years before.”61 While the post-structuralist
hegemony of the last twenty years is being more aggressively challenged in
ways that merit serious consideration,62 two things are worth noting when such
attacks occur: first, researchers like Jules and Soetaert are desperately in need
of tangible results and have become impatient with theories about a cyber-
space which has been around for more than two decades; second, serious
theorists are loathe to indulge in facile and simplistic descriptions and are
aware that models and frameworks, such as the simulacrum, delocalization,
maps and tours, place and space, writerly and readerly, centers and decenter-
ing, and rhizomes are only pointers toward future attempts at cybermapping.
An example of over-enthusiastic claims and simplistic uses of theoretical
terminology is Barbara Kennedy’s euphoric view of her own book as a unique
choreography in cyberspace:
68 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

We invite the reader to taste, feel and move with the words, the tones, the images and
rhythms of this introduction, equipped to then feel some experimental flights
between, across and through the interstitial spaces within the book. Those not brave
enough to fly alone, preferring the more sedate pages of a linear, ‘logically’ framed
book (such loss of jouissance!) will be helped by the User’s Guide.63

What Bell and Kennedy are not able—or not willing—to see is the facile
usurpation of a theoretical discourse in order to describe the otherwise
mundane act of choosing to read a collection of essays either in order or
randomly. “Brave” readers will move from one essay to another with no
specific order and will see the “interstitial spaces,” whereas the “not brave
enough” will read sequentially, like a herd of docile animals, as if reading has
ever been anything else than a reading for jouissance. Clearly, cyberspace is
more than such easy binary oppositions.
On the one hand, vulgarizations of cyberspace in the form of artistic maps
and comments thereon offer nothing new to the serious investigator; on the
other hand, “abstract rhetoric” and facile approximations exasperate everyday
users who are eager to know their whereabouts in cyberspace. The question,
therefore, is not only whether we can map cyberspace or not, whether the
hitherto “smooth” can be “striated,” “localized,” and/or “produced” by its
users; it is also whether a theory of cybermapping can accommodate our
double urge to understand and to use, to be at the same time fascinated by the
wonderful vistas opened by cyberspace and to boldly use this knowledge to
achieve tangible results. This conundrum can be eased if one approaches cy-
bermapping both metaphorically and practically, both through, specifically,
the metaphor of myth and the practice of writing on a city-like model.
Our map, then, will be at one and the same time a mythical writing of the
virtual city we have called cyberspace. The project is new but the means have
been used before. Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, has Marco Polo initiate the
great Kublai Khan into the secrets of mythical mapping through language:
Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner
improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by
the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into the net; another city by a
naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with
mold, clenching a round, white pearl. The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the
connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain…But, obscure or
obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems,
which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused.64

Will we be able to ascertain our bearings in cyberspace? Will a map based on

the writing of a mythical city-like landscape quench our thirst for localization
and appease our frustration? Maybe, but cyberspace is unlike any other space
 New Maps for a New Body 69

we have visited so far, and we might end up discovering that we are and have
always been a mythical writing ourselves. The seduction of cybermapping can
well be summarized by the following exchange, again, between Kublai Khan
and Marco Polo:
“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he [Kublai] asked Marco, “shall I be able
to possess my empire, at last?”

And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an
emblem among emblems.”65

With this fascinating prospect ahead of us, let us proceed to investigate the
“emblems” provided by myth in the search for ways to map cyberspace.

N O T E S

1 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1992), 7.

2 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, “Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern
Condition,” in Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker,
eds. (Montréal: New World Perspectives, CultureText Series, 2001), 20.
3 Ibid., 31.
4 Dyson, “Space,” 41–42.
5 Lévy, Virtuel, 25.
6 Ibid., 29.
7 Ibid., 30.
8 Ibid., 31.
9 Gareth Branwyn, “The Desire to Be Wired,” in Beckmann, Virtual Dimension, 323–32,
325.
10 Karen A. Franck, “When I Enter Virtual Reality, What Body Will I Leave Behind?” in
Cyber_Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era, Neil Spiller, ed. (London:
Phaidon, 2002), 240–45, 240.
11 Lawrence Lessig, “The Zones of Cyberspace,” Stanford Law Review 48.5 (May 1996),
1403–11, 1403.
12 Lucia Leão, “New Labyrinths and Maps: The Challenges of Cyberspace’s Art,” Tenth
International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Paris, France (Dec. 7–10, 2000),
proceedings online at http://www.isea2000.com/ [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
13 Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 11.
14 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 100.
15 Ibid., 123–24.
16 Paul Virilio, L’Art du moteur (Paris, Galilée, 1993), 185–86.
70 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

17 Ibid., 192–93.
18 Ibid., 195.
19 Ibid., 196–97.
20 Paul Virilio, La Bombe informatique (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 24–25.
21 Spiller, Cyber_Reader, 19.
22 Lévy, Intelligence, 26–27.
23 Lévy, Virtuel, 9.
24 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), xiv–xv.
25 Ibid., 115.
26 Ibid., 115.
27 Ibid., 117–18.
28 Charlotte Linde and William Labov, “Spatial Networks as a Site for the Study of
Language and Thought” Language 51 (1975), 924–39.
29 De Certeau, Practice, 118–20.
30 Ibid., 121.
31 Ibid., 122.
32 When using the term “hacker” I am always making the distinction between “hacking”
and “cracking,” the former being the noteworthy endeavor to continuously try and make
software work better, the latter being the spurious defacing/stealing of other users’
property.
33 Barthes, Plaisir, 11.
34 Ibid., 13.
35 Ibid., 14–15.
36 Ibid., 15.
37 Ibid., 15.
38 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 4.
39 Ibid., 5.
40 Ibid., 5–6.
41 Serres, Atlas, 279.
42 Derrida, Writing, 278.
43 Ibid., 279–80.
44 Ibid., 280.
45 Ibid., 280.
46 Ibid., 280.
47 Jacques Derrida, Papier machine: Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses
(Paris: Galilée, 2001), 161. The original French of this quote is, unfortunately,
untranslatable: Derrida is, as usual, playing on the meaning of “voile” which is at the
same time the tissue, the sail, and the veil; at once the text and the net of the World Wide
Web, the cybernauts’ sail, and the veil which hides them from real life.
48 Gibson, Neuromancer, 139.
 New Maps for a New Body 71

49 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 13, 16.

50 Ibid., 20.
51 Ibid., 20.
52 Ibid., 20, 22.
53 Ibid., 592, 593.
54 Ibid., 597–98.
55 Ibid., 598.
56 Ibid., 599. See, further down, Hakim Bey’s recent disavowal of the Internet as a
potential smooth space after what he thinks is the centers of power’s full control and
thus striation of this last bastion of free thinking.
57 David Bell, “Introduction I – Cybercultures Reader: A User’s Guide,” in Bell and
Kennedy, Cybercultures, 1–12, 2.
58 Mark Nunes, “Virtual Topographies: Smooth and Striated Cyberspace,” in Ryan,
Cyberspace Textuality, 61–77, 63.
59 Spiller, Cyber_Reader, 13.
60 Lévy, Intelligence, 137.
61 Guy C. Jules Van Belle and Ronald Soetaert, “Breakdown into the Virtual
User-Involved Design and Learning,” Journal of Technology and Teacher Education
9.1 (Spring 2001), 31–42 , 34.
62 What has been known as “The Sokal Affair,” the famous academic hoax perpetrated by
New York University physicist Alan D. Sokal with his article “Transgressing the
Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text
46/47 (Spring-Summer 1996), 217–52, and composed of a whooping twelve pages of
notes and ten pages of references, serves as a historical example of a successful attack on
the excesses of post-structuralism. Sokal later wrote a book in 1997 with Louvain
University theoretical physicist Jean Bricmont entitled Impostures Intellectuelles (Paris:
Odile Jacob) where both authors take up the issue of post-structuralist stars—such as
Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Latour, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, and Virilio—acting as
impostors.
63 Barbara Kennedy, “Introduction II – The ‘Virtual Machine’ and New Becomings in
Pre-Millennial Culture,” in Bell and Kennedy, Cybercultures, 13–21, 16.
64 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997), 21–22.
65 Ibid., 22–23.
C H A P T E R F O U R

Cyberspace as Myth

Ariadne’s thread is a line that traces out the corridors of a labyrinth that is already a
kind of writing.
J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines1

Part sacred space, part ethereal region, part digital fact, cyberspace involves a
regional geography perhaps best captured in a koan: What is the place where
everyone is but nobody lives?
Paul F. Starrs, The Sacred, the Regional, and the Digital2

We stand awkward between the earthloving beast and the cool, hot electronic angel.
We will feel the dirt in our blood and the sun in our eyes even after they’re gone or
just memories. Even after we’ll have no blood and no flesh eyes. Dirt and sun made
us. We won’t forget.
Greg Bear, Queen of Angels3

J acques Gaillot, bishop of Evreux, France, since 1982, is called back to the
Vatican in 1995 and dispossessed of his French diocese. He is given
instead the diocese of Partenia, in Algeria. But Partenia is not on the map
since the fifth century and actually lies under the sand. Bishop Gaillot, far
from giving up, is helped in 1996 by Léo Scheer, Baudrillard’s friend and
colleague, who swiftly endows him with another virtual diocese, this time on
the Internet. As Starrs notes: “Although there might be no living patron
resident within the geographical confines of Partenia, on the World Wide Web
Partenia had become a virtual diocese, with Gaillot ministering to any and all
who tapped the hypertext link.”4 Scheer said later: “Instead of a metaphysical
idea of a bishop, attached to a real place, we would have a metaphysical idea
of a place, attached to a real bishop,” adding: “The mind of God is imitated by
the virtual structure of the Internet, where the difference between physical
74 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

actuality and real existence has at last been breached.”5 Starrs explains:
Surely “God,” if you happen to subscribe to such a notion, can be ascribed more than
a few trappings of cyberspace—trafficking in mysterious ways; operating at highly
variable bandwidths; remaining nearly impossible for most to see; posting rules and
engaging in operations that remain more than a little Delphic; vast in reach but
evanescent in form; evolving quickly, in many guises, in sundry places, with each
claiming the True Faith; administered on earth by an exotic priesthood of acolytes;
difficult to map or locate, and essentially elusive.6

Margaret Wertheim, in “The Medieval Return of Cyberspace,” draws in-

teresting parallels between cyberspace and the medieval vision of physical vs.
spiritual realities. The analogies are helpful in that they call to attention the
possibility of cyberspace being the actualization of existing ideas that have
evolved with humanity. To Wertheim, the seventeenth century has waved
away centuries of medieval metaphysics and replaced them with a material-
istic view of the universe. Whereas the medieval worldview saw the “soul” as
the only reality in an illusory physical world, materialism has reverted this
view and made the tangible world the only standard by which to comprehend
the universe. Wertheim interestingly shows that, with the advent of the new
technologies, the situation has been reversed again: cyberspace is seen as a
return to a metaphysics of otherworldliness. She says: “Who could have
foreseen that the electronic gates of the silicon chip would become a meta-
physical gateway, punching a porthole in the bedrock of materialism?” The
soul, kept out of the equation for three centuries, has “once again found a
space that it might call its own.”7 The progress made by science has only es-
tranged us, Wertheim says, from our innermost soul and has, in a reversal of
priorities, hurled people away from science and into the reaches of cyber-
space.8 While Paul Levinson, in his Real Space, bemoans the fact that cy-
berspace is an illusory construct which has diverted us from further exploring
the “real space” of our planet and that of others in our solar system, Wertheim
takes the opposite view that, while prospects of life on other planets are still
far-fetched dreams, the real life is now taking place, everyday, in cyberspace,
a “silicon facilitated Cambrian explosion of genus and species limited only by
the human imagination.”9 Wertheim’s stand brings a refreshing meditation on
the function of cyberspace in a twenty-first century plagued by materialism
and offers a much-needed defense of cyberspace as not the ultimate techno-
logical monster which will gobble reality and leave humanity at the mercy of
AIs, but on the contrary as a gate through which our humanity can soar again
unfettered.
Benedikt, like Wertheim, re-situates cyberspace in its relationship with
the most essential needs of humans. Going further back than just the medieval
 Cyberspace as Myth 75

age, Benedikt sees the old mythological themes present in almost all societies
as playing a vital part in late twentieth-century technologically-advanced
cultures. He notes that it is not a coincidence that the new technologies are the
preferred grounds of young people who have been fed on a diet of science
fiction, comic books, and computer games. The new technologies are filled
with myth, magic, and lore and provide the younger generation with ways to
reinscribe themselves in the wider picture of the universe.10 The seduction of
cyberspace comes in part from the relative ease with which cybernauts can
immerse themselves into states of being, into worlds and realms of fantasy and
fiction hitherto restricted to the initiated few. As such, cyberspace is not to be
equated only with the mere triviality of computer gaming:
[C]yberspace’s inherent immateriality and malleability of content provides the most
tempting stage for the acting out of mythic realities, realities once ‘confined’ to
drug-enhanced ritual, to theatre, painting, books and to such media that are always, in
themselves, somehow less than what they reach for, mere gateways. Cyberspace can
be seen as an extension, some might say an inevitable extension, of our age-old
capacity and need to dwell in fiction, to dwell empowered or enlightened on other,
mythic planes, if only periodically, as well as this earthly one.11

To Benedikt, the need for myth in our technologically advanced societies

takes the shape of an uncanny mixture between the demands of a materialistic
culture, based on reason and business, and the age-old need to self-expression
and art. These two modes of being are best united, precisely, in cyberspace,
which becomes thus the “mytho-logic” place par excellence.12
Dery goes further than that and presents the idea, shared by cyber-hippies,
technopagans, and New Agers, that the machine, at this stage of its develop-
ment, is slowly acquiring a soul, and that dormant myth has been relocated in
the new realm of cyberspace.13 The young generation, pushed by science to
relinquish the spiritual, is fighting back: “With rationalism and materialism
encroaching on all sides, those who feel impoverished by the withering away
of the Spiritual have adopted the strategy, consciously or not, of legitimating
spiritual beliefs in scientific terms.” 14 Computers, in an abrupt reversal of
values, are seen by technophiles as gods, and computer programmers, since
they mediate between cyberspace and the realm of physical reality, are seen as
priests.15 The late twentieth-century need for magic is so strong that the ter-
minology of computer programming evinces the interaction between magic
and science: hackers are variously known as “gurus,” “ninjas,” or “wizards”;
computer hardware borrows terms such as “voodoo,” “mystique,” “trident,” or
“Hercules.”
Miller sees the new technologies as being able to bridge the gap between
the past, the present, and the future, and that between the here and the there,
76 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

almost magically:
[M]odern communications technologies, from trick photography, to the telephone, to
cinema, to radio, to television, to recordings on disks, tapes, or CDs, to the computer
connected to the Internet, fulfill in reality old dreams of magic communication, at a
temporal or spatial distance, with the living or with the dead. I can, any time I like,
hear Glenn Gould play Bach’s Goldberg Variations with fingers long since turned to
dust. I can even hear Alfred Lord Tennyson reciting his poems. Talk about raising
ghosts!”16

Since myth is taken to be so vital a part of cyberspace construction, it is

appropriate to begin with a basic definition of myth which will be refined as
we move along. Webster’s Dictionary offers the following definitions:
1. a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some superhuman being or
some alleged person or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural
explanation, esp., a traditional or legendary story that is concerned with deities or
demigods and the creation of the world and its inhabitants.

2. stories or matter of this kind: in the realm of myth.

3. any invented story, idea, or concept: His rationalizations of his failings are pure
myth.

4. an imaginary or fictitious thing or person.

The etymology given is also highly interesting: “myth” comes from the Greek
mŷthos, meaning “story,” “word.”17
What is striking is the resemblance between myth and simulation as both
involve representations of things which do not have a counterpart in real life,
and both can be fictitious and devoid of separate existence independently of
the act of simulation or the act of myth-making. Cyberspace is seen as an
“alleged” plane of existence without an apparent determinable basis in factual
reality. It does have its peculiar denizens, its demigods, its stories of creation
which have become, with time, the stuff of legend. The other striking feature,
one which I will be exploring later, is the etymological relationship between
myth and story-telling, myth and word, myth and écriture.
But back to the opposition between myth and reality. Mircea Eliade points
out that in the language of the nineteenth century, myth was anything which
was not reality, a semantic legacy from early Christianity’s battles against
paganism: anything which was not justified by the Bible was a “fable.” But in
so-called primitive societies, myth is the opposite of this Judeo-Christian
view, as it expresses an absolute truth, a sacred story, a transhuman revelation:
Being real and sacred, myth becomes exemplary and thus repeatable, for it serves as
 Cyberspace as Myth 77

model, and thus as justification of all human actions. In other words, a myth is a true
story which took place at the beginning of Time and which serves as model to human
behavior. By imitating the exemplary actions of a god or a mythical hero, or simply
by telling their adventures, the man of archaic societies detaches himself from profane
time and magically rejoins the Great Time, the time of the sacred.18

Eliade cautiously attempts a definition of myth that can encompass dis-

course, creation, and the sacred:
Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time,
the fabled time of the “beginnings.” In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds
of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the
Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind
of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a “creation”; it
relates how something was produced, began to be…It is this sudden breakthrough of
the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today.19

Myth explains how “a reality came into existence,” and the potential for using
myth to construct the reality of cyberspace is very tempting; were it not for the
“breakthrough of the sacred” into the everyday world, as Eliade suggests,
reality would not be revitalized and apprehended in its totality. Myth thus
works to give meaning to reality, just like cyberspace works to give meaning
to physical reality, constructing it or, better, re-constructing it from that other
side which has always been present but which is only now so pressingly
available. One can see the affinities which can exist between cyberspace and
Eliade’s re-adjustment of the idea or practice of myth. As cyberspace is
gaining in popularity and as theory is finding many of its pronouncements
being almost magically justified in simulated worlds, cybernauts, like the
so-called primitives of archaic societies, are allowing themselves to be
increasingly detached from the “profane time” of real life and are finding
themselves more and more fascinated by the perceived sacredness of
cyberspace.
In a leap of speculative imagination, will there come a time when cyber-
space will be the model which real life will have to imitate? One is reminded
here of Eusapia, one of the cities Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan in
Calvino’s Invisible Cities: the inhabitants of Eusapia, to make their passage to
death smoother, have constructed an identical copy of their city and put it,
obviously, underground. The twin city, as necropolis, is “crowded with
big-game hunters, mezzosopranos, bankers, violinists, duchesses, gener-
als—more than the living city ever contained.” Yet, with the passing of time,
the living notice that things are changing in the underground realm:
[T]he dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober
reflection, not passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the
78 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do
everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the
Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.20

If cyberspace is, to some, an end-of-times apocalyptic realm, a dead city, dead

to life and to reality, a necropolis, are we, as cybernauts, re-building our
Eusapia and making it unrecognizable? The “hooded brothers,” the fraternity
which maintains the link between the two worlds, are our programmers and
hackers. But Calvino’s Eusapia is more than a fantastic meditation on life and
death, for it delivers its coup de grâce at the end: “They say that this has not
just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper
Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no
longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.”21 And the circle is
complete as we go back to the Webster’s definition of myth as “a traditional or
legendary story that is concerned with deities or demigods and the creation of
the world and its inhabitants,” and Eliade’s “a true story which took place at
the beginning of Time and which serves as model to human behavior”
acquires more interesting overtones. With the construction of our own
Eusapia, our own twin city, are we really in real space or have we been, from
the beginning, in cyberspace without knowing it?
McLuhan, quite interestingly, proposed a definition of myth which takes
into account the dichotomous world we live in: “For myth is the instant vision
of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period…We live
mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.”22 Man-
kind is unable, due to its short life-span, to comprehend and assimilate the
long and complex processes that shape life and the universe. Myth, with its
stories, heroes, monsters and magical realms, affords us to metaphorically
glimpse such processes. The “single planes” we have so far lived in are not
sufficient anymore: we had to construct our twin Eusapia in order to extend
the reaches of our experience. Cyberspace is that other plane which can offer,
as myth, this instant vision: invisible yet omnipresent in its capability to allow
almost instant hyperlinking to any other cyber-place, intangible yet omnipo-
tent in what it can potentially do, a mere piece of hardware, yet omniscient in
the unlimited stores of information it can contain, process, and analyze. A
highly seductive cyberspace it is, and even Virilio, the most outspoken voice
of rebellion against the new technologies, is found to say:
Curiously, telecommunications put properties of the divine into play in civil society:
the ubiquity (to be all present together at the same time), instantaneity, immediacy,
omnivoyance, omnipresence. Each of us is metamorphosed into a divine being, at
once here and there, at the same time.23
 Cyberspace as Myth 79

Of course, Virilio prefers to see this kind of power as a purely negative and
illusory acquisition that will transform human beings, through the ascendancy
of the media, into a passive audience incapable of meditating on the events
taking place around them.
One of Lévy’s major premises, stated in the introduction to Les Tech-
nologies de l’intelligence, is the equation between, among other things, myth
and technologies: “I will show that the usual categories of the philosophy of
knowledge, like myth, science, theory, interpretation or objectivity are inti-
mately dependent on the dated and situated historical usage of certain intel-
lectual technologies.”24 We can reverse this statement and say that certain
intellectual technologies, and here I mean cyberspace, are tightly dependent
on myth: cyberspace is shaped by myth and, in return, produces mythical ethos
peculiar to our age.
But let us begin with beginnings. Barlow, in 1996, issued his famous
“Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” establishing a mythical
land, the “home of Mind,” which he sees as superseding the corrupt societies
of the physical world. The utopian overtones are unmistakable:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come
from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind…I declare the global social space we are
building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us…It is
an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions…Ours is a world
that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a
world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic
power, military force, or station of birth…We will create a civilization of the Mind in
Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have
made before.25

This place where the mind but not the body lives is, however, to be
reached through a conscious journey, and cybernauts become the first travel-
ers to that new realm. Indeed, as Dyson points out, the cybernaut is far from
being a passive, time-wasting viewer glued in front of a screen. Contrary to
cinema and television, where consent is turned down to a minimum and
viewers are reduced to mere voyeurs, cyberspace creates “voyagers,” entities
who are journeying “into a space that is already there, pre-existent, with its
own restrictions, its own ‘reality’.”26
Probably the most enthusiastic description of the cybernaut voyager ever
written so far has to be ascribed to Timothy Leary’s essay “The Cyberpunk:
The Individual as Reality Pilot,” published in 1991. The ex-Harvard university
psychologist saw the “cyberpunk” as the re-embodiment, thanks to cyber-
space, of a long-lost original character who is a cross between a genius, a
freethinker, a pioneer, a maverick, and a pilot:
80 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Who is the cyberpunk?…Every stage of history has produced a name and an heroic
legend for the strong, stubborn, creative individual who explores some future frontier,
collects and brings back new information, and offers to guide the gene pool to the next
stage.27

In a vein similar to Lévy’s, Leary sees cyberspace as the harbinger of a new

species of humans, what he calls “homo sapiens sapiens, cyberneticus.” These
new humans are the “Pilot People” who, in what looks like a home-grown
version of Emersonian self-reliance, can pilot their way around “clearly and
creatively, using quantum-electronic appliances and brain know-how,” and
thus become examples and models for others to emulate. 28 Although
cyberpunks are fairly new, their prototypes have always existed and have
always been, as they are now, hunted down:
Self-assured singularities of the Cyber Breed have been called mavericks, ronin,
freelancers, independents, self-starters, nonconformists, oddballs, troublemakers,
kooks, visionaries, iconoclasts, insurgents…Religious organizations have always
called them heretics…In the old days, even sensible normal people used to call them
mad.29

The cyberpunks’ strength—and threat to others—can be in part understood

when one looks at the etymologies involved. Leary patiently explains that
“cybernetics” comes from the Greek “kubernetes,” meaning pilot, a word
filled with “Greek traditions of independence and individual self-reliance” and
which, Leary adds, is “derived from geography.” As the word “kubernetes”
moved to Latin, it was changed to “gubernetes,” from “gubernare,” to control,
regulate, steer, and acquired quite a different connotation from its original one.
What had been playful, imaginative piloting had become a means of control.
From the Romans to Norbert Wiener’s 1948 coining of the word
“cybernetics,” more than two thousand years of misunderstanding have
elapsed. Leary’s enthusiasm springs from the discovery that cyberspace has,
finally, given humanity the chance to grasp again the true meaning of piloting.
He says: “We are liberating the term, teasing it free from serfdom to represent
the autopoetic, self-directed principle of organization which arises in the
universe in many systems of widely varying sizes. In people, societies and
atoms.” 30 If cybernauts are typically caricatured as shabby, disheveled
teenagers wasting their lives while “reality” is somewhere out there, in the
real world, Leary sees them, on the contrary, as exemplifying the true spirit of
adventure and daring:
Pilots, those who navigate on the seven seas or in the sky, have to devise and execute
course changes continually in response to the changing environment. They respond
continually to feedback, information about the environment. Dynamic. Alert.
Alive…The Hellenic concept of the individual navigating his/her own course was an
 Cyberspace as Myth 81

island of humanism in a sea of totalitarian empires.31

Far from paralyzing humanity, as Virilio thinks, cyberspace is proving to

be the new grounds where imagination, creativity, and free will are expressing
themselves after the long night of materialism and oppression. Barlow, in
“Crime and Puzzlement: In Advance of the Law on the Electronic Frontier,”
gave in 1990 this picture of cyberspace:
Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the 19th Century West.
It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse…hard to get
around in, and up for grabs…It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both
outlaws and new ideas about liberty.32

Barlow who, incidentally, co-founded in 1990 EFF, the Electronic Frontier

Foundation,33 has given above a perfect description of cyberspace as the new
American frontier with all the myths and legends surrounding it. Others, like
Schroeder, Huxor and Smith, use the frontier theme to explore ways in which
Active Worlds was populated, and see the “tough” conditions prevalent at the
birth of cyberspace as equivalent to those that shaped early American society.
Kroker and Weinstein categorically say: “A frontier mentality rules the drive
into cyber-space.” 34 The struggle to people the new continent is perhaps
unequaled in the history of human civilization and the large-scale movements
from the 17th century onward, from the Old World to the New one for
religious, spiritual, philanthropic, political, financial, territorial, and social
reasons, represent one of the most impressive drives known to us. A similar
drive is happening now in cyberspace: from Geocities’ street-based maps of
web pages to the terminology used in connection with building a site (site
“under construction”) to “domain” names to addresses, everything tends to
replicate the rush for land-grabbing which possessed the early settlers of the
new continent. Florian Röetzer says in this context:
[A]fter the Cold War and programs like Star Wars are long over, a “new frontier” is
born, the dream of an American people. “Go Cyberspace” replaces “Go West.”
Cyberspace is the latest American frontier. Hackers are celebrated in the same way as
conquerors of new territories or outlaws were in the past, at least when they are finally
integrated into the economic system after having sowed their wild oats in the new
Wild West…The conquest of cyberspace follows the example set by the settlers,
cowboys, heroes of the Wild West and soldiers who subjugated a continent that, in
their eyes, didn’t belong to anyone—pure colonialism.35

Fredrick Jackson Turner, in his often-quoted paper “The Significance of

the Frontier in American History,” 36 addresses what can be today equally
applied to cyberspace. To Turner, the history of America is the history of the
colonization of the Great West, and the frontier, always receding westward, is
82 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

the key to understanding the American mind and culture. Following these
lines, we can also say with a fair amount of certainty that the history of the new
technologies in general and of the Internet in particular is indeed the history of
the colonization of cyberspace, and that the key to understanding the spirit of
cyberspace can be found in humanity’s drive to colonize new territories.
Turner quotes the Italian economist Loria as saying that America holds the
keys which Europe, the Old World, has for centuries sought in vain, and ex-
plains that the colonization of America can be seen as a microcosm of the
evolution of human society from Indian “savagery” to civilization. Here
Turner comes very close to McLuhan’s definition of myth, cited previously, as
“the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long
period.” Turner is thus implicitly giving the colonization of America, through
the expansion of the frontier, a mythical quality: the instant vision of a com-
plex process which has taken millennia for Europe to go through has, almost
magically, been accomplished in the New World.
Following our analogy, we can say that cyberspace offers the key to the
enigmas that were plaguing the “Old World,” representing here real life. What
took millennia to accomplish in real life can be done in a mere fraction of that
time in cyberspace. Indeed, the technological and scientific progress wit-
nessed since the second half of the twentieth century has moved in exponential
leaps. Turner identifies three results of the colonization of the West: one,
cosmopolitanism, two, independence from England, and three, the promotion
of democracy in both worlds. These three results, uncannily, are duplicated in
cyberspace: one, cosmopolitanism has become globalization where the Old
World is one vast global village connected, instantaneously, to all of its parts
like a giant hologram; two, independence from England has become increased
independence from physical reality: the post office, the typewriter, paperwork,
real-life banking, education, books, entertainment, games, are slowly be-
coming obsolete as they are replaced by their digital counterparts; and three,
the promotion of democracy is seen as being fostered by the Internet as it
provides ways of expressing resentment toward totalitarian regimes, of criti-
cizing political practices, of communicating through secured channels, etc.37
Turner also speaks about the character of the colonizers and points out that,
while transforming the wilderness, they also imperceptibly leave behind their
old traits and become peculiarly Americans, that is, they are characterized by
coarseness, strength, acuteness, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, and are quick
to find expedients, all features peculiar to prolonged existence at the frontier.
One would almost read here a description of hackers who, living on the fron-
tier, in cyberspace, match wits with the very software they have collabora-
tively created, always trying to find solutions to bugs, always trying to
 Cyberspace as Myth 83

improve their own programs.

Turner becomes, for the purpose of this study, even more relevant when
he writes that it is also the wilderness which masters the colonists, as it re-
ceives Europeans fully acquainted with the niceties of civilization and throws
them, many times at the cost of their life, into canoes, hunting shirts, mocca-
sins, log cabins, and replaces their advanced weapons with coarse and primi-
tive ones. The New World, cyberspace-as-Eusapia, dispossesses us from our
old habits, molds us, and though we think that we are constructing a New
World, the opposite is also valid: the New World is constructing us, instilling
into our minds routines which are specifically of the nature of cyberspace. We
speak of “saving,” “loading,” “undoing,” “editing,” “printing,” “backing up,”
“restoring,” “deleting,” “inserting,” “clicking,” “merging,” “emailing,”
“formatting,” and many others actions which, although they owe their origin
to real-life actions, have become essentially digital terms coloring the way we
see the real world. Turner also warns against the fears and jealousies of the
Old World, and observes that what he calls the “East” has always feared the
colonizers’ progress westward and saw it as an unregulated advance which
would jeopardize its own domination of the known world and, as such, saw it
as its duty to check or at least guide it. Here again the similarities are striking:
from Neo-Luddites to apocalyptic scenario-mongers, a whole industry has
made it its duty to disparage cyberspace and to throw the discredit on its very
ontological bases. Turner’s “East” is here real life ultimately threatened by the
explosive advance of the colonizers of cyberspace. But this is quite under-
standable, if not condonable: for the first time in the history of human civili-
zation, a whole, nearly fully-equipped, almost universally accessible, cheap,
with little physical dangers, and supremely attractive alternative to reality is
offered. Real life’s hitherto unshakable grip on its denizens, from religion to
science, is about to receive blows that may endanger its very raison d’être.
Turner ends his paper in a quasi-prophetic manner: although the westward
expansion has abated, yet the spirit of Americanness still prevails and the
American energy is bound to continually demand wider fields in which to
exercise its expansiveness and colonizing propensities. He closes by calling
the end of the westward colonization the first period of American history. But
little did Turner realize the accuracy of his predictions: more than five centu-
ries after the discovery of America, cyberspace is once again offering
lands—presumably really virgin, this time—to be colonized, this time not by
Americans only, but by a global community of daring cybernauts. A new
period of worldwide history began in the 1980s with the colonization of cy-
berspace, and the myth of the frontier is nowhere more apparent, nowhere
quicker to gauge and assess, than now: realms hitherto unexplored, limited not
84 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

by physical boundaries but by the imagination of its outward-looking colo-

nizers, cyberspace is now on the brink of providing humanity, for the first
time, with simultaneous multiple existential modes where only the limits of
desire apply. Paul C. Adams, in a discussion of the different virtual-place
metaphors associated with the new technologies, cites the electronic frontier
as one of them, pointing out that Turner’s frontier “has been transposed in
science fiction movies and novels, particularly those in the subgenre called
cyberpunk, into the cutting edge of high technology,” 38 and Arthur and
Marilouise Kroker equate the American character with the mindbogglingly
fast advances made by the new technologies:
The basis of American identity is the will to technology. Only Americans have been
courageous, or maniacal, enough to pay the price for the coming to be of virtual
reality. They are Nietzsche’s experimental subjects who transform themselves into
nutcrackers of the soul, objects of conscience and body-vivisectioning. They can be
observed from a distance by Asians, Europeans and Canadians with a mixture of
adulation, scorn and feelings of cultural superiority, but not without a lingering sense
of deep admiration and awe for these Kings and Queens of the virtual kingdom.39

Yet what Röetzer hints at above, when he describes both expansionist

movements as “pure colonialism,” must not be forgotten or cast aside as the
rush to colonize cyberspace is sweeping the western culture. Ziauddin Sardar
uses strong words to unmask the ideology behind a drive which would like to
appear as a candid pastime miles away from physical reality. To Sardar, the
race to colonize the Earth has not ended; on the contrary, cyberspace is just
another excuse to continue the subjugation of the weak by the strong:
The outer space is a domain best left, for the time being, to Star Trek. For the conquest
to continue unabated, new terrestrial territories have to be found; and where they
don’t actually exist, they must be created. Enter, cyberspace…It [cyberspace] is a
conscious reflection of the deepest desires, aspirations, experiential yearning and
spiritual Angst of Western man…That it is a ‘new frontier’, a ‘new continent’, being
reclaimed from some unknown wilderness by heroic figures not unlike Cristobal
Colon, is quite evident from how the conquest of cyberspace is described by many of
its champions. Analogies to colonization abound.40

Worse, cyberspace to Sardar is a devilish attempt to re-write history, to wipe

out from the physical memory of humans the centuries of oppression by
creating, as if in vitro, a new species which would not only turn a blind eye to
the suffering caused by its less fortunate predecessor but one which would also
see history as beginning anew, with everything that was before having been
conveniently spirited away.41
But there is more to the frontier myth than just the rush of colonization.
Stefan Zweig, in his Amerigo, relates how Vespucci’s 1503 six-page pamphlet
 Cyberspace as Myth 85

entitled Mundus Novus ensured its author an everlasting fame, despite the
large body of controversy surrounding the legitimacy of naming the new
continent after the Florentine merchant. According to what is described in the
letter, the “New World” is a blessed land: toil is unknown, trees, rivers and
seas give their product freely and abundantly, men live in total innocence and
share all goods in common, including women. One single sentence, coupled
with the title, made of this pamphlet the elixir for all the Western world’s
sorrows: “if paradise on earth exists somewhere, it must not lie too far from
here.”42 To Zweig, a Mundus Novus, especially at that time, was hailed as the
panacea to cure all ills. How similar are we to the inhabitants of Europe at the
beginning of the sixteenth century? Is cyberspace another Mundus Novus that
promises so much, as it did then, in the face of looming catastrophes threat-
ening to obliterate humanity? Is cyberspace as Mundus Novus another para-
dise, not on earth, but in virtuality, since our planet has been so meticulously
mapped that no human being can, for too long, hide?
Yet some have been disillusioned with the myth of cyberspace. Nirre, in
the same article cited previously, is suspicious of the way the myth has gone
from magic to fable, from promises of a better world to mundane concerns,
from connecting to cyberspace and coming out in a fully virtualized body in a
sophistication never seen before to an illusory manufactured simulation, from
dreams of apotheosis and fantastic powers and phoenix-like awakenings to the
loss of all expected charms. But perhaps Nirre and many others were ex-
pecting too much from cyberspace, and have over-inflated the myth to pro-
portions where it was indistinguishable from pure fantasy, for if myth is a
natural and essential attempt to understand the deeper forces at work in a
society, fantasy is only the unbridled imagination let loose (Webster’s Dic-
tionary defines fantasy as “imagination, esp. when extravagant and unre-
strained” and as “the forming of grotesque mental images”43). Cyberspace is
definitely not the panacea that will cure humanity’s ills, despairs, and de-
pressions, just as the American frontier was not the end of all woes. François
de Closets, at the turn of the third millennium, was writing: “In the year 2000,
which, in those old days, represented the absolute future, the computer has
been put back in its place: the best of our slaves, but certainly not our rival,
even less our equal.”44 Cyberspace is neither hell nor heaven, it is neither the
work of the devil nor the work of angels coming to deliver mankind from the
fetters of the flesh; cyberspace is an alternative mode of existence which
challenges our views of the world as we know it, forcing us to re-assess our
notions regarding time and space. As Lévy simply and accurately says: “ We
have dreamed, and maybe sometimes reached, especially since the middle of
the 1980s, a desirable software space open to explorations, to connections
86 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

with the outside, and to singularizations.” 45 No magical solutions, no

out-of-body experiences await the serious cybernaut.
Lévy also enumerates the ways in which oral societies code their
knowledge as myth and writes that representations of reality have to be richly
interconnected; connections between them will use cause-and-effect relations;
propositions will refer to concrete and familiar domains of knowledge which
can be used on pre-established schemes; and finally these representations must
have real bonds with problems of everyday life and be heavily and emotion-
ally charged.46 Myth, to Lévy, can be rich and emotionally charged without
being fantastic, but it has to be, nonetheless, a social construct. Indeed, Roger
Caillois, in his famous 1938 Le Mythe et l’homme, wrote:
Myth…belongs by definition to the collective, it justifies, supports, and inspires the
existence and the action of a community, a people, a group of craftsmen or a secret
society. A concrete example of how to act and a precedent, in the judicial meaning of
the word, in the vast domain of sacred culpability, myth becomes, to the eyes of the
group, clothed with authority and coercive power.47

Cyberspace is a “collective” space par excellence. Without the cybernauts and

the AIs which people it, cyberspace quickly loses its appeal and thus its raison
d’être. The miracle of being able to connect to others beyond the limitations of
physical distances, already heralded by the telephone, is magnified as
cybernauts can connect to hundreds, even thousands, of other users
simultaneously and exchange information otherwise un-exchangeable by
other means.
The community that inhabits cyberspace is varied, but hackers probably
deserve the right to be called the aboriginal inhabitants of this new world. A
secret society they are, disguising themselves under shocking and
not-so-shocking pseudonyms many of which owe to the world of mythology
and magic. Barlow, in his early encounters with hackers, found that they had a
set of ethics and that they were trying to protect the Internet and its architec-
ture.48 Hackers, like the knights of yore, took it upon themselves to protect the
lands they deemed sacred. The sense of community is also present with
“normal” everyday users, witness Dibbell’s account of a “rape” in cyberspace
when one user of LambdaMOO, a certain “Mr Bungle,” appropriated the
persona of another user and started sending obscene messages to the other
users. The action, appropriately called a “voodoo doll,” was immediately
deemed of utmost gravity, and Mr Bungle was, after unanimous agreement,
“toaded,” i.e., his account was summarily canceled by the programmers of
LambdaMOO, also appropriately called “wizards.”49 Caillois’ description of
myth, as we can see from Dibbell’s account, is valid in cyberspace as well, if
not in a better way.
 Cyberspace as Myth 87

Claude Lévi-Strauss’ linking of myth with bricolage is, in this context,

also relevant: Lévi-Strauss begins by refusing to equate the faculty of con-
structing myths with that of fabulation, saying that the former is “far from
being, as has often been held, the product of man’s ‘myth-making faculty’,”
ascribing to it the role of preserving for coming generations the remains of
methods and ways of observation and reflection, what De Certeau would call
ways of doing. Myth is with Lévi-Strauss a “science of the concrete,” re-
stricted yet no less potent and genuine than what is called the exact natural
sciences. The narratives of myths preserve results “secured ten thousand years
earlier” which “still remain at the basis of our own civilization.”50 This science
of the concrete as opposed to exact science, of myth as opposed to real life,
what Lévi-Strauss calls “bricolage,” can be equated with the colonizing
movement of hackers in cyberspace. His description of the “bricoleurs” can
effortlessly be seen as a description of hackers:
[T]he ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means
compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is
that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if
extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the
task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a
kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’—which explains the relation which can be perceived
between the two.51

Hackers are the myth-builders of cyberspace. Armed with their brains and
their fecund imagination, they are bricoleurs who make do with whatever is
available. As such, it is not strange to see a strong sense of community and
bondage between hackers, and an ethics of sharing the tools of the trade. Myth
is “intellectual bricolage” and cyberspace, if opposed to the “engineer” nature
of the real world as a place where each thing receives a set position in time and
space, is thus seen as a mythical plane of existence initially pieced together by
hackers and thereafter continuously added to, bricolage-wise, by the millions
of users who, with the means at hand, add a piece here and a piece there to the
formidable edifice. Lévi-Strauss’ engineer prefers a view of reality from the
outside, from “beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civili-
zation,” while his bricoleur works from within the system, trying to use what
is already available.52 What Lévi-Strauss says about the “savage mind” and its
relationship to myth and magic throws an interesting light on the reasons why
cyberspace is fulfilling a primeval human need:
[M]agical thought, that ‘gigantic variation on the theme of the principle of Causality’
as Hubert and Mauss called it…can be distinguished from science not so much by any
ignorance or contempt of determinism but by a more imperious and uncompromising
demand for it which can at the most be regarded as unreasonable and precipitated
88 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

from the scientific point of view.53

What cybernauts are doing is not mere escapism from the harsh realities of
everyday life: just as their “savage” counterparts, in so-called primitive
societies, are able to apprehend reality through myth and magic, cybernauts
are given the chance to re-think that same reality through the prism offered by
cyberspace. The “imperious and uncompromising demand” for cyberspace
stems from just that need.
That cyberspace does not have to coincide with reality, both in format and
in content, is obvious. If it were otherwise, cyberspace would be redundant
and would not command the attention it has been getting for years. Further, it
is precisely because the map of cyberspace is untransferrable onto that of
physical reality that it can survive and exert its optimum influence on reality.
Borges’ often-quoted passage on the fallacy of precise mapping provides an
interesting analogy:
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the
entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and
the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the
Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who
were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that
that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they
delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still
today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all
the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.54

The equally famous response to Borges’ story is Baudrillard’s opening in his

Simulacra and Simulation in which the French critic credits Borges with
writing “the most beautiful allegory of simulation,” yet only to deplore the fact
that the end of the twentieth century heralds not just simulation, but simulacra:
what is being covered is not something tangible but the fact that there is
nothing to be covered anymore. Baudrillard reverses the Borges story in that it
is not the territory which comes before the map but the contrary: the map
comes before in what he calls the “precession of simulacra.” More, what is left
in Baudrillard’s deserts are not the vestiges of the map but those of the real
itself.55
The Buddhist mandala provides an interesting example of the relationship
between myth, mapping, and the existence of others planes of being. A
mandala, in oriental art, is “a schematized representation of the cosmos,
chiefly characterized by a concentric organization of geometric shapes, each
of which contains an image of a deity or an attribute of a deity,” the word
being Sanskrit for “circle.”56 W. Y. Evans-Wentz, in his memorable 1927
 Cyberspace as Myth 89

translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, defined mandalas as “divine

conclaves”57 and “mystic groupings of deities”58 and gave detailed descrip-
tions of numerous mandalas, among them the “Great Mandala of the Peaceful
Deities,” painted in color on heavy cotton cloth, complete with innermost,
subordinate, and top circles.59
Carl G. Jung, who contributed the “Psychological Commentary” to Ev-
ans-Wentz’ edition, assigned psychological significance to the mandalas and
added that “on a higher level of insight, the dead man knows that the real
thought-forms all emanate from himself, and that the four light-paths of
wisdom [corresponding to the four colours in the mandala] which appear
before him are the radiations of his own psychic faculties.” The mandala helps
to destroy the karmic illusions so that “consciousness, weaned away from all
form and from all attachment to objects, returns to the timeless, inchoate state
of the Dharma-Kāya.”60 Further clarification is to be taken from Jung’s Psy-
chology and Alchemy where he says, in his chapter on the symbolism of the
mandala, that the term denotes “the ritual or magic circle used in Lamaism and
also in Tantric yoga as a yantra or aid to contemplation.” Jung adds that no
two mandalas are alike for the true mandala is “always an inner image, which
is gradually built up through (active) imagination, at such times when psychic
equilibrium is disturbed.” Since Jung’s book is primarily concerned with
dreams and alchemical symbols, the meaning of the mandala is that as a
symbol it “originated in dreams and visions…[and] not invented by some
Mahayana church father.”61 The importance of the mandala to Jung—and here
to me in this study—is the equation between the mandala and its mappable use
as psychic center:
It is not without importance for us to appreciate the high value set upon the mandala,
for it accords very well with the paramount significance of individual mandala
symbols…characterized by the same qualities of a—so to speak—“metaphysical”
nature. Unless everything deceives us, they signify nothing less than a psychic centre
of the personality not to be identified with the ego.62

Jung cautiously advanced the theory that if the mandala is an archetype, then it
must be a collective phenomenon, and this despite the distinct variants he
exposed throughout more than a hundred pages, and ended up by affirming
that “the symbolism of the mandala is not just a unique curiosity; we can well
say that it is a regular occurrence.”63 Jung is here, of course, hinting at his
collective unconscious theory and trying to tentatively place the mandala as a
universal symbol perceived throughout the ages:
The archetype is, so to speak, an “eternal” presence, and the only question is whether
it is perceived by the conscious mind or not. I think we are forming a more probable
90 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

hypothesis, and one that better explains the observed facts, if we assume that the
increase in the clarity and frequency of the mandala motif is due to a more accurate
perception of an already existing “type,” rather than it is generated in the course of the
dream-series.64

Eliade, in the appropriately-titled Myth and Reality, defines the mandala as an

“imago mundi,” a “Cosmos in miniature,” and its construction, by the initiates,
as a “magical re-creation of the world.” 65 What I suggest here is that the
mandala, as mythical symbol, has re-surfaced not only in the dreams analyzed
by Jung but, following Eliade, in the way it can serve as a framework to help
us map cyberspace. This framework, like the mandala, is a fluid one, an inner
image built by each cybernaut as they cross the continuously receding
expanses of cyberspace.
Greg Bear, in Queen of Angels, has scientists enter, in what can be seen as
a cyberspace-like manner, the “Country of the Mind” in order to fathom the
secrets of the human psyche:
Martin closed his eyes. On the edge of his vision fluttered a somber brightness limned
by electric green. The electric green blossomed into an infinite regression of twirling
fractals, inner-mind geometries familiar to all brain researchers; visual interference
patterns from occipital lobe signal smear.66

The “twirling fractals” are quickly identified as mandalas which morph to

mythical creatures symbolizing the innermost recesses of the mind’s drives:
Clouds. An endless cycle of clouds and rain again in a mandala, storms racing in a
circle around a twisting wheel of lightning. The lightning threatened to turn into
snakes. Martin exulted; they were on track, observing the layers of limbic signs,
symbols exchanged between the brain’s autonomic systems and higher personal
systems. “Clouds and lightning, lightning trying to go back to the snakes layer
again.”67

Mandalas are also at the center of the futuristic training given to would-be
mind scientists in Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers:
I rolled over onto my back and stared at the meditation mandala on the ceiling. The
colors reminded me of the colors from the relaxation exercise Segretti had hooked me
into. The program had probably drawn on them, I realized, and for some reason, the
idea was rather comforting.68

On a more mundane plane, the association between the new technologies

and the mandala has also been observed. Dery quotes mythologist Joseph
Campbell, co-author of The Power of Myth, as being “dazzled by the dizzy
mandala of the computer’s microcircuitry,” and as exclaiming, upon opening
up his own PC: “Have you ever looked inside one of those things?…You can’t
 Cyberspace as Myth 91

believe it. It’s a whole hierarchy of angels—all on slats.”69

Cyberspace-as-mandala belongs to myth in that it opens up, in a fulgurant
manner, visions which have taken aeons to imagine, and in that it constructs,
as Jung says above, a “psychic centre of the personality not to be identified
with the ego.” Here mysticism rejoins psychoanalysis in the building of an
image not too far removed from the theories expounded by postmodernist
thinkers about the idea of the self being not much more than a narrative con-
struction, a fiction lacking a stable center where the ego—of the author, of the
reader, of the critic—can find itself. Cyberspace re-constructs the mandala
image and offers, at its center, not the stability of real life—the ego—but the
play of possibilities.
Case, in Gibson’s Neuromancer, goes through a kind of epiphany when, at
the beginning of the novel, he is able to re-enter cyberspace. The mandala-like
nature of the experience is described:
He closed his eyes…

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of
space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.
Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.70

Cyberspace as mandala serves, likewise, to open up the inner eye in the

realization that the real world we have taken for granted may be but an
illusion.
But as the tantric deities sometimes take on frightening shapes, so does
cyberspace to the initiate and the non-initiate alike. Case experiences “the
paneled room [folding] itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling
away into cyberspace like an origami crane.”71 The vistas offered by cyber-
space can be magical, but also disconcerting. To be put face to face with a
space that defies the norms of our everyday life measurements is, to say the
least, like going through a mystical experience where time and space cease to
function as expected. Cyberspace is here available for anybody to enter, yet it
remains an absence until it is actually used. Calvino presents, in Invisible
Cities, the city of Fedora where in each room there is a small crystal globe with
a different version of Fedora itself, each version being the form imagined as
ideal by different travelers. Marco Polo tells the Khan about the meaning of
this invisible city:
On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone
Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but
because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary
when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is
possible no longer.72
92 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Similarly, cyberspace offers itself like the little crystal globes: each cybernaut
constructs cyberspace as the ideal to be reached, and while doing so, the stone
Fedora, real life, is no longer the same anymore, changing a little bit with
every dream, with every crystal globe being added. On the map of our big
empire, an empire which must make room for the visible and the invisible, for
the present and the absent, for the model and the simulation, for real life and
cyberspace, there must be room for all Fedoras, for all modes of existence. As
Marco Polo explains later to the Khan, “[t]he catalogue of forms is endless:
until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born.”73
Cyberspace’s most important gift is that it has allowed us to tangibly
experience infinity and not to be bound by a stone-like representation of
reality. What has hitherto remained the jealously guarded possession of
mystics and experimenters of mind-enhancing substances can now be made
available for all.
Borges, in “The Book of Sand,” feverishly describes a face-to-face en-
counter with infinity, in this case with a book the pages of which cannot be
counted and can never be found again. Cyberspace puts us in front of a similar
situation: the digital spaces we are faced with are of such a different substance
and texture that they are only limited by the extent we use them, and anyone
who has “surfed” the Internet for a substantial time would understand why its
“pages” follow a route that can never be the same. The book, in Borges’ story,
is called the “Book of Books,” and also the “Book of Sand,” because “neither
this book nor sand has a beginning or an end.” The book comes to the narrator
through a mysterious Bible seller who asks him, after telling him the origin of
the book, to find the first page. The narrator tries but finds that such an easy
action is impossible: pages keep coming out of the cover. Asked to find the
last page, the narrator goes through the same ordeal in vain. The seller at-
tempts an explanation:
This is not possible, yet it is. The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite. Not
one is the first, not one is the last. I do not know why they are paginated in such an
arbitrary way. Maybe to mean that the components of an infinite series can only be
paginated in an absolutely haphazard manner.74

He adds: “If space is infinite, we are in any point in space. If time is infinite,
we are at any point in time.” 75 Is cyberspace infinite space? Is cybertime
infinite time? Probably, as long as we are inside it: actions can be undone as
though nothing were final and second chances were always available;
deletions, unlike our real-life terminations and deaths, can be reversed and the
dead and sick brought back to life and pristine health; items can be copied so
perfectly that the age-old concept of the original simply vanishes;76 one item
can be copied an infinite number of times in a manner reminiscent of mystical
 Cyberspace as Myth 93

stories of bi-locality; items can be cut from one place and put anywhere else in
a manner not very different from magical tele-transportation. Can there be any
doubt that cyberspace, through apparently trivial commands, is offering the
mythical equivalent of what humanity has been dreaming of since its
beginning?
But a myth of these dimensions, as we have seen above, is, to many, a
monstrosity, something that cannot be encompassed by our still-budding no-
tions of time and space. The narrator in Borges’ story realizes the extent of
what the book of sand constitutes, not in its substance inasmuch as in its im-
plications on reality:
I understood that the book was monstrous. It meant nothing to realize that I myself
was monstrous, I who was seeing it with my own eyes and was touching it with my
own ten fingers and nails. I felt that it was an object of nightmare, an obscene thing
which defamed and corrupted reality.77

What is more important than the narrator’s understandable fright is the vague
realization, somewhere deep inside, that he himself is similar to the book of
sand, with no essential boundaries in time and space, with no beginning or
end, himself a book the pages of which are infinite, constantly re-written,
never the same. It is therefore obvious why the book of sand, the book of our
own existence, when seen as an infinite entity, becomes an object of
nightmare, obscene, a defamation and corruption of reality: it is simply
because it allows us, like Blanchot’s siren song, to glimpse into our own
infinity, and the whole edifice of reality, patiently constructed through the
millennia, crumbles to pieces before our very eyes. Cyberspace, like a
monstrous mirror, reflects back the very infinity of reality, and the myth of
cyberspace is the instant vision not only of a complex process, as McLuhan
said, but of an infinite process. We live mythically in cyberspace as we
glimpse infinite planes, and the vision is frightening because it allows us to
look back at some original chaos which has been dormant all the time. Hakim
Bey, in his famous Temporary Autonomous Zone writes, Nietzsche-like:
CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert &
spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon),
the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black
pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.78

Chaos, in early Greek cosmology, is the primeval emptiness of the universe,

the original state of things, and Bey states that there is a Chaos still waiting to
be acknowledged. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, gives this picture of the
beginning of times:
94 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Before there was any earth or sea, before the canopy of heaven stretched overhead,
Nature presented the same aspect the world over, that to which men have given the
name of Chaos. This was a shapeless uncoordinated mass, nothing but a weight of
lifeless matter, whose ill-assorted elements were indiscriminately heaped together in
one place…Nothing had any lasting shape, but everything got in the way of
everything else; for, within that one body, cold warred with hot, moist with dry, soft
with hard, and light with heavy.79

The attraction of cyberspace is the attraction of chaos, the seduction of places

waiting to be transformed into spaces, the frontier myth again, since to the
early colonizers the Indians—as “savages”—and the wilderness were symbols
of evil, symbols of disorder waiting to be ordered by the civilizing hand of
man.
Chaos as mandala is best represented as a labyrinth, and cyberspace as
labyrinthine mandala possesses the one feature of all labyrinths: it can either
lead to the center, to the secret, or it can lead to confusion and death. The most
famous labyrinth and, appropriately, the most mythical, is Daedalus’ labyrinth
designed for King Minos of Crete. Ovid gives us this description:
Daedalus, an architect famous for his skill, constructed the maze, confusing the usual
marks of direction, and leading the eye of the beholder astray by devious paths
winding in different directions…Daedalus constructed countless wandering paths and
was himself scarcely able to find his way back to the entrance, so confusing was the
maze.80

The labyrinth was to be the prison for the Minotaur who was the fruit of the
union between Minos’ wife Pasiphae and a bull sent forth initially by Poseidon
to be sacrificed by the king—who didn’t, such was the beauty of the bull. The
Minotaur roamed the labyrinth, feasting on young men brought to him every
nine years, and was eventually killed by Theseus with the help of Ariadne and
her golden thread.
It is to Borges that we turn again for an interesting re-reading of the
Minotaur’s story based on Apollodorus’ version of the myth. Asterion, the
Minotaur, finds himself the unknowing prisoner of a peculiar labyrinth:
It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is
infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as well…[anyone] will also
find a house like no other on the face of the earth…Even my detractors admit there is
not one single piece of furniture in the house.81

Asterion lives in a house the paths of which, like the monstrous book of sand
above, are infinite, a house which has no equivalent on earth, a house with no
furniture, i.e., with no physical moorings, or with no fixtures that can be used
to accommodate humans from the outside world. Asterion is not a mere beast,
 Cyberspace as Myth 95

on the contrary: Borges endows him with a high sensibility with which he tries
to understand the place he has been locked in. Asterion has “meditated on the
house”:
All the parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place. There is
no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the mangers, drinking troughs,
courtyards, pools are fourteen (infinite) in number. The house is the same size as the
world; or rather, it is the world…Everything is repeated many times, fourteen times,
but two things in the world seem to be only once: above, the intricate sun; below,
Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I
no longer remember.82

Asterion’s search for answers echoes our own quest(s) for the nature of reality.
Gibson has one of his characters say, in Count Zero:
‘Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all
that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all
agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a
whole universe.’83

Compare the above with Case’s description of the Villa Straylight—a

construction half-physical, half-digital—in Neuromancer:
‘The Villa Straylight…is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in
Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages,
by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried
past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . .’84

If Baudrillard uses the image of Narcissus bending over the spring, Borges has
Asterion inventing a mirror image of himself: “But of all the games, I prefer
the one about the other Asterion. I pretend that he comes to visit me and that I
show him my house…Sometimes I make a mistake and the two of us laugh
heartily.”85 Whether it is Narcissus or Asterion is not an issue to Baudrillard
who says: “We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in
the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space,
eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle.” But
Baudrillard hastens to add: “Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its
charm will be lost.”86 Likewise with Borges who, always ready to add a twist
to his narrative, has Asterion’s double come not in the shape of the self-created
other, but in that of Theseus, not a denizen of Asterion’s world and thus not a
figment of the half-beast-half-man’s imagination, but a man of flesh and
blood, a man from real life. Not surprisingly, Asterion awaits Theseus and
calls him his “redeemer.” When the rather insensitive earthling kills the
Minotaur, he is surprised by the ease of his deed:
96 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended
himself.’87

The tragic side of Asterion is mirrored by the uncouthness of Theseus; the

tragedy of Asterion is that as a miscarried progeny, a freak crossbreed between
a beast and a human being, ultimately a simulation because not essentially
real, living in a closed world with entrances too many to be numbered, in a
house where every part points to and is, at the same time, any other part; a
simulation which has committed the unforgivable sin of re-creating himself,
i.e., a simulation creating a simulation, the Platonic sin of a work thrice
removed from reality. But Borges’ story leaves, by the very characterization of
its actors, a subtle hint or an interrogation which lingers after the narrative is
told and the events acted out: could Asterion be right? Could he be the
thinking consciousness which, by looking back at itself sees itself for the first
time (for speculation and specular—mirror-like—share the same Latin root
speculor, to observe88)? Is Theseus then really the darker side of Asterion’s
nature who tragically puts an end to the Minotaur’s inquisitive sensibilities? If
cyberspace is the House of Asterion, who is this Theseus bent on ruthlessly
killing the master of the domain?
Lévy also takes up the Minotaur-Theseus story and gives it another in-
teresting twist, ascribing the myth to a re-writing, by the nascent Greek civi-
lization, of what was originally a Cretan supremacy built on the love not of
war, but of peace. Lévy reverses the original roles and Theseus, much like in
Borges’ story, is the rude barbarian incapable of meditating on the nature of
reality:
Who is then the Minotaur? Is it the frightening beast devouring the young
Athenians?…This version of the Minotaur is that of the Greeks. But the polemic
Greeks, sons of Mycenae and readers of the Iliad, could not understand Knossos, the
enigma of an irenic civilization. The Minotaur, the man-bull hybrid, is nothing but the
Minoan acrobat executing, on the sacred bull, perilous ritual jumps. The Minotaur,
the man-bull hybrid, indeed appears in the center of the labyrinth, but it is really the
central court of Knossos’ palace. He appears in the open, light, gracious, in the sunny
court of a large well of light…Theseus killing the Minotaur is the Mycenaeans
occulting the Minoan civilization, an artistic, technical civilization with no weapons
and no slavery.89

It is clear from the above that cyberspace, as is seen by many, is this “artistic,
technical civilization with no weapons and no slavery,” a realm which
desperately wants to be above the destructive passions of the flesh or “meat,”
and which delights in its ritualistic acrobatic jumping and surfing along fluid
hypertextual routes.
Still, Asterion as a figure cannot all by himself account for the creation of
 Cyberspace as Myth 97

cyberspace, and the rich mythical lore patiently constructed by humanity over
the millennia provides us with further building blocks with which to map
cyberspace. The ubiquitous pair of one male and one female being the origin
of the human species—the Adam and Eve of the Biblical creation story—has
given cybertheorists food for thought. In cyberspace, creation is present in the
form of the basic digital duality of 1 and 0, as explained in Stephenson’s Snow
Crash: “Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This
distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between
being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation
myths.”90
Not only is this separation pivotal in creation myths, it is even more es-
sential when one is dealing with cyberspace, where everything hinges around
presence and absence: simulation, virtuality, decentering, and the absence of
an ultimate signified. In fact, it is legitimate to say that the second half of the
twentieth century bears the mark of this problematization of presence and
absence. Jameson spoke of five fundamental depths that have been repudiated
in contemporary theory: the hermeneutic model of inside and outside, the
dialectical model of essence and appearance, the Freudian model of latent and
manifest, the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity, and the
semiotic opposition between signifier and signified. To Jameson, depth in all
five models has been replaced by surface.91 We can also add to these five a
spatial model, born with cyberspace, a model which, contrary to the other five,
has not been repudiated, but has been on the contrary acknowledged as the
supreme spatial model of presence and absence. Yet even a new model, to be
palatable to human beings who, after all, have not physically evolved at the
same speed as their own technologies, has to be clothed with myth, and the old
stories, for lack of new ones, have to be adapted to fit the new models. This, in
a few words, is what Stephenson admirably does, among other things, in Snow
Crash. Eve, in cyberspace mode, is not the one who is tempted by Satan to eat
the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge; instead, she is tempted to pluck
out data from the common repository of binary knowledge and thus intro-
duces a metavirus which is the cause of the creation of other viruses.92 As a
result, the whole of the avatars peopling cyberspace take their various shapes
from the software design of the two main characters in the novel, Hiro and
Juanita:
She [Juanita] was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something
close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of
her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry
or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita—the Adam and
Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget.93
98 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

The above echoes Genesis’ account of the creation of the world and God’s
making humanity after his image. Jeff Noon, in Vurt, uses similar imagery
when describing trips to virtual realms accessed through “simulation
feathers.” “Vurt,” the other side of reality—virtuality,—is equated with the
garden of Eden, and the connection between knowledge, Paradise, and the
Fall, is striking:
Last time I saw my sister, for real, she was sitting opposite me, across an apple
jam-smeared table, with a feather in her mouth, expecting to fly. It was me, the
brother, holding the feather there, turning it all around inside of her mouth. And then
moving it to my own mouth, and Desdemona’s eyes were glazed already by the Vurt,
as I twisted the feather deep, to follow her down. Wherever she was going, I was
going too. I really believed that. We went down together, sister and brother, falling
into Vurt, watching the credits roll; WELCOME TO ENGLISH VOODOO. EXPECT
TO FEEL PLEASURE. KNOWLEDGE IS SEXY. EXPECT TO FEEL PAIN.
KNOWLEDGE IS TORTURE. Last time I saw my sister, close up, intimate, in the
Vurt world, she was falling through a hole in a garden, clutched at by yellow weeds,
cut by thorns, screaming my name out loud.”94

The descent to virtuality finds its best metaphor in the Fall of Adam and
Eve. Gibson constructs a cyber-myth taken from the Bible but twisted to ac-
commodate the new cyberspace model: Paradise is not the place on earth
where God’s newly created Adam and Eve bask in supreme innocence, it is
cyberspace. Out of it is the Fall; back to real space is the casting out of Eden:
“For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the
Fall.”95 The body, in a curious return to the religious paradigm, is the source of
evil, but here its opposite is not the spirit, but disembodied existence in cy-
berspace, a return to the pure freedom of an a-physical world. Case and his
cowboy buddies live in cyberspace like angels.
But cyberspace is a strange place indeed, and it must in a way contain real
life in it, prior to it, if that is in any sense possible, and Case—as Ng in Snow
Crash in the van episode cited previously—is capable of enjoying the “meat,”
flesh, but from the vantage point of cyberspace. It is as if the flesh or physi-
cality were only pure in cyberspace, as if the body, in mystical parlance, could
only be transcended by the grace of the holy cyber-spirit:
There was a strength that ran in her [Linda]…Something he’d found and lost so many
times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat,
the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of
information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its
strong blind way, could ever read.96

And then the long-awaited union with Linda, the long search for her that
spans, like a barely visible thread, the whole novel, is consummated, but only
 Cyberspace as Myth 99

as Orpheus can consummate his love with Eurydice: in the realm of the dead.
Yet both are, in some way, still alive:
The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon
clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as
salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old
message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some
stranger’s memory, the drive held.97

Case is amazed to see that the “old message,” that of the flesh, that of physical
existence, is still valid and working in cyberspace, yet he doesn’t know, at this
stage, that even this “coded model” is a plane of existence that owes as much
to virtuality as it does to real life.
As far as origins are concerned, then, myths in cyberspace are reversed
and are seen as the mirror image version of their real life counterparts.
Baudrillard, though with another agenda in mind, writes of such reversals:
“Simulation…is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a
hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is
nevertheless the map that precedes the territory…that engenders the terri-
tory.”98 The territory, real life, comes after and is modeled after the map, after
cyberspace. When Case, at the end of the novel, “jacks in” and sees Linda and
himself waving at him from the far reaches of cyberspace, he realizes that
immortality, in whatever digital shape it may be, can survive real life and it is,
in fact, his own life in the matrix which engenders the events of the novel.
Case’s experience is a satori-like sudden realization that phenomena are, in the
digital complexity of cyberspace, undifferentiated. His enlightenment recalls
that of Govinda in Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha when, also at the end,
Govinda sees in the smiling face of Siddhartha the kaleidoscopic vision of
different planes of being:
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he saw other faces, many
faces, a long series, a continuous stream of faces—hundreds, thousands, which all
came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time, which all
continually changed and renewed themselves and which were yet all Siddhartha.99

Govinda’s search mirrors our own: trying to resolve the conflict between
Nirvana and Samsara, between the un-nameable, the end of the existence of
the ego, and the world of illusions, the world we live in. When faced with the
riddle of cyberspace, when cyberspace becomes a Zen koan, we strive to
resolve the conflict as well. Which is which? Is cyberspace a world of illusion,
Mara the seducer,100 or is it the answer to our questions and the end of our
quest?
Slavoj Žižek is skeptical about the enthusiasm projected by cyberspace
100 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

and problematizes the issue of self and identity, asking whether we are “no-
body and nothing,” only an illusion of self-awareness similar to what is ex-
perienced by hallucinogenic drug-takers:
No wonder, then, that the old heroes of the LSD scene like Timothy Leary were so
eager to embrace virtual reality: does the prospect of VR not offer the drug journey
into the ethereal space of new perceptions and experiences WITHOUT direct
chemical intervention in the brain, i.e. by providing from the outside, through the
computer generation, the scenes that our brain itself had to create when enhanced by
the drug substance?101

Žižek is mainly afraid that we, as human beings, will be, after the genome
project completion, defined as a mere code “that can be compressed onto a
single CD”102 and that our cherished individuality will disappear and melt in a
giant “brain-in-the-vat” scenario. The prospect of downloading “the entire
human brain (once it is possible to scan it completely) onto an electronic
machine more efficient than our awkward brains”103 seems very real to him.
However, Žižek’s fears, like those of others, stem from a hasty reduction of
possibilities into a dark apocalyptic scenario. Stahl Stenslie clarifies the
“brain-in-the-vat” controversy:
Future communication will go beyond the interface as we know it. Not into an absurd
“uploading of the body” or the disappearance of the body in information, but rather in
the re-emerging of the body as interface; an unpredictable, unreliable, unstable, and
emotional interface, susceptible to hormonal flux and biological decay, but with a
“fuzzy” logic guaranteeing information digestion/exchanges in bit rates higher than
any contemporary, “logic” interface.104

But Žižek is in fact unable, in a chapter appropriately called “Against the

Digital Heresy,” to escape the lure of linking cyberspace with myth, for he
writes:
In this sense, the claim that cyberspace contains a Gnostic dimension is fully justified:
the most concise definition of Gnosticism is precisely that it is a kind of spiritualized
materialism: its topic is not directly the higher, purely notional, reality, but a “higher”
BODILY reality, a proto-reality of shadowy ghosts and undead entities.105

Erik Davis goes to the extent of saying that Gnosticism in fact “anticipates
cyberculture” with “its obsession with simulacra and encoded messages, as
well as its almost libertarian hatred of traditional authority and a corre-
sponding emphasis on spiritual autonomy.”106 Lévy, in turn, situates the issue
of this higher reality in the context of his overall theory of collective intelli-
gence, defining it as “an intelligence distributed everywhere, constantly val-
orized, coordinated in real time, leading to an effective mobilization of
competences,” with the aim of “mutually recognizing and enriching peo-
 Cyberspace as Myth 101

ple.”107 Lévy adds: “Far from fusing together individual intelligences in a kind
of indistinct magma, collective intelligence is a process of growing up, of
differentiation and of mutual re-energizing of singularities.”108 Gibson, in a
passage cited previously, could not have said this better when Case, only in
cyberspace, recovers a long-lost relationship with the flesh and discovers that
his cyberspace body is in a way more real than the one he carries in real life.
Žižek is aware of the consequences of such meditations: “However, the ulti-
mate lesson of cyberspace is an even more radical one: not only do we lose our
immediate material body, but we learn that there never was such a body—our
bodily self-experience was always-already that of an imaginary constituted
entity.”109
Apocalyptic brain-in-the-vat visions are not, however, conducive to a
dispassionate appraisal of what cyberspace can offer. If we follow the
mythical path, we will see that cyberspace is home to a full-fledged cos-
mogony which can be seen as threatening or as benign as its counterpart in real
life. The Babel story is certainly a recurring motif in the literature of cyber-
space. From the Bible we read the following narrative:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech… And the LORD said,
Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do:
and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to,
let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one
another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of
all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called
Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth.110

Babel/Babylon, the confusion of languages, is seen by Gibson as cyberspace,

and he has the Zionites, in Neuromancer, go with Case on his journey. They
provide a counterpart to his cowboy-in-the-matrix identity by having turned
their back to the main system and founded the Zion colony. Case has Aerol,
one of the Zionites, have a try at cyberspace:
‘Try it,’ Case said.

He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit
the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. ‘What did you see, man?’

‘Babylon,’ Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the
corridor.111

Shortly after, Case meets the two surviving founders of Zion who speak a
peculiar language, a mixture of prophecy and technological awareness:
“‘Soon come, the Final Days . . . Voices. Voices cryin’ inna wilderness,
prophesyin’ ruin unto Babylon…We monitor many frequencies. We listen
102 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us
a mighty dub’.” 112 The Zionites are Neo-Luddites who are forced to
accompany Case on his quest which will, paradoxically, end with the
unification of the two great AIs, (Artificial Intelligence), Wintermute and
Neuromancer, into the matrix. It is as if Wintermute and Neuromancer were
attempting to reverse the Babel of tongues, to re-instate one unified language.
But Gibson remains skeptical as to whether the end justified the enormous
means in the final dialogue between Case and the newly-formed AI:
‘But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?’

‘There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of
eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ‘Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to
know, nobody to answer.’113

The reversal of Babel, the re-unification of languages, the tremendous effort at

becoming a unity again has not had the expected results, for the new AI, the
matrix, has alienated itself from both the outside world and cyberspace,
resorting to communication attempts with different solar systems. Yet, as seen
earlier, parallel lives and unwritten existences still continue their life in
cyberspace, as if unaware of the battle that has been fought. Could this mean
that, as the new technologies rise and fall, as schemes of power, enslavement,
and illusion thrive, there remains the fact that cyberspace is a viable
alternative to real life? Neither the Zionites, who helped Case with their music
tear the fabric of the illusion played on him, nor Wintermute-Neuromancer
possess the key to immortal omnipotent life. It is on the individual level, that
of Case and Linda, that cyberspace offers solutions of continuity and hope. As
I will show later, it is indeed on the personal level, as guerrilla warfare, that
cyberspace can be mapped and occupied.
The Tower of Babel as myth has also intrigued writers of the city who, like
Paul Auster, are ready to re-shuffle the notions of space and time. The pro-
tagonist of City of Glass, Quinn, takes up an investigation which turns out to
be everything but a normal case. As he follows Peter Stillman, the prime
suspect, he discovers, to his utter horror, that the man, through his apparent
wanderings in the city, is in fact tracing a very precise itinerary and actually
constructing a sentence onto the streets out of his daily wanderings. Quinn
draws up a map of Stillman’s daily walks which produce the phrase “THE
TOWER OF BABEL.” What horrifies Quinn—and infinitely seduces Auster
and his readers—is, in a way reminiscent of the individuality or uniqueness of
Jung’s mandala, that Stillman was mapping, in a de-Certeau-like manner, his
own myth-city through his own individual movements:
 Cyberspace as Myth 103

For Stillman had not left his message anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the
movement of his steps, but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a
picture in the air with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is
no result, no trace to mark what you have done.114

We do not, so to speak, leave our messages anywhere when we communicate

in cyberspace, except on hard disks if we choose to, or if they are kept for us
on purpose.115 Yet where are they at the moment of production? If on the
screen, they are a combination of 1s and 0s, digitized pixels hitting the screen
to be replaced by others in quick succession, and stored temporarily in
memory. The digital message, even when stored on disks, is problematic, for
where is it when the computer is turned off? Under what language is it stored?
What we see on the screen is a translation from the essential machine
language—what is called low-level language—which computers use to
communicate with each other before end-users are allowed to look. We, like
Stillman, create the letters by the movements of our fingers on a keyboard, but
they are not written down. Until—and if—they are printed out, they remain
electrical signals, a bewildering combination of “on” and “off” switches
making up bytes. Is this similar to drawing a picture in the air with our finger?
Is our mapping done through writing, as Stillman is doing? The Babel myth is
the best metaphor for this movement in cyberspace: the digital world,
cyberspace, the world before the Fall, is the perfect space for the perfect
movement which can take any form and which can even disappear without
leaving a trace. It is only in real life, in the real world, that movement acquires,
because of the Fall, this heavy quality alongside with the confusion of
languages and their consequent inability to re-map a lost original ideal, what
Stephenson, in Snow Crash, calls an “informational disaster,” the
“Infocalypse” following the stopping of the Tower of Babel project and the
confusion of languages.116
With Paradise followed by the Fall and then by the confusion of tongues
comes a double identity, one that partakes of the divine, or of the original state,
and one that is bound to the flesh. It will be no surprise, then, to see that the
myths constructing cyberspace are also very much indebted not only to a
paradise, a fall, and a confusion of tongues, but also to the idea of a double
identity. In fact, the denizens peopling Active World, as well as those in
Stephenson’s Snow Crash, are called “avatars,” a term taken from Hindu
mythology. Webster’s Dictionary’s definition of avatar is interesting:
1. Hindu Myth. the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some
manifest shape; the incarnation of a god.

2. an embodiment or concrete manifestation, as of a principle, attitude, view of life, or

104 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

the like. [<Skt avatara a passing down…]117

The Hindu avatar descends to the earth and embodies a concrete manifestation
or principle. In Snow Crash and in Active Worlds, the movement is in the
opposite direction: the real-life user connects to the Metaverse and to the
online community and embodies a concrete manifestation or principle of
reality. As Stephenson himself shows with Ng, it is possible to control real life
from cyberspace; it is possible to forsake the physical body, to keep it barely
functioning and, acquiring a brand new virtual body, a brand new virtual life,
and brand new virtual conditions, to control, if needed, the physical body for
menial chores, as if in contempt. The creation of this perfect virtual world is
the mythical—and deeply tragic—attempt to go back to an Edenic past, and
Ng spares no effort designing it:
He has a large office with French doors and a balcony looking out over endless rice
paddies where little Vietnamese people work. Clearly, this guy is a fairly hardcore
techie, because Y.T. counts hundreds of people out in his rice paddies, plus dozens
more running around the village, all of them fairly well rendered and all of them doing
different things. She’s not a bithead, but she knows that this guy is throwing a lot of
computer time into the task of creating a realistic view out of his office window.118

Yet Stephenson quickly adds that, unlike in the real world where people
physically feel each other, avatars in the Metaverse can’t and, therefore, bow
but do not shake hands because this would painfully remind them of their
virtuality.
But hasn’t the flesh been the principal enemy of the Judeo-Christian tra-
dition for centuries? Obviously, a departure from the physical into a realm of
pure thought and pure rationality could not be too alien to the western mind.
As the movie The Thirteenth Floor brilliantly suggests, we could ourselves be
the avatar(s) of a super-user, a “deity” descended to our real life. The mere
fascination and the stupendous facility and adaptability of such myths to the
medium of cyberspace is worthy of notice. As a new mode of existence, cy-
berspace embodies both our wildest and most spiritual fantasies quickly, ef-
fortlessly, and with a high degree of versatility. An example is the ease with
which Voodoo myth has been adapted by Noon as shown previously and
specially by Gibson where Oungans, Mambos, Loas, Pappa Legba, Ezili
Freda, Baron Samedi, Similor, Madame Travaux, Grande Brigitte and others
rub elbows with advanced technology. In a passage from Count Zero, humans
are “decks,” Danbala is the “program,” and the world is cyberspace:
When Beauvoir or I talk to you about the loa and their horses, as we call those few the
loa choose to ride, you should pretend that we are talking two languages at once. One
of them, you already understand. That’s the language of street tech, as you call it. We
 Cyberspace as Myth 105

may be using different words, but we’re talking tech. Maybe we call something
Ougou Feray that you might call an icebreaker, you understand? But at the same time,
with the same words, we are talking about other things, and that you don’t
understand…‘Okay,’ Bobby said, getting the hang of it, ‘then what’s the matrix? If
she’s [Jackie] a deck, and Danbala’s a program, what’s cyberspace?’ ‘The world,’
Lucas said.119

Indeed, Dery notices that in Gibson’s novels “cyberspace is inhabited by

artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have evolved into something rich and
strange: a pantheon of voodoo deities known as the loa,” and points out that
the proliferation of programs in cyberspace “has given rise to artificial entities
that assume the appearances and attributes of voodoo gods.”120
Avatars, as embodiment of the pre-Fall creatures, are therefore embodi-
ment of Chaos, the original undifferentiated unity, sometimes also represented
as Dionysus. Bey judiciously puts the three together: “Avatars of chaos act as
spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible
as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed,
sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers,
pirates of all signs & meanings.”121
In the context of mirrors, it is interesting to note that the Narcissus myth,
briefly mentioned previously, has also played an important role in the con-
struction of cyberspace. The master of myth, Ovid, tells us the wonderful story
of Narcissus discovering his reflection in the clear pool:
While he sought to quench his thirst, another thirst grew in him, and as he drank, he
was enchanted by the beautiful reflection that he saw. He fell in love with an
insubstantial hope, mistaking a mere shadow for a real body. Spellbound by his own
self, he remained there motionless, with fixed gaze, like a statue carved from Parian
marble…Unwittingly, he desired himself, and was himself the object of his own
approval, at once seeking and sought, himself kindling the flame with which he
burned…But he could not lay hold upon himself.122

Are we spellbound by our own reflection in cyberspace? Are we deluded, like

Narcissus by a reflection of ourselves which we have not been able to see
before? Have we tricked ourselves and are we now trapped in a deadly mirror
image? Ovid issues a strong warning to Narcissus:
Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you? The thing
you are seeing does not exist: only turn aside and you will lose what you love. What
you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with
you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if go you can.123

This would be simple and settled yet Ovid takes the problem to its ontological
extreme and Narcissus appears to us not as a foolish teenager tricked by his
106 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

own arrogance but as a tragic representation of human nature as it battles to

understand itself and to find perfection. Narcissus, addressing his
surroundings, utters these words: “Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it:
my own reflection does not deceive me. I am on fire with love for my own self.
It is I who kindle the flames which I must endure…How I wish I could
separate myself from my body!”124 The initial separation, be it that following
the Greek Chaos or that of the Judeo-Christian Fall, is to be mended by
another separation, this time between the body and the soul. Our fall from a
state of happiness, whatever it may be, is to be met by an amputation that will,
paradoxically, make us whole again. Our construction of cyberspace has
amputated us from our physical body and what we have lost is given back to us
in different ways. McLuhan, in “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis,”
says the point of the Narcissus myth, transposed to our relationship with the
new technologies, is “the fact that men at once become fascinated by any
extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”125 He goes on
to explain that any invention, especially in this age, is an extension or a
self-amputation of our physical bodies, and humanity becomes the “sex organs
of the machine world,” serving it and being served by it, in a mutually
beneficial relationship.126
This process, which Baudrillard finds, through the invention of the holo-
gram, fascinating, is represented in cyberspace by our avatar, our mirror im-
age. Benjamin writes: “Let two mirrors reflect each other; then Satan plays his
favorite trick and opens here in his way…the perspective on infinity,”127 and
Sterling, in an interview conducted by Rosie Cross, admits that it is “very
difficult to get your bearings in the world of cyberspace; it really is a place of
fun house mirrors.”128 Cyberspace and real life are two mirrors, quickly be-
coming with every passing day more and more polished, reflecting each other
better and better until the time when one would not know which was originally
which. Fascination or ultimate temptation? What to do with such a dilemma?
Myth is able to give an answer, as it has done for millennia, and its lore pro-
vides us with yet other ways to deal with cyberspace.
Daoism is one of the earliest mystical systems to have provided a clue to
the relationship between two states of being, the original undifferentiated First
Principle, and the state brought about by everyday confusion and turmoil. The
Dao, or “Way,” is the path to re-implanting in oneself the features of that
original principle. Speaking of the Dao129, Lao Zi, in his famous Dao De Jing,
says:
Tao is a hollow vessel,

And its use is inexhaustible!

 Cyberspace as Myth 107

Fathomless!

Like the fountain head of all things.

Its sharp edges rounded off,

Its tangles untied,

Its light tempered,

Its turmoil submerged,

Yet dark like deep water it seems to remain.130

Cyberspace obviously evokes in the minds of many users a vast,

inexhaustible, and dark realm which can scarcely be fathomed as it is
continuously expanding and changing its own boundaries. The similarity with
the American wilderness, mentioned previously, is also striking. Lao Zi, when
saying
Great space has no corners131

would offer the would-be cybernaut cartographer with a situation similar to

that faced by the early explorers and to the space/place pair mentioned by De
Certeau. Is our new “Great space” really without corners, or are we still in the
infancy of a new method of mapping the New World of cyberspace? Yet, for
the first time, the idea of dealing with a space which is inherently unbounded
seems fascinating, especially since it also implies the attractive possibility that
if a space is infinite, then its center can be anywhere, and if its center is
anywhere, then taking up any position in this space would be equivalent to
standing on one of its infinite centers. Then one would be able to dream, with
Lao Zi, of accomplishing the marvelous miracle of knowing all that happens
everywhere else:
Without stepping outside one’s doors,

One can know what is happening in the world,

Without looking out of one’s windows,

One can see the Tao of Heaven.132

And is this not the main fascination of cyberspace—now in its Internet-like

manifestation—to be able to sit in one place, in front of a computer screen, and
access the whole digitized world and communicate with it? Sterling marvels at
this new capability, saying: “But it’s this sense that there—sitting there in my
108 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

study is access to the information of the world.” 133 The old dream of
omnipresence and omniscience is becoming, everyday, more and more a
reality.
But alongside the myth of rebirth comes that of sacrifice. Indeed, the two
worlds, that of reality and cyberspace, are connected by—and share—a myth
of sacrifice and celebration performed by officiants. Georges Bataille gives an
interesting interpretation of sacrifice:
[T]he destruction operated by sacrifice is not annihilation. It is the thing—only the
thing—which sacrifice wants to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys the links of
real subordination of an object, it tears the victim away from the world of utility and
brings it back to the world of unintelligible fancy.134

Transposed to cyberspace, this means that if the matrix is seen by many as a

danger to real life, a destroyer of physicality, then the sacrifice of the old (real
life) is in fact the realization that the sheer physicality of our world has to be
purged by the fires of the digital in order to free it from its bonds. Cyberspace
comes as a sacrificer to sever the age-old subordination of the sacred to the
profane, yanking our old self from utility to the pure realm of imagination. In
this sense, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual is a necessity when the
physical, the object as “thing,” has become too ponderously predominant:
“When the offered animal enters in the circle where the priest will immolate it,
it moves from the world of things…to that which is immanent to it,
intimate.”135 Cyberspace comes back, like an avenging angel, to purify the
physical world and at the same time to redress the wrong committed against
this world by the object and then, to Bataille, “the putting to death appears like
a way to repair the offense made to the animal, miserably reduced to the state
of thing.”136 And the sacred, in Bataillian terms, is a prodigal boiling which, in
order to effect the required changes, has to violently assert itself in an
unboundedness not unlike madness and the full expenditure of accumulated
energy. Cyberspace is violently knocking at the door(s) of real life and the
voice heard outside terrifyingly fills us, the denizens of real life, with awe and
wonder. Bataille says: “The divine world is contagious and its contagion is
dangerous.”137
The officiants to this mystery are more akin to shamans than to priests, for
if priests are needed for Apollonian rituals, shamans are the only possible
officiants for the Dionysian cults. Real life is an ordered paean to Apollo, “any
song of praise, joy, or triumph” and cyberspace is a dithyramb to Dionysus, a
“choral song or chant of vehement or wild character and of usually irregular
form.”138 Henri Jeanmaire, the authority on the cult of Dionysus, says that as
Apollo gave birth to the soothing and solacing institution of religion, Dionysus
retained the mysterious, dark, and frantic aspects of early cults.139 The fol-
 Cyberspace as Myth 109

lowers of Dionysus, the “mad” female Maenads, were known, during feasts in
honor of the god, to collectively and brutally seize a fawn, tear it to pieces with
their bare hands, and eat it raw, an enactment of their god’s passion, death, and
rebirth.140 Here again, the divine is contagious and is certainly dangerous for,
as Walter F. Otto writes:
[T]he magnificence of the god [Dionysus] to whom all the treasures of the world are
made available is suddenly darkened by deep tenebrae. Behind the enchanted truth
rises another truth, a truth which makes the female dancers tremble and which takes
them to a madness not amiable but sinister.141

Otto explains that Dionysus is not only the “Happy” but also the “Terrible,”
and that he would offer himself in sacrifice to himself: “The obscure truth
which brings madness shows its horrible face less in the actions of the god
than in what he himself goes through.” 142 Our divided stances toward
cyberspace show how this dual nature is at work, not only on a personal and
limited level, but on a worldwide scale on the verge of covering any and all
facets of our existence. Dibbell, talking about D&Ds, compares Dungeon
Masters to shamans who have to “mentally picture” the map of their
dungeons, uncannily creating, with the mere power of the imagination, a
full-fledged realm where characters will wander, battle, and die; and Bey
advocates the return to shamanistic practices in order to deal with the
emerging world(s):
To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some
legendary Stone Age—shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police,
gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as
birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.143

Bey equates chaos with the Dionysian frenzy when he says:

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing
witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I
love & desire to the point of terror—everything else is just shrouded furniture,
quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes,
banal censorship & useless pain.144

Bey, in terms reminiscent of de Certeau, sees cyberspace as the last yet

formidable haven for freethinkers in their building of “Temporary
Autonomous Zones” where their survival is conditioned by how much
“sorcery” they can yield in a place/space dichotomy: “Sorcery works at
creating around itself a psychic/physical space or openings into a space of
untrammeled expression—the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic
sphere…Imaginal Yoga.”145 Caillois ascribed a double function to the inner
110 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

workings of the mind: one is magical, and evinces attitudes of conquest,

intelligence, and power, an attempt to extend the field of consciousness to
integrate in it the super-sensible world; the other is mystical, and shows
qualities of effusion and passivity.146 Magic, shamanism, and sorcery perfectly
describe the nascent cyberspace as a place to be conquered, colonized, and
transformed, through mythical metaphors and practices, into a new space.
After this brief foray into the myth of cyberspace, it is time to answer
Eliade who asks, quite justifiably, what has become of myth in modern so-
cieties. He bemoans the fact that “certain ‘participations’ to myths and to
collective symbols still survive in the modern world, but they are far from
filling the central role played by myth in traditional societies: in comparison,
the modern world appears devoid of myths.” 147 Eliade tries to search for
modern ideologies that have taken the place of myth and cites Marxist com-
munism and national socialism as having, for a time, fulfilled the role, but
ends by saying that “outside of these two political myths, modern societies do
not seem to have known others of a comparable amplitude.”148 But Eliade does
not quite give up and thinks that myth has found refuge back in a realm long
thought to be its own, that of writing, and reminds his readers that mythical
archetypes survive in one way or another in the big modern novels. In par-
ticular, poetry takes up the missing place of myth in modern societies for the
very fact that poetry can, almost magically, “re-create” language, and can
“abolish common language, that of everyday life, and invent a new one, per-
sonal and private, ultimately secret.”149 The great myths of creation, trans-
formation, and death are being played everyday whenever one is writing,
especially poetry, for it is in poetry that the greatest license is permitted.
Likewise, I see cybernauts, with the help of software programmers, creating
worlds, interacting with and in them, and being able to destroy them with a
simple command. The creation of digital folders, files, and documents; the
amazing flexibilities offered for editing almost anything from a simple image
to a long document; the magical facility with which anybody can copy, almost
ad infinitum, any file and delete it as easily; all these actions partake of myth.
If one is not a programmer, mythical actions are still as conspicuous, as Eliade
says about the modern act of reading:
Reading not only replaces oral literature…but also the telling of myths in archaic
societies. Reading, indeed, maybe more than spectacle, produces a rupture of duration
and therefore a “slipping out of time” phenomenon. Whether we “kill” time with a
detective novel, or we enter into a foreign temporal universe, that represented by any
novel, reading projects the modern out of his duration and integrates him to other
rhythms, makes him live other stories…[and] gives him the illusion of a mastery of
time in which we can suspect a secret desire to spirit himself away from the
implacability which leads to death.150
 Cyberspace as Myth 111

Cybernauts of all kinds are daily constructing a writerly text with the
trustworthy tools offered by myth in a tragic attempt to escape the limitations
of time and the fatality of death. Never before have twenty-first-century hu-
man beings been given such an opportunity to mythically re-write their fate,
and this in the seemingly innocuous act of accessing the Internet, “surfing” the
web, sending emails across the planet, and constructing simulations. The
human species’ frenzied virtual activity, where millions are simultaneously
online, is unprecedented. Luddite scenarios about the end of the human race
and other apocalyptic visions misread the obvious: in the absence of myth, in
the absence of God, cybernauts have built, only as bricoleurs can, a new space
teeming with the re-constructed myths that have shaped the collective human
race for millennia. The mythopoeic dimension of cyberspace is being mapped
everyday by the daring colonizers of virtuality, a map as rich in imaginative
meaning as that of the first explorers sailing across the voids of the great
oceans.
Let us now turn now to the characteristics of this writing of myth and see
how it is also a mythical writing, an écriture, a “semiophany,”—as Barthes
called it in not a very different context151—which has so dramatically changed
our view of the universe and which, to take up again Lévi-Strauss’ term, has
allowed almost anybody to share in the construction of a “science of the
concrete,” and to become a bricoleur in the continuously expanding new realm
of cyberspace. Cyberspace as the re-construction—and probably last ha-
ven—of myth is to be informed by cyberspace as écriture.

N O T E S

1 J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992), 10.
2 Starrs, “Sacred,” 193.
3 Greg Bear, Queen of Angels (London: Millennium, 2000), 468.
4 Starrs, “Sacred,” 196. Bishop Gaillot’s page is, almost ten years later, very much alive at
http://www.partenia.org [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006]. In the section on the history of
Partenia, Gaillot writes: “Since Partenia does not exist anymore, it has become the
symbol of all those who, in society as well as in the Church, have the feeling of not
existing anymore. It is an immense diocese without frontiers where the sun never sets”
(http://www.partenia.org/histoire_f.htm).
5 Qtd in Starrs, “Sacred,” 197.
6 Ibid., 197.
112 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

7 Margaret Wertheim, “The Medieval Return of Cyberspace,” in Beckmann, Virtual

Dimension, 47–60, 47–48.
8 Ibid., 53.
9 Ibid., 57.
10 Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps,” 32.
11 Ibid., 32–33.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Dery, Escape, 15. Dery defines technopaganism as “the convergence of neopaganism
(the umbrella term for a host of contemporary polytheistic nature religions) and the New
Age with digital technology and fringe computer culture.” Quoting Erik Davis, a critic
of cyberculture and “long-time participant-observer in the Pagan community,” he
further defines technopagans as “a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep
one foot in the merging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of
Paganism.” Davis puts their number between one hundred and three hundred thousand
in the United States (Dery, Escape, 50).
14 Ibid., 50–51.
15 Ibid., 66.
16 J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 21–22.
17 Webster’s, 946.
18 Mircea Eliade, Mythes, rêves et mystères (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 21–22.
19 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 5–6.
20 Calvino, Invisible, 110.
21 Ibid., 110.
22 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 25.
23 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (London: Continuum, 2002), 42.
24 Lévy, Technologies, 10.
25 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” The Humanist
56.3 (May–Jun. 1996), 18–19.
26 Dyson, “Space,” 35–36.
27 Timothy Leary, “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot,” in Bell and Kennedy,
Cybercultures, 529–39, 529.
28 Ibid., 530.
29 Ibid., 530.
30 Ibid., 531–32.
31 Ibid., 534.
32 John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement: In Advance of the Law on the Electronic
Frontier,” Whole Earth Review (Fall 1990), 44–57, 45.
33 Barlow’s web page can be found at http://homes.eff.org/~barlow [Last accessed Oct. 12,
2006].
34 Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, 15.
 Cyberspace as Myth 113

35 Florian Röetzer, “Outer Space or Virtual Space? Utopias of the Digital Age,” in
Beckmann, Virtual Dimension, 121–43, 131.
36 Given originally as an address to the American Historical Association in 1893 and
published later, in 1920, in The Frontier in American History.
37 The abuses of the Internet are, of course, obvious. But take, for example, Phil
Zimmerman’s PGP cryptographic software. A free product, it has helped many
institutions and bodies in the world communicate vital life-saving information in secure,
untampered-with, channels.
38 Adams, “Cyberspace and Virtual Places,” 161.
39 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s
(Montreal: New World Perspectives, 2001), 12.
40 Ziauddin Sardar, “Alt.Civilizations.Faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West,” in
Bell and Kennedy, Cybercultures, 732–52, 734.
41 Ibid., 735.
42 Stefan Zweig, Amerigo: Récit d’une erreur historique (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1994),
23–24.
43 Webster’s, 515.
44 François de Closets et Bruno Lussato, L’Imposture informatique (Paris: Fayard, 2000),
80.
45 Lévy, Technologies, 64.
46 Ibid., 93.
47 Roger Caillois, Le Mythe et l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 151.
48 Andrew Richard Albanese, “Cyberspace: The Community Frontier - LJ Talks with
Electronic Frontier Foundation Cofounder John Perry Barlow,” Library Journal 127.19
(Nov. 15, 2002), 42–44.
49 Dibbell, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, ch. 1.
50 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1966), 16. For a more complex study of myth, see Lévi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study
of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 78.270, (Oct.–Dec. 1955), 428–44. The article
has been translated back into French as “La Structure des mythes” in Lévi-Strauss’
Anthropologie Structurale (Paris: Plon, 1974).
51 Ibid., 16–17.
52 Ibid., 19.
53 Ibid., 10–11.
54 Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1998), 325.
55 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 1.
56 Webster’s, 870.
57 W. Y. Evans-Wentz, ed., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985),
xxvii.
58 Ibid., 217.
59 Ibid., xxviii–xxix.
114 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

60 Ibid., xlviii–xlix.
61 Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Princeton: Princeton UP., 1993), 95–96.
62 Ibid., 98–99.
63 Ibid., 222.
64 Ibid., 221–22. See also Jung’s Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blüte (The Mystery of the
Golden Flower) translated to French as Commentaire sur le mystère de la fleur d’or
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1979), for examples of European mandalas drawn by patients in
the book’s index (87–107). Jung is careful to say that all the drawings (the earliest dating
from 1916) “have been realized independently of any oriental influence” and “clearly
illustrate the parallelism between oriental philosophy and the unconscious mental
processes in the Occident” (87).
65 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, 25.
66 Bear, Queen of Angels, 318.
67 Ibid., 319.
68 Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers (London: Victor Gollancz, 2000), 35.
69 Dery, Escape, 72.
70 Gibson, Neuromancer, 68.
71 Ibid., 208.
72 Calvino, Invisible, 32–33.
73 Ibid., 139.
74 Jorge Luis Borges, El Libro de arena (Madrid: El Libro de Bolsillo, 2000), 133. My
translation.
75 Ibid., 133–134.
76 See Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction
mécanisée,” in Écrits français (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 177–220.
77 Borges, Libro, 136.
78 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism (NY: Autonomedia, 2003), 3.
79 Ovid, Metamorphoses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 29.
80 Ibid., 183.
81 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 2000), 170.
82 Ibid., 171–72.
83 Gibson, Count Zero, 170.
84 Gibson, Neuromancer, 206.
85 Borges, Labyrinths, 171.
86 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 105.
87 Borges, Labyrinths, 172.
88 Auzanneau and Avril, Dictionnaire latin, 580.
89 Lévy, Intelligence, 239.
90 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 195.
91 Jameson, Postmodernism, 12.
 Cyberspace as Myth 115

92 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 216–17.

93 Ibid., 59.
94 Jeff Noon, Vurt (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993), 82.
95 Gibson, Neuromancer, 12.
96 Ibid., 284–85.
97 Ibid., 285.
98 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 1.
99 Herman Hesse, Siddhartha (New York: Bantam, 1976), 150.
100 “Lit. ‘murder, destruction’, the Devil of the Sixth Heaven…Although the embodiment
of death, Mara symbolizes in Buddhism the passions that overwhelm human beings as
well as everything that hinders the development of wholesome roots and progress on the
path of enlightenment,” The Seeker’s Glossary of Buddhism (New York: Sutra
Translation Committee of the United States and Canada, 1998), 360.
101 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2003), 53–54. See also the controversial
works of Carlos Castaneda depicting his initiation to peyote.
102 Ibid., 48.
103 Ibid., 51.
104 Stahl Stenslie, “Flesh Space,” in Beckmann, Virtual Dimension, 19–23, 19.
105 Žižek, On Belief, 54–55.
106 Erik Davis, “Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,” in Spiller,
Cyber_Reader, 192–94, 192.
107 Lévy, Intelligence, 29.
108 Ibid., 33.
109 Žižek, On Belief, 55.
110 The Bible, King James’ Version, Genesis 11:1–9.
111 Gibson, Neuromancer, 131.
112 Ibid., 135. See also Benjamin Fair, “Stepping Razor in Orbit: Postmodern Identity and
Political Alternatives in William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” Critique 46.2 (Winter 2005),
92–103, for a discussion of Zionite political allusions in the novel.
113 Ibid., 316.
114 Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 1990), 85–86.
115 I am aware of the tremendously advanced ways various governments are using the new
technologies to spy on their own citizens and on citizens of other nations. The European
Parliament’s commissioning of an investigation into the suspected existence of a covert
data-gathering system nicknamed “Echelon” is one of many proofs about the insecurity
of data in cyberspace (the EP’s report is available, in full, in various places on the
Internet as a PDF document). However, these issues fall beyond the scope of this study
as they are amply addressed by other writers.
116 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 101, 203.
117 Webster’s, 102.
118 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 206.
119 Gibson, Count Zero, 163.
116 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

120 Dery, Escape, 55.

121 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z., 4.
122 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 85.
123 Ibid., 85.
124 Ibid., 86.
125 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41.
126 Ibid., 46.
127 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
UP, 1999), 538.
128 Rosie Cross, “Surfing the Internet” aired Apr. 3, 1994, Radio Eye, Sunday Night on
Radio National.
129 I will be using the official pinyin transliteration system whenever mentioning Chinese
terms. The old Wade system, though still found in some places, is misleading for
pronunciation.
130 Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse (New York: The Modern Library, 1948), 63. Lin
Yutang calls Lao Zi’s famous book “The Book of Tao” but many other renderings exist
for the original Chinese “Dao De Jing.”
131 Ibid., 211.
132 Ibid., 227.
133 Rosie Cross, “Surfing the Internet.”
134 Georges Bataille, Théorie de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 58–59.
135 Ibid., 59.
136 Ibid., 61.
137 Ibid., 72.
138 Webster’s, 1036 and 418.
139 Henri Jeanmaire, Dionysos: Histoire du culte de Bacchus (Paris: Payot, 1978), 194.
140 Ibid., 175.
141 Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Le Mythe et le culte (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 110.
142 Ibid., 112.
143 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z., 4.
144 Ibid., 4.
145 Ibid., 22.
146 Caillois, Mythe, 9.
147 Eliade, Mythes, rêves, 23.
148 Ibid., 26.
149 Ibid., 36.
150 Ibid., 36–37.
151 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 55. Barthes describes
Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises” as a new language, a “semiophany.”
C H A P T E R F I V E

Cyberspace as Écriture: The

Metaverse

Go ye wa no: I am about to make words. Melanesian expression.

Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo1

What is a myth today? I will immediately give a very simple first answer perfectly in
line with etymology: myth is a discourse.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies2

T
he different myths re-interpreted in the preceding chapter to fit the
context of a mapping of cyberspace can only be situated within the
framework of language and of a magical use of discourse. Speaking of
myths and mythemes, Lévi-Strauss said: “If we want to account for the
specific characters of mythical thought, we must therefore establish the fact
that myth is simultaneously inside language and beyond it.” 3 Can we,
likewise, attempt to map cyberspace in conjunction with myth and writing? In
this chapter I will try to show how cyberspace is indeed an écriture which
constructs and maps out a space for cybernauts.
Borges, in Atlas, played the following game with the notion of the laby-
rinth where discourse becomes itself an unending maze:
This is the labyrinth of Crete. This is the labyrinth of Crete whose center was the
Minotaur. This is the labyrinth of Crete whose center was the Minotaur that Dante
imagined as a bull with a man’s head in whose stone net so many generations were as
lost as María Kodama and I were lost. This is the labyrinth of Crete whose center was
the Minotaur that Dante imagined as a bull with a man’s head in whose stone net so
many generations were as lost as María Kodama and I were lost that morning, and
remain lost in time, that other labyrinth.4

The starting point is a place, the labyrinth of Crete, and Borges uses language
118 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

to construct a narrative, beginning with “whose center was the Minotaur,” and
building over it until that place becomes a space filled with history’s events,
memories, actors, and expectations. From the heart of the labyrinth language
has magically built upon itself to create a vibrant life-like realm. The labyrinth
remains a monological place, closed upon itself, self-reflecting and ultimately
sterile until a narrative discourse, dialogic and reflecting the voices of the
world, reaches out to map out its bearings.
Lévy, in the context of knowledge versus power as the coming order of
cyberspace, also equates the labyrinthine qualities of the new technologies
with writing:
Instead of thickening the bastions of power, let us refine the architecture of
cyberspace, the ultimate labyrinth. On every integrated circuit, on every electronic
chip, we see but cannot read the secret number, the complex emblem of collective
intelligence, scattered irenic message.5

To Lévy, cyberspace has allowed us to genuinely treat the text as it was meant
to be treated, as tissue:
As we tear the text by reading or listening, we ruffle it. We fold it upon itself. We link
the passages which correspond to each other. We sew together the limbs scattered and
dispersed over the surface of the pages or in the linearity of discourse: to read a text is
to recover the textile gestures which gave it its name.6

He adds that cyberspace has also brought writing back, thanks to it basic
programming language, to its original simplicity:
Informatization accelerates the movement begun by writing by reducing any message
to combinations of two elementary symbols, zero and one. These characters are the
least significant possible, identical on all the supports of memory…Information
technology is the most virtualizing of techniques because it is also the most
grammaticalizing.7

Taken back to its bare binary pair of 1 and 0, information technology uses the
two basic building blocks of creation, the mythical Adam and Eve, the
mythical yin and yang of all differentiated beginnings. Any original language,
whether “primitive” or “basic” such as that of IT, is thought to be imbued with
power. Maurice Leenhardt, in 1947, wrote his phenomenal study on the person
and the myth in the Melanesian world. A friend of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and
Marcel Mauss, he wrote the following lines in Do Kamo:
When a great endeavor succeeds, like the bringing down of a log from the mountain to
the sea to make a boat, they [the inhabitants] immediately explain the success of the
event without mishaps, without broken leg or other damage, by properly saying: the
words (no, action) have been good because we have followed the words (no, action
 Cyberspace as Écriture 119

revelation) of someone, and they name a god…they have remained in the mythical.8

From Leenhardt to J. L. Austin’s 1962 How to do Things with Words, the

performative uses of discourse have fascinated human beings. One of the
earliest recorded acts of mythical—and almost magical—creation through
words is, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the fiat of God in Genesis 1:3: “And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Are we still, millennia later,
working our way through technology and thinking, like Leenhardt’s
Melanesians, that we are in fact giving our words a magically performative
quality? Let us remember first de Certeau’s practices which allow everyday
people to construct stories in order to thwart modes of delimitation and
control: story-making transforms places into spaces. If we also remember that
one of the main definitions of myth is that of a “traditional or legendary story,”
and Eliade’s pronouncement that myth is a true story, the connection between
space, mapping, myth and narrative becomes clear.
How myth becomes a narrative and, specifically, literature, is explained
by Caillois who writes that “it is precisely when myth loses its moral re-
stricting power that it becomes literature and object of esthetic pleasure,” and
adds, interestingly: “It is the moment when Ovid writes the Metamorphoses.”9
In one sweeping gesture, Caillois helps us put together the diverse elements
which make up the cyberspace jigsaw puzzle: when myth loses ground in front
of its one formidable enemy, science, mythical construction goes under-
ground, wages guerrilla warfare and wins on different fronts. Through lan-
guage, writing, and literature, myth is alive again, and cyberspace becomes the
metamorphosis of myth from the physical to the virtual. Isn’t one of the defi-
nitions of matrix the mold used in printing for casting typefaces? If the matrix
is the mold, the original, is not the real world, maybe, also the writing done by
cyberspace? Are we Eusapians dictating—the verb “to dictate” comes from
the Latin dīcere, to say, speak10—fashion to the other world, that of simulation
and virtuality, or is the opposite also true? The mirror and the double are the
locus of a duplicity, two edges rubbing each other and forcing beholders to
acknowledge/discover their own nature in the process. To repeat Barthes’
theory, the writerly nature of modern texts comes from their allowing us as
readers to experience the duplicity inherent wherever the fissure between two
edges is present.
Cyberspace is such a text, probably the first fully writerly text in the his-
tory of human thought. Cyberspace is a gigantic and, yes, probably a mon-
strous book; an obscene book which defies and defames our age-old respect
for the orderly, the delimited, and the clearly mapped out; a mandala dictated
to us and, at the same time, drawn with our very hands; a polymorphous and,
at the same time, amorphous rhizome where the only rules are those of a
120 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Dionysian frenzy which turns us into Maenads not knowing anymore which is
first and which is last. Our writing in cyberspace is that of a book connected to
all other books, a book-plateau, as Deleuze and Guattari say:
We call “plateau” any multiplicity connectable to others through superficial
subterranean stems, in order to form and extend a rhizome. We are writing this book
as a rhizome. We have made it of plateaux. We have given it a circular form, but it
was a way of joking. Every morning we would wake up, and each one of us would ask
himself what plateaux he would take, writing five lines here and ten lines there.11

Like the founders of French surrealism, André Breton and Philippe Soupault,
Deleuze and Guattari were in their own way attempting to get to the source of
the original language, the language before the Fall. Interestingly, the machine
language of cyberspace is, as Stephenson points out in Snow Crash, long
strings of 1s and 0s which bring up myriads of words, colors, and sounds.
Almost all the human sensoria, in cyberspace, can be brought back to this
fundamental language, a process so dazzling in both its simplicity and
complexity that it approaches the realm of myth.
Eliade’s assertion that poetry is a prolongation of myth and is a private,
personal, and secret realm where reality is metamorphosed is, in many ways,
verifiable in cyberspace. If we go back again to Webster’s Dictionary, we read
that the definition of “universe” is:
1. the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena; all existing things,
including the earth and its creatures, the heavenly bodies, and all else throughout
space; the cosmos; macrocosm.

2. a world or sphere in which something exists or prevails.12

“Universe” comes from the Latin “universus,” a word made up of unus and
verto, “one” and “to turn.” Now, the word for “verse,” meaning a poem or
piece of poetry comes from the Latin versus, “a line of writing,” which also
comes from the same Latin root verto, to turn, for writing is a turning of
words, images, and figures together. Verto also means to turn back, to switch
and to flip.13 Two modes, two sides of one coin, are therefore present both in
“universe” as a physical world and in “verse” as a mode of writing, as écriture.
Let us recapitulate: if myth is an attempt to explain the phenomena of the
world in a narrative; if myth perpetuates itself in language; if our word for the
known or supposed world is “universe” and our word for poetry is “verse,”
and both share the same root, then myth, language, and the known and un-
known worlds are uncannily, yet unmistakably, related. But is our “one turn”
universe enough to accommodate the new modes of being created by the new
technologies? Language’s “turning” of words to create, like a potter working
 Cyberspace as Écriture 121

on a wheel or a glassmaker blowing and turning new forms, myth anew is able
to give the universe yet another turn which will flip it upside down, and create,
as we have seen earlier, a mirror image where gazer and gazed at are irreme-
diably and forever confused.14
The three elements of myth, narrative, and universe are masterfully joined
in Stephenson’s “Metaverse” mentioned earlier. That this Metaverse is, if we
follow the Greek and Latin etymologies, an “after, behind, and/or beyond the
turn/return,” provides us with exciting mirror-like complexities. The rela-
tionship between the Metaverse and metaphorical language is clear in Snow
Crash when a sword-fight occurs between Hiro and a Japanese businessman, a
fight, in fact, between their two avatars:
The Nipponese businessman lies cut in segments on The Black Sun’s floor.
Surprisingly (he looks so real when he’s in one piece), no flesh, blood, or organs are
visible through the new cross-sections that Hiro’s sword made through his body…But
the air does not rush out of him, he fails to collapse, and you can look into the aperture
of a sword cut and see, instead of bones and meat, the back of the skin on the other
side. It breaks the metaphor.15

Bodies in cyberspace are the poetical oeuvre of computer programmers and

hackers. In fact, all of cyberspace is a big text written in its entirety with a
language not too different, in its essence, from the language of literature. It is a
specialized jargon which can be understood by most but appreciated by few.
Its authors form a close-knit society with its craft, lore, and traditions. In the
context of intertextuality and hypertextuality, Michael Riffaterre wrote:
The institutions of interpretation have remained largely unchanged since Aristotle,
with one exception. Born almost unnoticed initially in the backyard of the humanities,
first mistakenly seen as a mere improvement in the techniques of inquiry available to
literary scholars, computer programming evolved almost overnight from a system of
information retrieval to one of real analysis, to one capable of producing first critical
discourse and later creative writing. This last avatar is the significant one, the first
break with traditional humanism.16

But programmers and hackers enjoy the added benefit of seeing their work
taking actual shape and performing actual actions that are slowly becoming
more far-reaching as the writing technologies advance. For it is indeed a
writing which is involved, the writing of a code which translates, in a fulgurant
manner, into immediate and measurable results. Like their pen-and-paper or
typewriter forefathers, the “poetry” of code-writers is highly metaphorical; in
fact, it can only be metaphorical since whatever it constructs lives in the realm
of simulation and virtuality. Yet, how potent such metaphorical language is
can be taken as the confirmation that what takes place in real life is not less
bound to the dicta of language. Gibson shows the relation between cyberspace
122 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

and narrative in the following passage from Count Zero:

It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, non-linear flood of fact and sensory data, a
kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jumpcuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like
riding a rollercoaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid
intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness,
except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with
lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol-system.17

The fascination of language-as-virtuality is told by Miller: “I have used, and

will go on using, the word ‘magic’ to name the power that words on the page
have to open up a virtual reality when they are read as literature.”18
If narrative is a story being told in language, and cyberspace is a narrative
construction and re-creation of myth, then it is important to see how the rela-
tionship between narrative and the new technologies that have allowed the
translation to cyberspace is perceived. Worthington sees the problem clearly
when she writes: “Narrative…is more essential than ever as a tool for under-
standing the myriad conjunctions between postmodernism and technology and
for devising a possible place for ourselves as active subjects within those
conjunctions.”19 In fact, it is George P. Landow who first put together the
theories of the postmodern age and the new discoveries of technology. In his
Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology, he writes that we are witnessing the clear coming together of
literary theory and hypertext, i.e., literary theories finding their practical con-
firmation in the narratives of cyberspace:
The parallels between computer hypertext and critical theory are of interest at many
points, the most important of which, perhaps, is that critical theory promises to
theorize hypertext and hypertext promises to embody and thereby test aspects of
theory, particularly those concerning textuality, narrative, and the roles or functions
of reader and writer. Using hypertext, critical theorists will have, or now already
have, a laboratory in which to test their ideas.20

Cyberspace is seen, as shown previously, as a lab in which the theories of the

last half of the twentieth century are being—very successfully, one may
say—tested. Landow builds his thesis not around figures who have shaped the
new technologies inasmuch as around the very same critics/writers I have
introduced like Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Borges, Jameson, Calvino, de
Certeau, Derrida, Gibson, Lévi-Strauss, Miller, and others. Talking about the
Deleuze and Guattari concept of the rhizome, he writes:
Anyone considering the subject of this book [A Thousand Plateaus] has to look
closely at their discussion of rhizomes, plateaus, and nomadic thought for several
obvious reasons, only the most obvious of which is that they present A Thousand
 Cyberspace as Écriture 123

Plateaus as a print proto-hypertext…Certainly, many of the qualities Deleuze and

Guattari attribute to the rhizome require hypertext to find their first approximation if
not their complete answer or fulfillment…Like Derrida and like the inventors of
hypertext, they propose a newer form of the book that might provide a truer, more
efficient information technology.21

What Jean-François Lyotard describes as the “return of the narrative in the

non-narrative”22 is the converging moment between technology and writing
when contemporary critical theory, after having almost exhausted its
interpretive methods in the physical world, 23 is now ready to effectively
measure, on a scale never expected before, the truth or untruth of its assertions.
Miller masterfully shows the extent to which the new technologies are
replacing more traditional modes of reading and writing, and compares two
users of the language, one he calls Horace, the “book or paper person,” the
other he calls Jimjim, a “cyberperson” spending the many hours of the night
on his computer chatting with friends online and using the many possibilities
offered by the Internet:
It does not go without saying that Jimjim is necessarily inferior to Horace. Jimjim’s
involvement with his media is active, interventionist. Jimjim writes a lot, with fluency
and power, while Horace is in danger of being passively determined by other people’s
words. Reading books does not necessarily make one a good writer, whereas instant
messaging is superb training in succinctness and economy, even elegance, of style.24

The fear of losing traditional modes of reading and writing is not grounded in
valid reasons. In fact, what we take as a battle for narrative between the real
and the virtual ignores the fact that the book, writing, and the text have always
been virtual objects and activities. Ryan writes:
As a generator of potential worlds, interpretations, uses, and experiences, the text is
thus always already a virtual object. What the marriage of postmodernism and
electronic technology has produced is not the virtual text itself, but the elevation of its
built-in virtuality to a higher power. In no form is this exponentiation more obvious
then [sic] in hypertext.25

Lévy concurs when he says that writing, because of its virtualizing quality,
“desynchronizes and delocalizes,” and helps bring forth “a mechanism of
communication in which messages are often separated in time and space from
their emitting source, and thus received out of context.”26 The new writing
heralded by cyberspace takes our already-virtualized communicative abilities
to their ultimate development and brings about a revolutionary change:
Compared to old techniques of reading as network, digitalization introduces a small
Copernican revolution: it is not the navigator who follows the reading instructions
and physically moves in hypertext, turning pages, moving weighty volumes,
124 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

wandering in libraries, but it is now a mobile and kaleidoscopic text which presents its
facets, turns, folds and unfolds itself at will in front of the reader.27

It is not only us, humans, who have become, to anxious Neo-Luddites,

deterritorialized, but it is also the text which, freed from its fetters, is fully
spreading its wings and showing itself in its true colors: fully metaphorical,
fully flexible, ungraspable because forever mutating. Lévy explains:
Hypertextual mechanisms present in digital networks have deterritorialized the text.
They have brought forth a text without clear borders, without definable interiority.
Now there is some text, as one says some water or some sand. The text is put in
motion, caught in a flux, vectorized, metamorphic. It is thus closer to the movement
of thought itself.28

Virtualization, to Lévy, “brings about the becoming of the text,” and begins
the real “adventure of the text.” Humanity has, finally, “invented writing.”29
Cyberspace is indeed a textual space par excellence. One of the current
manifestations of this textual space is hypertext, defined by Landow in the
context of theorists of textuality as follows:
Like almost all structuralists and poststructuralists, Barthes and Foucault describe
text, the world of letters, and the power and status relations they involve in terms
shared by the field of computer hypertext…Hypertext, as the term is used in this
work, denotes text composed of blocks of text—what Barthes terms a lexia—and the
electronic links that join them…Hypertext denotes an information medium that links
verbal and nonverbal information.30

Landow is referring to Barthes’ S/Z, the masterfully minute re-reading of

Balzac’s novel Sarrasine. In it, Barthes writes about an ideal writerly text
where “systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their
number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.”31 Is it
necessary to point out that cyberspace is precisely this “ideal text”? What were
hitherto scholarly theses, experimentations, and viewpoints almost
exclusively aimed at the academic elite can now be practically experienced by
any cybernaut. Lévy, who defines hypertext as a “universe of meaning” and
“worlds of signification,” also sees it as a metaphor valid for all spheres of
reality where “significations” are involved.32 He characterizes hypertext as
following the principles of metamorphosis, heterogeneity, multiplicity and
embedding of scales, exteriority, topology, and mobility of centers. What he
says about topology is interesting to our mapping concerns:
In hypertexts, everything works according to proximity and neighborhood. The
course of events is a question of topology, of paths. There is no homogeneous
universal space where forces of linking and unlinking, where messages could freely
circulate. Everything which moves must do so on the hypertextual web as it is, or has
 Cyberspace as Écriture 125

to modify it. The web is not in space, it is space.33

The peculiar topology of texts seen in a post-structuralist context is best

exemplified by Barthes’ statement that the “text, in its mass, is comparable to
a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks;
like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary
rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of
birds.” 34 As the text is, to follow Barthes’ famous expression,
“étoilé”—“starred,”—so is cyberspace: a deep mass without edges and
without landmarks, wherein cybernauts as travelers, be it for a minute or for
days, are marking their private, personal, and secret path, secret not because it
is confidential but because it remains the representation of what lies at the
deepest core of each traveler. A mapping of cyberspace taking the text as its
progenitor would use mobile, starred landmarks which can be likened to the
lexias used by Barthes for the first time in his starring of Balzac’s Sarrasine.
These lexias are
brief, contiguous fragments…[and] will include sometimes a few words, sometimes
several sentences; it will be a matter of convenience: it will suffice that the lexia be
the best possible space in which we can observe meanings; its dimension, empirically
determined, estimated, will depend on the density of connotations, variable according
to the moments of the text.35

In other words, cyberspace as textual space is a construct which, as Lévy said

above, works according to proximity or, as Barthes would say, is made of
contiguous fragments in continuous movement and change displaying the
metamorphosis quality of hypertexts. Cyberspace mapping will consist of
what I call cyberlexias, or the brief units of information generated by our
journeys in virtuality. Such journeys might consist of shorter or longer bursts
of information exchanges. The dimension of such cyberlexias would, as in a
text, depend on the density of information given or taken. As technologies
progress, a convergence will most probably occur where our movements in
hypertext will be essentially similar to those in cyberspace. Silvio Gaggi
writes in this context:
When, in the near future, hypertextual systems…become our dominant textual
vehicle, both the way we read and what we understand literature to be will be
altered…The distinction between text and context will dissolve and intertextuality
will cease to be regarded as such because there will be, in fact, only one text, one
intertext, one hypertext…In hypertext there is no primary axis, no clear road in or out,
no coordinates that have priority over any other coordinates—except as the reader
determines.36

In a way reminiscent of Kurzweil’s troubling predictions, Gaggi is envisioning

126 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

a future where hypertext becomes the only mode of reading and writing. What
we can equally infer is that all modes of communication and thus of being
might be incorporated in cyberspace. Every unique, non-duplicatable path
each and every reader/cybernaut draws in the flat and smooth sky of
cyberspace will determine, and therefore map up, the lexias making up each
cybertext. As in Borges’ “The Book of Sand,” the awesome monstrosity or
obscenity of cybertextuality resides in the fact that never will anyone be able
to find the first or the last page, and never will anyone be able to find the same
page again, that is, to read and write the same cybertext. Sven Birkerts writes:
Stripping the work of its proud material trappings, its solid three-dimentionality,
[screen technologies] further subject it to fragmentation…We can enter cleanly and
strategically at any number of points; we can elide passages or chapters with an elastic
ease that allows us to forget the surrounding textual tissue.37

Derrida foresaw the end of reading and writing as we have known it and writes
in Of Grammatology of a new age where technological developments have
forced us to re-evaluate our reading and writing habits:
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today, it is within
the form of a book that new writings—literary or theoretical—allow themselves to be,
for better or for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to the
envelope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in the
volumes. That is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread
past writing according to a different organization of space…Because we are
beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently.38

The cyberspace of reading and writing is both the locus of a Derridean

arch-writing—a writing working as a mold for all reading, writing, and
speaking—activity and a site where readers—who have also become aware
that they have also always been writers—are positioned. Miller clarifies this
new discursive space:
The Internet is not a “space,” if one means by that a Euclidean manifold in which each
thing is in one place and has identifiable relations by coordinates to all other things
and to the borders that define regions within the volume. In the nonspaced space or
spaced-out space of the Internet, everything is in a sense everywhere at all times, and
everything is juxtaposed to everything else, in a pell-mell confusion.39

Faced with the inherent difficulty of mapping a space which defies the
common acceptance of the term, Lévy links that space with language and
coins the term “cosmopedia” as a replacement for “encyclopedia”:
Rather than having to deal with a text with only one dimension, or even with a
hypertexual network, we are faced with a multidimensional space of dynamic and
 Cyberspace as Écriture 127

interactive representations. To the face-to-face of the fixed image and the text,
characteristics of the encyclopedia, cosmopedia opposes a very large number of
forms of expression: fixed image, animated image, sound, interactive simulations,
interactive maps, expert systems, dynamic ideographies, virtual realities, artificial
lives, etc.”40

Cyberspace is so intimately reliant on language that words, as Shawn P.

Wilbur writes, have come back with a vengeance: “We use words as tools, as
individuals and as scholars. On the Internet we use little else. Whatever else
Internet culture might be, it is still largely a text-based affair.”41 Heim says that
the new technologies have driven “our verbal life faster and faster,” and that
word processors are “computerizing our language.”42
What can be seen as a monstrosity is paralleled by the proliferation, during
the last thirty years or so, of programming languages. As if the initial strings of
1s and 0s were not enough, programmers have vied to create more and more
powerful and versatile languages. Kittler calls the implosion of programming
languages a “postmodern tower of Babel.”43 Indeed, the Babel myth again
serves a useful metaphor for this excess of languages, an excess which can
take the form, in the new technologies, of viruses, which are nothing else than
a malicious written code. In Stephenson’s Snow Crash, one of the characters, a
hacker guru, is infected by a very special virus and says:
“What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?”

“Some language I didn’t recognize,” Da5id says. “Just a bunch of babble.”

Babble. Babel.

“Afterward, you looked sort of stunned.”44

Writing is a Babel-like activity where languages, codes, and modes are

shuffled, modified, and transformed in a dizzying whirlwind. After God
“descended” to see what mankind was doing and confounded their language,
humanity was stunned. Attempts to go back to the original pre-Babel tongue
are as numerous as they are simplistic and/or extremist. The earliest recorded
endeavor of this kind is reported by Herodotus in his Histories when the
Pharaoh Psammetichus wanted to ascertain through language who the most
antique people was and, taking two children and isolating them, came to the
conclusion that since the first word they said was “becos,” the Phrygian word
for bread, the oldest language was therefore Phrygian and not, as he formerly
thought, Egyptian.45
Paul Auster, in City of Glass, takes up the Herodotus story and mentions
two other instances, one during the Middle Ages and another in the early
sixteenth century. But Auster’s own narrative turns around the fictional Peter
128 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Stillman who, obsessed by the same search for the original pre-Babel lan-
guage, locked up his son, also named Peter, in a dark room for nine years.
After recognizing the failure of his project, Peter Stillman the father burned
his records, accidentally setting fire to the whole house and unwillingly saving
his son from his confinement. The father is tried and found insane, and the son
is sent to a hospital to recover. His speech, however, is forever tainted with the
Babel curse: Peter Stillman the son can only babble:
“Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. Clack clack bedrack. Numb noise, flacklemuch,
chewmanna. Ya, ya, ya. Excuse me. I am the only one who understands these
words…Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. It is beautiful, is it not? I make up words
like this all the time. That can’t be helped. They just come out of my mouth by
themselves. They cannot be translated…I am mostly now a poet. Every day I sit in my
room and write another poem. I make up all the words myself, just like when I lived in
the dark.46

The link between poetry and myth, noted above, is striking. When myth
forsakes its guiding role in societies, it is incorporated—or recuperated—by
literature, by writing. Peter Stillman the son and Peter Stillman the father are
one and the same person representing the search for the pre-Babel language,
its loss, and its re-tracing. As the elderly Stillman leads Quinn the detective in
his walks in New York and spells out the phrase “The Tower of Babel” on the
actual map of the city, cyberspace is constructed by users who write their own
journeys. To Lévy, cyberspace is the computer of Babel:
One could say that there is only one computer, only one support for text, but it has
become impossible to trace its limits, to fix its outline. It is a computer the center of
which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere; a hypertextual computer,
dispersed, alive, pullulating, unfinished, virtual, a computer of Babel: cyberspace
itself.47

The writing of cyberspace takes this anxiety a notch further. In the world
of the matrix, the dichotomy between the basically simple 1s and 0s strings
and the dazzling graphics, sounds, and—soon?—feelings such strings can
produce, is tantamount to pure myth. Stephenson has his protagonist wonder
over a picture of Hammurabi as the latter is given by Marduk, the chief
Babylonian god, some sort of scepter in the shape of a one and a zero; these are
explained as emblems of royal power, the origin of which is “obscure.”48
Power belongs to the one who can go back to the mythical pre-Babel tongue. If
myth, as noted earlier, is the attempt to put in one fulgurant vision the essence
of a concept which has taken millennia to develop, then cyberspace offers an
infinitely varied virtual world through a mere binary code. Hardly a new
concept, true, for most myths speak of an original pair of beings who are either
 Cyberspace as Écriture 129

created or re-created after some divinely-imposed catastrophe. But that a myth

has actually taken form is what can be seen as the miracle of cyberspace.
From myth (Herodotus) to fiction (Auster) the progression takes us to
cyberspace. Stephenson’s Babel, in Snow Crash, is aptly called “Infocalypse”:
the building of the tower had to be stopped because of an “informational dis-
aster,”49 and it is indeed a proliferation of information that constitutes one of
the main results of cyberspace. The divine name is, in terms of new tech-
nologies, the machine language of the world:
At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes.
When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its
brainstem, the root of its existence. It’s the tongue of Eden. But it’s very difficult to
work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a
minute level.50

Peter Stillman the father was trying to “work in machine language” but went
crazy; likewise, human beings need a language-buffer, as it were, which will
only imperfectly point to the original parent language, if indeed it does exist.
The proliferation of languages is paralleled, in cyberspace, by a proliferation
of programming languages.51
But at the same time, paradoxically, the proliferation of languages as a
confusion visited by God is also pictured as the gift of speaking in tongues.
Here again the connection between language and myth is striking: glossola-
lia—“speaking in tongues”—is, according to Webster’s Dictionary, “a prayer
characterized chiefly by incomprehensible speech,” from the Greek glossa,
meaning tongue, and -lalia, originally meaning a speech defect specified by
the preceding element, in this case glôssa.52 It is also revealing to find that the
old name for linguistics was “glossology.” One of the most important events
to be recorded in the New Testament was the apostles’ speaking in tongues
during the feast of the Pentecost:
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it
filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven
tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the
Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them
utterance.53

The antique punishment recorded in the Old Testament is here repeated but in
a different direction and different motives: glossolalia as defect and as means
of confusion becomes the speaking in tongues as divine gift and as a means of
re-unification and universal understanding through the gospels. The confusion
of the bystanders is also the mirror image, reversed of course, of the confusion
in the Babel story:
130 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were
confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they
were all amazed, and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these
which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we
were born?54

What is the role of the proliferation of tongues in cyberspace? Is it a

glossolalia of confusion or a return to unification through multiplicity?
Hypertext is one form of glossolalia for, as Lévy says in this context: “Each
one according to their means, the communication actors or the elements of a
message construct and remodel universes of meaning.”55 Stephenson devotes
three full pages in Snow Crash to a discussion between Hiro and the virtual
librarian on the meaning and cyberspace implications of glossolalia. The
librarian tells Hiro that “[m]any Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of
tongues was given to them so that they could spread their religion to other
peoples without having to actually learn their language. The word for that is
‘xenoglossy’.”56 And isn’t the widely-advertised concept of “global village”
precisely built around a missionary-like movement to hook the whole planet
online and achieve cyberspace xenoglossy?
Glossolalia, to others, represents the ultimate chance for human beings to
fully construct a Babel language which is neither one of confusion nor one of
unity. Instead, it is language of pleasure, and it is again to Barthes that I turn to
borrow these lines from his study of relations in Sade:
The meaning of the chain is to posit the infinite of erotic language (isn’t the sentence
itself a chain?), to break the mirror of enunciation, to make sure that pleasure does not
go back to where it came from, to waste the exchange by dissociating the partners, not
to return back to those who have given to you, to give to those who will not return
back, to deport the cause, the origin, away, to make one finish the gesture begun by
another: every chain being open, saturation is only momentary: nothing internal
happens there, nothing interior.57

Cyberspace, then, is not only a simple mirror or a hologram which puts two
worlds in specular reflection. The problem of the proliferation of languages,
tongues, and voices in virtuality is elegantly solved with the help of the
post-structuralist theory of the multiplicity of narratives in a chain which does
not end, and which is made of links written by each and every reader. The
pleasure of cyberspace textuality is not only the uncertainty of who will read
what, and in which order, but also who will re-write the offered text. Barthes is
also touching upon the Bakhtinian notion of dialogism and the centrifugal
power of narrative away from a pure reflexivity that can only lead to closure.
Bakhtin, unlike Eliade, ascribes to poetry a centripetal power which, instead of
reaching out, confines poets inside their own unique mythical bubbles.58 His
 Cyberspace as Écriture 131

concept of the prose writer, on the other hand, differs markedly from that of
the poet. He writes:
The prose writer does not purify his discourses from their intentions and from the
tonalities of other people, he does not kill in them the embryos of social plurilinguism,
he does not put aside these linguistic figures, these ways of speaking, these virtual
story-telling-personas who appear, in transparence, behind the words and the forms of
his language; but he disposes all these discourses, all these forms, at different
distances from the ultimate semantic core of his work, from the center of his personal
intentions.59

The above can be read by cybernauts as one of the features which have made
cyberspace the point of convergence of different and differing voices from all
over the planet. It is only through a dialogic writing that the global village can
be made possible. Bakhtin says that polylinguism as introduced in the novel
is the discourse of the other in the language of the other, serving to refract the
expression of the author’s intentions. This discourse presents the singularity of being
bivocal. It simultaneously serves two locutors and expresses two different
intentions…Such discourse contains two voices, two meanings [“sens”], two
expressions…In all of these [bivocal discourses] is found the seed of a potential
dialogue, un-deployed, concentrated on itself, a dialogue of two voices, two
conceptions of the world, two languages.60

The “two conceptions of the world” is an interesting point in the context of

cyberspace. As seen above, the current debate is precisely about the existence
of this other world or virtuality, whether it is a mirror image, a double, a
hologram, or a post-structuralist chain of unending signifiers. Bakhtin’s
dialogical discourse is useful in that all narrative discourse contains, in its
essence, the seeds of an other, and dialogue makes this other’s universe not
only an intelligible world but also a shareable one.
The sharing of voice(s) in polylinguism and bivocality can also be use-
fully related to the notions of gift, prodigality, and excess. Mauss, in his fa-
mous “Essai sur le don,” defines the specific kind of gift known as potlatch as
an institution characterized by “total prestations of agonistic type.” A potlatch,
in various North-American Indian tribes, is the obligation of giving, receiving,
and returning gifts in an increasingly excessive display of generosity. Mauss
says about this remarkable excess or rivalry and antagonism: “One reaches the
level of battles until the putting to death of the chiefs and nobles affronting
each other. One also reaches the purely sumptuary destruction of accumulated
wealth to overshadow the rival—and at the same time associate—chief.”61
Cyberspace is a giant arena where, through the expansion, at an exponential
rate, of technologies undreamt of before, cybernauts are engaged in private
and public displays of potlatch-like giving, receiving, and returning gifts.
132 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

However, the economy of excess in cyberspace is not, contrary to that of the

physical world, one of matter: what is being given, received, and returned is
information, the twenty-first-century commodity par excellence, a commodity
at the same time intangible and supremely potent. Mauss was aware of the
non-physicality of the potlatch:
And all these institutions uniquely express only one fact, one social regime, one
defined mentality: everything, food, women, children, goods, talismans, soil, labor,
services, sacerdotal offices and ranks, is matter for transmission…Everything comes
and goes as if there existed a constant exchange of a spiritual matter comprising
things and men between the clans and the individuals, spread over the ranks, the
sexes, and the generations.62

Mauss’ observation is crucial since it allows us, through the myths and taboos
surrounding the potlatch and through this “exchange of spiritual matter,” to
understand how a virtual writing of cyberspace has been able to engender, in
the space of a few years, an almost full-fledged world bustling with incredible
activity.
Bataille’s The Accursed Share takes up Mauss’ potlatch and excess and
clothes it in even more sumptuous attire. In his first part entitled “Consump-
tion,” Bataille studies various societies and the way their consumption
methods betrayed exuberance. Continuing from where Mauss had left,
Bataille sees the value of the potlatch in terms of loss:
But the wealth that is actualized in the potlatch, in consumption for others, has no real
existence except insofar as the other is changed by the consumption. In a sense,
authentic consumption ought to be solitary, but then it would not have the completion
that the action it has on the other confers on it. And this action that is brought to bear
on others is precisely what constitutes the gift’s power, which one acquires from the
fact of losing.63

What immediately strikes is the Bakhtinian importance of the other, and the
potlatch becomes with Bataille a dialogic exchange where gifts replace words
and are as easily disposed of as in a narrative that is only measured by its
surpassing itself. This surpassing, this going beyond oneself to reach the other,
is also reminiscent of the way myth functions to give humanity, through a
simple narrative, a glimpse of what cannot be understood otherwise. Bataille
writes that the “exemplary virtue of the potlatch is given in this possibility for
man to grasp what eludes him, to combine the limitless movements of the
universe with the limit that belongs to him.” 64 The Aztecs and human
sacrifices, the North American Indians and potlatch, Islam and conquest,
Lamaism and the absence of militarism, the Soviets and industrialization are
all drawn by Bataille on his map of the excesses of civilizations, and one can
 Cyberspace as Écriture 133

only wonder how, had he still been alive, he would have added the virtual
society of cyberspace which, in one move, captures the essences of potlatch,
conquest, and hyper-advanced technologies.
At this stage one is reminded of the important role played by fiction both
in the representation of reality and in the creation of cyberspace. Hence the
subversive aspect of virtuality: it is not only that virtuality threatens to di-
minish our hold on everyday reality or that the new technologies are alienating
humanity from itself and giving up control to supposedly autonomous AIs; the
problem is also one of language and power. What cyberspace has created is a
new language, a new discourse which has probably forever altered our view of
reality. Barthes, talking about the subversiveness of the Sadean language,
writes these words equally applicable to our context:
The deepest subversion (counter-censure) does not necessarily consist in saying what
shocks public opinion, morality, the law, or the police, but to invent a paradoxical
discourse (free from all doxa): invention (and not provocation) is a revolutionary act:
the latter can only be accomplished in the foundation of a new language.65

The perversion of cyberspace doubles as the perversion of a discourse which

runs counter to the established doxa, the revered doctrines presiding over what
we have, for millennia, thought language to be. For there is a myth of language
which is dissipated with difficulty, even after thirty years of postmodernism, a
myth which has survived until now and about which Barthes says: “We find
here the old modern myth according to which language is only the docile and
insignificant instrument of the serious things taking place in the spirit, the
heart, or the soul.”66 With the advent of cyberspace, the glossolalia of writing
has decentered language once and for all from its age-old pedestal of
representation-only. Cyberspace, from its programming to its dissemination to
its use clearly evinces a language which can completely, from the bottom up,
create worlds and realities.
The power of software programming as fiat combines with the myth of a
speech which creates realities seemingly coming out of nowhere to deliver the
most striking mixture of writing, magic, and creation known to humanity so
far. A shamanistic incantation, cyberspace as écriture is plainly recognized by
Stephenson in Snow Crash and given the Mesopotamian name of “nam-shub,”
“incantation”:
A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don’t believe in these kinds of
things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a
fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that
computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast
nam-shub.67
134 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

What is worthy of notice is that the Metaverse is a “fictional” structure, i.e., a

structure using fiction as a model, and if we recall the basic definition
presented earlier of fiction as “literature created from the imagination, not
presented as fact, though it may be based on a true story or situation,” then the
notion of cyberspace/Metaverse acquires new dimensions. Not only is
cyberspace a fictional construct, a matrix consisting of a “consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators” devoid of
tangible physical reality, but it is also a narrative construct, a work of fiction, a
vast world of signifiers constantly pointing, hypertextually, to each other
without ever reaching a primary point of reference, without reaching the
forever-slipping ultimate signified. Indeed, cyberspace can be seen as a
Metaverse and considered a single vast signifying incantation. Gibson’s
equation between the matrix and “the sum total of the works, the whole show,”
is not surprising anymore, neither is the closing scene where Case, jacked in,
sees himself and Linda alive in cyberspace. Narrative as writing assumes full
power in cyberspace and also problematizes the reality of our own existences,
rejoining, with full blast, the postmodern assumptions making of all human
experience a fictional construct.
Cyberspace elucidates, in true tangible form, ideas like those expressed by
Terry Eagleton on the nature of a language which “now begins to look much
more like a sprawling limitless web” in which “there is a constant interchange
and circulation of elements, where none of the elements is absolutely defin-
able and where everything is caught up and traced through by everything
else.” 68 Explaining one of the main tenets of Derridean deconstruction,
Eagleton writes:
Just as Western philosophy has been ‘phonocentric’, centred on the ‘living voice’ and
deeply suspicious of script, so also it has been in a broader sense ‘logocentric’,
committed to a belief in some ultimate ‘word’, presence, essence, truth or reality
which will act as the foundation of all our thought, language and experience.69

Obviously, the above words can be applied to the binary reality/virtuality,

making of reality the ultimate yardstick by which we measure the
“appropriateness” of virtuality and by which we cast judgment upon
cyberspace’s truth value. Virtuality thus takes on a secondary role, an
abnormal excrescence which can—and, to many, should—be safely excised in
order to return to a “normal,” “real,” and “natural” world. Virtuality is
portrayed as a supplement only. But supplements are always a dangerous
proposition to say the least, especially since Derrida’s Of Grammatology
shook the precarious base over which Western philosophy had built, for
centuries, a whole system of thought the results of which can be seen even
now in the opposition between “good” reality and “bad” virtuality. Derrida
 Cyberspace as Écriture 135

warns that the notion of the supplement arises out of an essential lack:
But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates
itself in-the-place-of, if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an
image, it is by the anterior default of a presence…As substitute, it is not simply added
to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the
structure by the mark of an emptiness.70

Cyberspace as supplement adds only to replace, and this is what Neo-Luddites

and what Western culture fear most, the replacement of a cherished reality
with what is thought to be unreal and intangible, a mere software gimmick.
Yet what is happening is that virtuality is slowly invading reality, attempting
to replace it in many fields, not only adding but filling an absence which was
not recognized as such. And if reality proves to be, in the final analysis, the
locus of an absence, then the whole conception of this reality is challenged.
But if reality is the locus of an absence and can be replaced by virtuality, it
is only logical to assume that virtuality can also be, at some point in the future,
the locus of some absence in its turn, and will be again replaced by another
concept. Derrida is aware of the conundrum and subsumes any binary pair to
his concept of “archi-écriture,” an arche-writing essentially present in both.
Writing about the nature/culture binary, he says:
I would wish…to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and
massive, was possible only on one condition: that the “original,” “natural,” etc.
language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had
itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I
wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it
essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing.71

This passage is extremely important in the context of the reality/virtuality

binary: if we transpose Derrida’s pair with ours, we see that the alleged
derivativeness of cyberspace is only made possible because the “real” nature
of the world we live in has never been untouched by virtuality, i.e., that our
reality is always, in some form or another, “contaminated” by virtuality. We
have seen how language has always been metaphorical, and can never be
perfectly equivalent to what it purports to name and describe. We have also
seen how the ultimate signified can never be caught: signifiers lead, in an
uninterrupted and infinite chain, to one another. Reality has always been
virtual. What stands above this pair is what can probably be called
arche-virtuality, the representative of which, what we now see as virtuality, is
only a mundane yet necessary concept to pit against reality. Can we thus say,
echoing Derrida’s famous “There is nothing outside of the text,”72 that there is
nothing outside of virtuality?
136 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

But cyberspace writing, whether it has to assume an arche-writing or not,

definitely posits a writer, or what is here better called a cyber-writer. Gibson’s
AI, Neuromancer, explains his/its name: “Neuro from the nerves, the silver
paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead.”73 An interesting passage
as it not only positions cyber-writing but also conjures up meditations on the
act of writing and the cyber-writer. Case is caught, in this final passage, in
cyberspace with Linda and Neuromancer, the main AI, is the writer of this
matrix where life and death are mixed or, as it appears later on, where the
difference between the two states becomes irrelevant. Cyber-writers are in a
very privileged position not experienced before: their writing assumes, be-
cause of the power of software, a quality hitherto only dreamed of, that of
actually giving life to their creation. “Neuro,” the presence in life, is also
“necro,” the absence in death, and both unite in the romance of the narrative,
in the fiction created. We are no longer content to say with post-structuralist
thinkers, that the author is dead, we can also add that cyber-writers are dead, a
dead-alive entity present in the cyberspace they have themselves created. The
triangle writer-text-reader is caught in a matrix where death is undifferentiated
from life and reality from virtuality. Once again, what were mere intellectual
exercises at the close of the twentieth century have become palpable real-
ity…or virtuality?
But what Gibson does not—at least explicitly—elaborate upon is that
Neuromancer is also a “new” romancer, a new writer of fiction, a new kind of
creator whose narrative not only instantaneously problematizes, in-situ, the
writer, the writing, and the reader, but also for the first time allows almost
anybody to partake in an activity hitherto reserved to the “intellectual” elite.
This is what Dibbell describes when he writes:
It took Samuel Pepys, 17th-century Englishman of affairs, about 150 years to get his
diary published. It takes “Soul Reaver,” 21st-century American teenager of Gothick
tendencies, about 14 kilobits per second, tops…History will yet judge whether Soul
Reaver’s diary has the staying power of Pepys’s, but keep in mind his doesn’t exactly
start out with a bang either.74

Dibbell acutely realizes that cyberspace and writing are one and the same. We
have always been writing a text anyway, an arche-writing barely visible in the
bewildering array of signification continuously inventing itself everyday. But
it is the merit of cyberspace to have made this theoretical truth a tangible fact.
The author, decentered by Derrida and erased by Barthes, passes from the
status of privileged being to that of everyday user, from a professional
craftsperson to an amateur who learns to re-use the powers of narrative.
Barthes, in an interview given in 1975, prophetically wrote:
 Cyberspace as Écriture 137

I can imagine a future society, totally unalienated which, on the level of writing,
would only know amateurish activities. Especially on the level of the text. People
would write, would make texts, for the pleasure of it, would profit from the jouissance
of writing without preoccupying themselves with the image they may conjure up in
others.75

Has the Barthean vision been fulfilled? When we sit in front of our screens, we
all become amateur writers again, partaking in the mythical re-creation of
words and commands which do something, whether we use a word processor,
play a game, buy and sell stocks, transfer money, or just send an e-mail. Not
only has the age-old idea of the original been superseded by that of the
legitimate copy, thus doing away with the idea of a single author, but
cyber-writers have also all become de facto hackers, cyber-bricoleurs
tinkering with the world around them with the help of words. We have, as
cyber-writers, acted the ultimate sleight-of-hand and thus precipitated, beyond
all predictions, the demise of a writing which has always tried to produce and
then to control, through its narrative and through the voice of its author, a
logocentric order of things. If the language of pre-cyberspace was Bakhtinian
monologism, a discourse pointing back at itself, the language of cyberspace is
pure dialogism where all participants, in the web of the text, weave a giant and
constantly changing tapestry of signifiers.
Talking about the Sadean discourse and the loss or inter-changeability and
decentering of authorial voice, Barthes says:
[W]ith Sade, it is some libertine who, without any other preeminence except that of an
ephemeral and practical responsibility, arranges the postures and directs the general
movement of the erotic operation; there is always somebody to regulate (but not: to
legify) the exercise, the séance, the orgy, but this somebody is not a subject; director
of the episode, he is only a moment of it, nothing more than…a sentence operator.76

Calvino has Marco Polo describe the city of Marozia which can be taken to
represent the way cybernauts construct the fiat of narrative space(s) as
cyber-writers:
It also happens that, if you move along Marozia’s compact walls, when you least
expect it, you see a crack open and a different city appear. Then, an instant later, it has
already vanished. Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what
actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer,
gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of
doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all
spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline,
transparent as a dragonfly.77

Are the kaleidoscopic nature of cyberspace and the uncertainty of its narrative
forms some of the reasons why it has attracted so much criticism and
138 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

antagonism from a culture which puts so much effort into centering itself and
is so anxious at mapping its bearings? Cyber-writing, on the contrary, opens
up the map(s) of cyberspace and refuses to be held and pinned down on a flat
mappa mundi. Absence and presence form the two unshakeable pillars upon
which cybermapping is to be envisioned.
Neuromancer’s injunction to Case, “If your woman is a ghost, she doesn’t
know it. Neither will you” acquires, in the context of cyberspace and the new
writing, an undreamt opportunity for cyber-writers, that of being part of a
collaborative orgy of writing where all, whether existing or not, willingly join
in the game of production of narrative. Gaggi says in this context:
The subject of the author, most significantly, is challenged by hypertext… notions of
intellectual property and authorship, which are very much tied to the fixity and
permanence of the book as an object for which an individual can take responsibility
and credit, are challenged. The speed and ease of comment and response in hypertext
makes it difficult to keep track of the specific contributions of various
writer/readers.78

Gaggi is here echoing Landow’s observation that, following along the lines of
contemporary critical theory, hypertext “reconfigures—rewrites—the author
in several obvious ways…the figure of the hypertext author approaches, even
if it does not entirely merge with, that of the reader.” 79 Both Gaggi and
Landow are in fact restating what Gibson had fictionally predicted in
Neuromancer in the passage cited above.
If all cybernauts have become, with varying degrees, cyber-writers, it is
legitimate to ask, in a study which attempts to map cyberspace, where the
hugely voluminous mass of writing goes or where it is stored. The role of the
librarian, or cyber-librarian, is in the age of cyberspace of critical importance
since everything is, in one way or another, a writing or a variation thereof.
Stephenson envisions, quite humorously, the cyber-librarian of the future, a
software program capable of seamlessly and almost instantaneously finding
information in cyberspace:
“Your information, sir,” the Librarian says.

Hiro startles and glances up. Earth swings down and out of his field of view and there
is the Librarian, standing in front of the desk, holding out a hypercard. Like any
librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around without audible footfalls.

“Can you make a little more noise when you walk? I’m easily startled,” Hiro says.

“It is done, sir. My apologies.”80

On a more serious note, Michael W. Giles, in his presidential address to the

 Cyberspace as Écriture 139

Southern Political Science Convention, in Tampa, Florida, in November 1995,

said:
The virtual library places greater emphasis on information management, accessing,
and retrieval skills. It, thus, emphasizes the unique skills of the library professional.
Indeed, given the high rate of technological change, library staff will come to play an
extraordinarily important instructional role in maintaining consumer access.
Moreover, the Cyberspace Model of scholarly communication places a heavy
emphasis on information management from the earliest stages of research process.81

Notwithstanding the appropriateness and accuracy of Giles’ observations, our

concern here is not specifically with “consumer access,” nor with “research.”
The cyber-librarian and the cyber-library he/she runs are mythical figures
engaged in acts of writing and in the management of cyber-discourse. John
Thiem, in his “Myths of the Universal Library: From Alexandria to the
Postmodern Age,” likes to imagine the creation of a hypothetical “Universal
Electronic Library,” itself a “subdiscipline of comparative mythology known
as bibliomythography,” and links it to the ancient Library of Alexandria in
Egypt as a symbol or mythological object. Thiem heavily uses Borges’ “The
Aleph” and “The Library of Babel” to make clear the relationship between the
vastness and complexity of the world and the “modern megalibrary.”82 As a
monstrous object, the “Universal Library” in cyberspace has become a
mythical symbol: “Like its precursor in Alexandria, the UL is not only an
enormous repository of information about every known mythology, it too has
become the impossible object of mythological devotion and execration.”83 In
this context, Allen writes that the present computer systems “seem to take us
back to the medieval idea of the total library.”84
The connection with Borges’ “The Book of Sand” is clear, but it is to the
Argentinean author’s “The Library of Babel” that one must turn in order to
fully understand the connection between myth (Babel), writing (Library) and
mapping. What we notice from the beginning is, first, Borges’ identification of
the library with the universe and, second, his apparent attempts at giving a
very physical identity to an otherwise indescribable building:
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps
infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by
very low railings…The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five
long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance
from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase…There are five
shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of
uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines,
each line, of some eighty letters which are black in colour.85

Borges is faced with the seemingly impossible task of mapping a space which
140 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

he knows is unmappable with the usual means of measurement available in the

physical world. As I have been showing throughout, it is to myth and to
writing that he resorts. First, the library has existed from all times, and
mankind has been the imperfect librarian entrusted with its care. Here we see
that the myth is serving its primary purpose, that of explaining, in short-hand
fashion, the vast and mysterious ways of the universe by means of analogy. As
the universe is infinite yet manifested in its details, so is a library which,
through the infinite combination of the letters of the alphabet, is yet found in
some physical location. Second, and this is logically deducted from the first
point, the library’s mythical infinity is constructed by the mere combination of
a very limited number of letters. Indeed, Borges wastes no time in linking
myth and writing, making of them the two axioms that govern any
understanding of the library. The first axiom is that “[t]he Library exists ab
aeterno,” and the second is that “[t]he orthographical symbols are twenty-five
in number.”86 In order to reconcile the two facts, Borges reaches an elegant
solution which denies both the infinity and the limitedness of the library:
Those who judge it [the world] to be limited postulate that in remote places the
corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end—which is
absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of
books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem:
The Library is unlimited and cyclical.87

Obviously, the analogy rests on the way our planet, as a sphere, is built. A
traveler would cross earth and, moving in a straight line, would eventually
reach the point of departure, yet no two voyages would be similar. Cyberspace
takes this analogy to new heights as it provides a sphere which, unlike physical
earth, constantly changes in volume, expanding and retracting according to
what is at the time the movement of networks on the Internet. Cyberspace is
both a myth in the problematization of its origin(s) and end(s), a genesis and
an eschatology in the problematization of its boundaries; and a writing which,
unlike Borges’ twenty-five “orthographical symbols” uses only two, the 1 and
the 0.
Yet another theme can be fruitfully used in our search for ways to map
cyberspace. Unsurprisingly, it will contain within itself the two seeds of myth
and writing, a myth because it will try to explain the universe (both in its
physical and non-physical natures) and allow us to see it as it may really is,
and a writing because reality and virtuality can only be apprehended and
represented through a system of signs. Such theme is the city, and it is ap-
propriate to end this chapter with a marvelously prophetic passage from Cal-
vino’s Invisible Cities:
 Cyberspace as Écriture 141

Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the
system of nonextinct species, the other fauna was coming back to the light from the
library’s basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals
and drainpipes, perching at the sleepers’ bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras,
dragons, hircocervi, harpies, hydras, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of
their city.88

Has our age unleashed the immemorial myths which it had jealously kept in
the prison-house of language? Is Eliade finally right in saying that the modern
world is devoid of myth and that the latter has sought refuge in writing? Yet,
like in Calvino’s delightful account of the city of Theodora in the above
passage, myth has, through cyberspace, taken a sizeable leap and is already
walking the streets of Cyberia.

N O T E S

1 Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo: La Personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien

(Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 247.
2 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 181.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1998), 239.
4 Jorge Luis Borges, Atlas (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986), 60.
5 Lévy, Intelligence, 240.
6 Lévy, Virtuel, 34.
7 Ibid., 86.
8 Leenhardt, Do Kamo, 232–33.
9 Caillois, Mythe, 151.
10 Webster’s, 400, and Auzanneau and Avril, Dictionnaire latin, 180.
11 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 33. The narrative is strikingly similar to that of
André Breton recounting his first attempts at automatic writing with his friend Philippe
Soupault as told in the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924.
12 Webster’s, 1555.
13 Auzanneau and Avril, Dictionnaire latin, 642, 643, 657, 658.
14 The question whether all language is metaphorical or not, especially since Nietzsche’s
famous “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms,” in his “On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense,” in The
Viking Portable Nietzsche (NY: Viking Press, 1954), 46–47, continued a long war
between the literalists (beginning with Aristotle) and the figuralists, and acquired giant
dimensions with Derrida and most post-structuralist critics. Michael Arbib and Mary
Hesse’s The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), Northrop
Frye’s Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (NY:
142 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990) and Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays,
1974–1988 (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1990), and George Lakoff’s “The
Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edition, Andrew
Ortony, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), are also of interest as far as the
relationship between metaphor and reality is concerned.
15 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 95. My italics.
16 Michael Riffaterre, “Intertextuality vs. Hypertextuality,” New Literary History 25.4
(Autumn 1994), 779–88, 779. My italics.
17 Gibson, Count Zero, 40.
18 Miller, On Literature, 21.
19 Worthington, “Bodies,” 195.
20 George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory
and Technology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 2.
21 Ibid., 38–39.
22 Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Tunis: Cérès Editions, 1994), 64.
23 See Sokal (cited above).
24 Miller, “Moving Critical Inquiry On,” 416.
25 Ryan, “Cyberspace,” 96.
26 Lévy, Virtuel, 36.
27 Ibid., 42.
28 Ibid., 46.
29 Ibid., 48.
30 Landow, Hypertext 2.0, 3.
31 Barthes, S/Z, 6.
32 Lévy, Technologies, 29.
33 Ibid., 31.
34 Barthes, S/Z, 14.
35 Ibid., 13.
36 Silvio Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the
Visual Arts, and Electronic Media (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1998), 103.
37 Sven Birkerts, “The Fate of the Book,” The Antioch Review 54.3 (Summer 1996),
259–70, 261.
38 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 86–87.
39 J. Hillis Miller, “The Ethics of Hypertext,” Diacritics 25.3 (Autumn 1995), 26–39, 31.
40 Lévy, Intelligence, 204.
41 Shawn P. Wilbur, “An Archeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity,” in
Bell and Kennedy, Cybercultures, 45–55, 46.
42 Heim, Metaphysics, 3.
43 Kittler, “There is no Software.”
44 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 69.
 Cyberspace as Écriture 143

45 Herodotus, Histories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 117–18.

46 Auster, New York Trilogy, 20–22.
47 Lévy, Virtuel, 45.
48 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 239.
49 Ibid., 64, 101.
50 Ibid., 260.
51 Add to the above C++, Python, Perl, Java, Lisp, and a multitude of other, more-or-less
obscure, low and high-level languages.
52 Webster’s, 602, 1365, and 802.
53 The Bible, King James’ Version, Acts 2:2–2:4.
54 Ibid., 2:6–2:8.
55 Lévy, Technologies, 29.
56 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 193.
57 Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 168–69.
58 Mikhaïl Bakhtine, Esthétique et théorie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 109.
59 Ibid., 119. My italics.
60 Ibid., 144–45.
61 Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés
archaïques,” in his Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Quadrige, 2001), 153, 152.
62 Ibid., 163–64.
63 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 69–70.
64 Ibid., 70.
65 Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 130.
66 Ibid., 45.
67 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 197.
68 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001), 112.
69 Ibid, 113.
70 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 145.
71 Ibid., 56.
72 Ibid., 158.
73 Gibson, Neuromancer, 289.
74 Julian Dibbell, “My Modem, Myself: Online Diaries,” The Village Voice 45.43 (Oct. 31,
2000), 151.
75 Roland Barthes, Le Grain de la voix: Entretiens 1962–1980 (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 233.
76 Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 9.
77 Calvino, Invisible, 155.
78 Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext, 106.
79 Landow, Hypertext 2.0, 90.
80 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 102.
144 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

81 Micheal W. Giles, “From Gutenberg to Gigabytes: Scholarly Communication in the Age

of Cyberspace,” The Journal of Politics 58.3 (Aug. 1996), 613–26, 619.
82 John Thiem, “Myths of the Universal Library: From Alexandria to the Postmodern
Age,” in Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality, 256–66.
83 Ibid., 260. For a unique–and quite hyper-textual–account of the stories surrounding the
Library of Alexandria, see Luciano Canfora’s The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the
Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
84 Allen, Intertextuality, 200.
85 Borges, Labyrinths, 78–79.
86 Ibid., 79, 80.
87 Ibid., 85.
88 Calvino, Invisible, 160.
C H A P T E R S I X

Cyberspace as City

The imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy
of dreams.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project1

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely
fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York2

A
s builders of cities for millennia and dwellers of megalopolises for
more than a hundred years, twenty-first-century humans have
naturally envisioned the new digital realm as a full urban space where
the storing, exchange, and travel of information mirror the life and movement
of dwellers of real-world cities. Not only does computer memory reside in
“addresses,” but we also speak of the “architecture” of processors, of “buses”
linking, like street and avenues, different processes, of “ports” giving access
not to tankers, ships, or liners, but to external or peripheral hardware or
software, and of “drivers” allowing hardware to be recognized by the
operating system. In addition, even casual cybernauts have heard—or are the
owners—of email “addresses,” Internet “sites,”—which are usually, at the
beginning, “under construction,”—and “domain names.” Beyond these rather
mundane appropriations of the city metaphor, however, lies a more
fundamental need to map out cyberspace on the urban grid, translating, as it
were, the desire to order experiential phenomena onto the realm of the
intangible, the ethereal, and the magical.
The implications of seeing cyber-cities as models of new ways of dealing
with reality have not escaped the attention of architecture theoreticians who
have, sadly, remained silent about the problem of cybermapping. Bermudez
and Gondeck-Becker, building on the theories of Ledoux, Piranese, Woods
146 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

and others, have come to the conclusion that since cyberspace offers a totally
new environment where real-world limitations are lessened, digital space does
not have to follow the rules of reality, and it becomes thus acceptable to try
and reflect on the potentials of cyber-architecture by investigating the rules
that are definitely alien to those governing the physical world in which ar-
chitecture has developed for centuries. But the most important point, to
Bermudez and Gondeck-Becker, is that if architecture can loosen up its grip
on hard physical reality, then any other discipline can follow suit. 3 Amy
Bruckman, founder of two virtual communities on the Internet, MediaMOO
and MOOSE Crossing, was writing, in 1996, that the new dimensions offered
by cyberspace present architects with a hitherto unheard-of medium wherein
to explore the limitless possibilities of the virtual. Citing Marcos Novak’s
notion of “liquid architecture,” Bruckman envisions a cyber-city where citi-
zens become creators of their own environment(s).4
Yet Bermudez, Gondeck-Becker, and Bruckman are repeating, in their
own words, what Jameson was writing years before about the way architec-
tural problems lead to theoretical issues in the other disciplines:
It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production
are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most
centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own
conception of postmodernism…initially began to emerge.5

We can say with Jameson that it is in the realm of cyber-cities that

modifications, such as Novak’s “liquid architecture,” are most remarkable,
and that it is the way we define our cyber environment—and we have indeed
begun to do so, witness the growing number of virtual communities—that has,
as I have shown earlier, forced us to raise questions in other fields. Even
though we might find ourselves, at first, uncomfortable with the dramatic
changes living in cyberspace entail, the cyber-city is the first step toward the
building of new theories of reality. Jameson, talking about postmodern
architecture, and calling it the “new hyperspace,” echoes the initial fear
experienced by cyber-dwellers:
I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a
mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects
who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has
been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the
subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new
hyperspace, as I will call it.6

The leap from mutated space and hyperspace to the fantasy of myth and
magic is understandable. Cyberspace as a writing of myth and as a mythical
 Cyberspace as City 147

writing is a discursive space constructed in the image of the city. Numerous

cyberspace writers have pointed at the connection. Benedikt writes:
In fact, all images of the Heavenly City—East and West—have common features:
weightlessness, radiance, numerological complexity, palaces upon palaces, peace and
harmony through rule by the good and wise, utter cleanliness, transcendence of nature
and of crude beginnings, the availability of all things pleasurable and cultured.7

He adds that the need for a Heavenly City is still as pressing as ever and that if
this need is to be fulfilled, it can only be actualized in cyberspace.8 Lévy says
in this respect:
Cyberspace: nomadic urbanity, software civil engineering, liquid ponts et chaussées
of the Space of knowledge…It is an architecture of the interior, an unfinished system
of the collective equipment of intelligence, a whirling city with roofs of signs. The
construction of cyberspace, the converging center of communication and thought of
human groups, is one of the principal esthetic and political stakes of the coming
century.9

Lévy’s challenge has been echoed by Heim’s concept of the relationship

between virtual and physical architecture, or “avatecture.”10
Indeed, cyberspace can be seen as Benjamin’s ideal labyrinthine city, as
the quasi-mythical qualities of a maze-like discourse in cyberspace are also
served by a model based on the city. Featherstone and Burrows, writing about
cyberpunk fiction, say:
The world of cyberspace is itself an urban environment…a digitized parallel world
which from ‘above’ might appear as a rationally planned city…but from ‘below’
reveals itself a Benjaminesque labyrinthine city, in which no one can get the bird’s
eye view of the plan, but everyone effectively has to operate at street level.11

Benjamin’s labyrinthine city is best demonstrated in this passage from

Gibson’s Virtual Light where the precise intersection of “information and
geography,” or of cyberspace and the real world, is seen as necessary for the
sanity of travelers in both realms, but more so for that of dwellers of
cyberspace. In a reversal of situations, physical movement in a physical city is
seen as a return to an already archaic sense of stability:
Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at
the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode
between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of
distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet
this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty,
might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the
girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted
of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data.12
148 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Conversely, some see cyberspace intimately connected to the dismaying

conditions existing in real-life cities. Röetzer writes: “The entry into
cyberspace is interconnected, above all, with the urban reality of cities: the
decay of public areas, increasing suburbanization, and the setting up of the
dual city.”13 In a process not unlike that imagined by Calvino in his city of
Eusapia, this real postmodern city is also becoming more and more similar to
the virtual landscape as far as technological modes of communication are
concerned. Ostwald, in “Virtual Urban Futures,” says that the postmodern city
is “gradually becoming more and more reliant on systems which are both
simulated and transient. The idea that technology is erasing the perceived
distance between points and the relationship between time and space is not
unfamiliar.”14
The recurring—and pressing—juxtaposition between the two cities has
made some theorists of urban spaces—both physical and virtual—ponder the
issue more seriously. Rem Koolhaas, in his monumental Delirious New York,
ends his book with the following words:
The City of the Captive Globe is devoted to the artificial conception and accelerated
birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals and their infliction
on the World. It is the capital of Ego, where science, art, poetry and forms of madness
compete under ideal conditions to invent, destroy and restore the world of
phenomenal Reality.15

The cyber-city is indeed a hothouse where experiments, theories,

interpretations and proposals are conducted in the world of simulation and
where madness and sanity live side by side in order to invent a new reality,
question the old one, and refresh our conception of what both mean. What
Koolhaas is doing in Delirious New York is to provide a “blueprint,” a
“theoretical” Manhattan of which the real city is but a “compromised and
imperfect realization,” 16 making thus of “Manhattanism” a virtual-city
concept.
Similarly, I want to present a “theoretical” cyberspace of which the rep-
resentatives in reality can be the Internet, simulated worlds, chat rooms, RPG
worlds of fantasy, simulators, VR goggles, and others. All these are by no
means the perfect realizations of the blueprint, but they all tend, each in its
own way, toward achieving what I believe is a mode of reality which com-
bines myth and writing to problematize our existing theories of physical real-
ity. Koolhaas’ Manhattan analogy is appropriate, for he attempts to extract,
from the real Manhattan, a rarefied concept, an “interpretation that intends to
establish Manhattan as the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism,
whose program—to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live
inside fantasy—was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly
 Cyberspace as City 149

stated.”17 Koolhaas’ point is that Manhattan’s driving force was the construc-
tion of a world poised at the antipodes of reality, where steel would mix with
sheer fantasy to create another reality altogether, beginning with the magic of
Coney Island and ending with the dream of world peace as embodied in the
United Nations building. Writing in 1978, could Koolhaas have imagined that
before the end of the century the Manhattan dream, to exist in a totally con-
structed world of fantasy, would be realized? In a world as ambitious as cy-
berspace where steel is replaced by writing, where virtuality is doubled by the
element of language and augmented by myth, can we now “openly” state the
program which will invent, question, and refresh our concepts of reality?
A starting point is how both worlds-as-cities can be represented as form-
ing two mutually including realms. Ernest J. Yanarella, taking Calvino’s In-
visible Cities as model, asks in 1998: “How can these inchoate ‘soft cities’
unfolding before and around us and the ‘hard cities’ of our past be integrated
and democratically controlled?”18 If it is doubtful that the new technological
revolution has passed, as Yanarella says, “largely unacknowledged,” his
comment is interesting in that it explicitly assumes that the cities we live in
now are constructions of the past and that virtual communities, or “soft cities,”
will become the norm. Yanarella’s answer to his own question is that cyber-
space is not meant to be an alternative to human habitation but “merely an-
other form of habitation within a more encompassing built environment
enclosed within an even more encompassing set of relations in nature.”19
Yet the connection with Calvino’s Invisible Cities is too tempting to be
ignored. Linking writing and the city, Calvino says about the city of Tamara:
Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you
must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting
Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her
parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it
may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it.20

The city-as-book is open to different readings and misreadings and is

constructed gradually by its different readers, hence compounding the initial
problem of mapping cyberspace as city. If the cyber-city is constructed as
reading a text, it is then open to the same aleatory processes of intertextual
readings. Indeed, city streets, to Benjamin, are the locus of writing: “This
revolution in language was carried out by what is most general: the
street.—Through its street names, the city is a linguistic cosmos.”21
As mentioned above, the attempt to present a blueprint of cyberspace will
not offer a tour of the premises—it has already been attempted by others—for
they are, because of the nature of virtuality, as shape-shifting as can be; what
can be achieved is pointing to the discourse of cyberspace without ever being
150 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

able to arrest the cybernaut/cyber-writer’s gaze on one possible landscape

feature for too long. As such, “hard cities” have become so bloated with
meaning that the more subtle signification opportunities provided by cyber-
space are slowly prevailing. As Kublai Khan, we are overwhelmed with im-
perial cities too heavy to offer new avenues of discourse and we surprise
ourselves enjoying the more boundless cities of virtual discourse:
“The empire is being crushed by its own weight,” Kublai thinks, and in his dreams
now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito
netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be
seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.22

It is interesting to note that Calvino’s invisible cities are not only “fictitious,”
i.e., pertaining to fiction and to writing, but also, more admirably, that they are
represented as lace, netting, veins, filigree, all features equally applicable to
the “Net” of our Internet and to the “tissue” of the text. This relationship
between the cyber-city and writing is nowhere made more explicit than in
Snow Crash. The “Street,” mentioned previously, is an urban-like virtuality
constructed from scratch with computer programming language, a fact which
does not make it, to its cyber-denizens, less liveable:
Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Élysées of the
Metaverse…It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up
and down it…The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the
equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers.
That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than
Earth…The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist—it’s just a
computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere—none of
these things is being physically built.23

It is this feature of cyberspace, this propensity on the part of human beings to

map out liveable space similarly wherever they migrate, that makes virtual
space so akin to a city. What better way to anchor one’s bearings in an
otherwise totally new and totally alien environment as cyberspace than to
duplicate the existing urban plans and transpose them, almost word for word,
into the realm of virtuality? Writing unveils its total creative power as never
before as it becomes clear that what we have taken for granted in the “real
world” can simply—and dramatically—be explained by the putting into play
of discursive strategies. A city, read as text and, what is more revolutionary
today, written as software, is found to be no less liveable than a “real” city.
And it is here that writing and myth combine in the construction of the
virtual polis, for there can hardly be anything more myth-like than an écriture
which actually builds, through the sheer volition of the cybernaut, spaces
 Cyberspace as City 151

which are immediately liveable and hence potentially mappable. The old
dream of giving language magical qualities is fulfilled.
It is indeed as an urban space that cyberspace harbors mythical images and
constructions. Graeme Gilloch, in his Myth and Metropolis, writes: “While the
phantasmagoria of modernity finds its most palpable expression in the archi-
tecture of the city, the individual and collective experiences of the metropolis
are also imbued with mythic forms.”24 The city is not just an urban construc-
tion, but encompasses utopias of ordered and structured existence. It acquires
ontological status and comes to represent humanity’s deepest aspirations,
expectations, and fears. Greg Bear, in Queen of Angels, describes the “Coun-
try of the Mind” virtually accessed by mid-twenty-first-century scientists in
similar urban myth terms:
“It is a region, an unceasing and coherent dreamstate, built up from genetic engrams,
preverbal impressions and all the contents of our lives. It is the alphabet and
foundation on which we base all of our thinking and language, all our symbologies.
Every thought, every personal action, is reflected in this region. All of our myths and
religious symbols are based upon its common contents…“Is it truly a countryside?”
“Something like a countryside or city or some other environment.” “With buildings
and trees, and people, and animals?” “Of sorts. Yes.”25

And Cadigan’s Mindplayers depicts the entry to the mind in architectural

terms:
All I had to do was move around a little. But in the beginning, I was moving around a
lot, just to watch the way things changed…The cathedral—now, there was a surprise.
I’d never imagined that I would have a church in my head, but there it was, taking up
a healthy portion of space in whatever area of my mind I was in.26

Gilloch, by equating the city to a monad which contains, in its essence, the
totality of human experience, is exactly re-phrasing one of the definitions of
myth cited previously. The relationship between myth and the city is a
reciprocal one: not only is myth constructing itself through the city, the city is
also feeding and keeping intact the myths it creates itself. Here again the
ambiguity presented by the problem of which comes first is one of the
fundamental lessons taught by cyberspace.
One of the most durable equivalents to the urban myth of cyberspace in
the real world is Paris, a city which has tormented the imagination of thinkers,
writers, and artists throughout the centuries. Indeed, Benjamin writes: “Few
things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of
Paris. Tens of thousands of volumes are dedicated solely to the investigation
of this tiny spot on the earth’s surface.”27 One of the reasons why Paris has
often been seen as the city par excellence is the amount of myth it contains. In
152 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

fact, a lot of mapping of Paris has been done with myth as the yardstick,
sometimes actually providing travelers with maps better than those obtained
by pure cartographic means.28 Here again, the writing of myth, in a De Certeau
manner, is better apt to render a space than a place. Benjamin, who devoted his
major work, The Arcades Project, to Paris, says:
Balzac has secured the mythic constitution of his world through precise topographic
contours. Paris is the breeding ground of his mythology…it is from the same streets
and corners, the same little rooms and recesses, that the figures of this world step into
the light. What else can this mean but that topography is the ground plan of this
mythic space of tradition…as it is of every such space, and that it can become indeed
its key.29

The places of Paris become, through Balzac’s writing, alive with innumerable
characters marking their own paths in the city, transforming Paris into a space
where myth springs out of the actions and reactions of its denizens. The city is
constructed by the stories attached to its landmarks, and the more myth-like,
the more secret, the better the topographical mapping. Benjamin again:
To construct the city topographically—tenfold and a hundredfold—from out of its
arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railroad stations…just as
formerly it was defined by its churches and its markets. And the more secret, more
deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the
network of the streets, lairs of love, and conflagrations.30

The city’s convolutes twist and form, like cyberspace, passages and labyrinths
where the unknown becomes secret and the secret becomes myth, the latter
finally resurfacing as a written hieroglyph waiting to be deciphered. The
underworld of real cities is a mirror image of another underworld, or
supraworld, that of cyberspace. Both antipodal realms are built with and on
myth and are peopled by mythological creatures thriving on legendary feats
and prowess. Both worlds—the underworld of the dead and the supraworld of
cyberspace—spill over onto the physical world and taint it, as it were,
unalterably. Benjamin writes:
Our waking existence…is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the
underworld—a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise…By day,
the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are
galleries leading into the city’s past) issue unremarked onto the streets. At night,
however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like
a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past—unless, that is, we have
emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.31

If the existence of the underworld is now, in our scientific age, seriously

doubted, the supraworld of cyberspace is being constructed as a replacement.
 Cyberspace as City 153

Our waking existence, our real life, is a realm which hints at virtualities but we
do not have to sleep—or die—in order to access the hidden points of the
labyrinths, entrances to dreams or to the afterworld.
Cyberspace is a dream being realized before our very conscious eyes, a
third mode of existence added to consciousness and unconsciousness. It is not
even the surrealists’ “inner man” mode which was to be accessed through
automatic writing; it is actually dreaming awake. The monstrosity of this
possibility transforms cyberspace into a dream-city the secrets of which await
to be discovered, a dream-city the boundaries of which are never traced for
good but the gates of which are guarded by mythical creatures:
At the entrance to the arcade, to the skating rink, to the pub, to the tennis court:
penates. The hen that lays the golden praline-eggs, the machine that stamps our
names on nameplates and the other machine that weighs us (the modern gnōthi
seauton)…the mechanical fortuneteller—these guard the threshold…They protect
and mark the transitions.32

The myth city remains, however, untouchable and, as cyberspace, unreachable

through the physics of real life. Calvino writes, talking about the effect Marco
Polo’s description had on the Great Khan:
But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his
inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with
words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander
through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.33

Caillois thought that when myth loses its moral coercive power, it be-
comes an object of aesthetic pleasure which finds its best representation in the
city, and what he wrote about this phenomenon taking place in Paris can be
easily transposed to cyberspace:
[It is acceptable to affirm] that there exists…a representation of the big city, powerful
enough on the imaginations that its exactitude can never be practically questioned,
created bit by bit by the book, yet widespread enough to be now part of the collective
mental atmosphere and possessing thus a certain coercive power. We can already
recognize there the characters of mythical representation.34

Paris is a world dislocated, through the power of writing, into a myth powerful
enough to create a representation that is collectively accepted and feared as the
harbinger of truths too primordial to be uttered in the light of day. Readers of
Paris know that the city
is not the only one, not even the real one, and that it is only a make-believe stage
brilliantly lit, yet too normal, one that the machinists will never unveil, and which
dissimulates another Paris, the real Paris, the ghostly Paris, nocturnal, ungraspable,
154 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

ever more strong because it is secret, and which comes in any place and at any time
dangerously meddling with the other one.35

In other words, the writing of myth constructs a double-jointed reality hiding

behind the appearances of order and structure. Here again, the pair
Apollo/Dionysus resurfaces and helps us explain, both for the city and for
cyberspace, how myth, by grafting itself on a seemingly simple entity, in fact
deconstructs it and rebuilds it again, though differently, and ultimately helps
us realize the fundamental uncertainty of what we had hitherto taken for
granted. Cyberspace is the mythical writing of our real life and is instrumental
in making us see, face to face, the quintessential nature of our representational
practices, even at the cost of losing our bearings in real life and allowing the
myth of cyberspace to spill over, as it is already doing, onto the domain of real
life. Along these lines, Caillois wrote:
The two Paris which, at the beginning, lived side by side without mixing, are now
reduced to a unity. Myth was at first content to use the facilities of the night and of the
peripheral suburbs, of the little unknown streets and the unexplored catacombs. But it
has quickly reached the full light in the heart of the city. It occupies the most
frequented edifices, the most official, the most reassuring…Nothing has escaped the
plague, the mythical has everywhere contaminated the real.36

The above reads like a contemporary description of how cyberspace has

encroached on the places allotted to reality, and how it is writing these places
into a virtual space equipped with old myths clothed in new garbs. We are
writing over reality with the myths of cyberspace, and our writing is itself a
mythical practice, a magical writing which uses itself to build its own spaces
in the virtual realm, to devour its old self like the ouroboros snake swallowing
its own tail in a circle which knows no beginning nor end.
Furthermore, the physical city, to the cybernaut, can also be seen as only a
pale shadow, almost a replica, of the real cyber-city, a Eusapia, the model
after which we have unconsciously built our earthly polis. As such, cities can
be read by those who have access to the master plan, the blueprint of cyber-
space. Talking about Benjamin’s notion of the city as readable space, Gilloch
writes:
The metropolis is a multi-faceted entity, a picture puzzle that eludes any unequivocal
decipherment. There is no single picture, no overarching perspective, that can capture
the fluidity and diversity of this environment. Insights into the character and
experience of the city are to be gleaned, therefore, only from fleeting images and
sudden moments of illumination, from the fragments stumbled upon in this complex
and ever shifting social matrix.37

Gilloch’s use of the term “matrix” brings to mind Gibson’s AI, Neuromancer,
 Cyberspace as City 155

as he explains to Case how, despite the bewildering array of diversity present

in the city, cyberspace is the model against which the physical can be read.
Neuromancer as cyberspace’s ultimate AI is as complex as the “ever shifting”
matrix he lives in and has become part of. As such, he foresees all possible
events and specifically Linda’s death: “I saw her death coming. In the patterns
you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those
patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those
dances.”38 Short of transforming themselves into AIs, cybernauts can become
Poesque “physiognomists” and, through their cyber-gaze, untangle the knots
which are incessantly constructed in their cyber-cities. Gilloch explains that
since the city, as a mythic construction, is never what it seems to be, “it is the
gaze of the physiognomist which brings to light the true character of the city.
Physiognomic reading is no superficial activity, no cursory glance. It must go
beneath the surface of things, penetrate their core.”39 Cybernauts become, in
the cyber-city—an invisible city par excellence,—cyber-flâneurs trying, like
their real-life counterparts, to decipher the city-as-text they have themselves
helped shape.
Benjamin’s flâneurs can serve as the starting point for the construction of
their cyber counterparts. To him, the flâneur is an individual who feels a deep
alienation and who projects onto the city a tragic vision:
The gaze which the allegorical genius plunges in the city rather betrays the feeling of
profound alienation. It is the gaze of a flâneur whose way of life hides behind a
mirage of goodness the anguish of the future inhabitants of our metropolises. The
flâneur seeks a refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar
city, to the flâneur, morphs into a phantasmagoria.40

Derrida’s sailing metaphor mentioned previously is striking here as well. The

flâneur is a ship sailing in a sea of people, anonymously drifting in the crowd,
surfing among the faces, the gestures, and the gaits of the passers-by, driven
from one place to another by the sheer forces of chance. The cybernaut as
cyber-flâneur can easily be seen in the following passage from Benjamin:
The crowd gives birth, to the man who abandons himself to it, to a kind of
drunkenness accompanied by very particular illusions, in a way that he flatters
himself, upon seeing the passer-by swept by the crowd, in having classified him, from
his external appearance and recognized him in all the recesses of his soul.41

The cyber-flâneur, however, in one important point works in a way crucially

different from Benjamin’s late-romantic figure: in cyberspace the world is not
alien; real life might be so, but not virtuality. The cyber-flâneur may be hiding
in front of a monitor or behind VR goggles, but the cyber-city offers itself in
all its intricacies to his/her wildest fantasies. The anguish created by modern
156 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

and postmodern cities disappears as the virtual polis, a digital construct, is

invisibly yet forcefully expanding in fascinating and unimaginable ways.
True, the cyber-flâneur is still seeking refuge in the crowd, but it is not the
physical, fleshy crowd of the real streets which hypnotizes the virtual surfer: it
is the encounter with disembodied identities, with countless personas, each
hiding behind an avatar, masquerading (from mask) in an endless pageant
where truth and illusion double the existing simulation. Each cybernaut, in
cyberspace, becomes a cyber-flâneur, trying to hide in order to better
appreciate the intricacies of a world entirely made up of programming
language, where only the voice/writing of the other carries through. How
different yet how strangely familiar the cyber-flâneur’s experience in
cyber-cities is to that of the physical flâneur can best be measured in the
following from Benjamin’s Arcades Project:
An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the
streets. With each step, the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the
temptations of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the
magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street
name…Like an ascetic animal, he flits through unknown districts—until, utterly
exhausted, he stumbles into his room, which receives him coldly and wears a strange
air.42

The similarity of this experience with “jacking out,” to use Gibson’s term, is
striking, as both real-world flâneurs and their cyber counterparts acutely sense
the relative harshness or uncouthness and inane materiality of the physical
world. It is only in the crowd that the flâneur can regain what is lost; it is only
in cyberspace that the cyber-flâneur surfs the crowded digital expanses like an
invisible spirit in a magical world. Indeed, both types of flâneurs share the
attraction for myth:
The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is
precipitous. It leads downward—if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past that
can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private…In the asphalt
over which he passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance.43

The double ground nature of cyberspace alluded to by Benjamin is acutely felt

by every cyber-flâneur: what the digital world is offering is, among other
things, an illumination into the nature of reality itself: short of leading to the
“mythical Mothers,” the source of creation, the cyber-city invites cybernauts
to re-assess their existing concepts of what is and what is not; cyberspace has
fulfilled, through writing, the role of myth in providing an encapsulated
version of reality. The only difference is that, in the cyber-city, cybernauts are
actually inside the myth itself.
 Cyberspace as City 157

Being inside the city-as-myth is best exemplified in Auster’s story of Peter

Stillman the father mentioned above in the context of the Tower of Babel
myth. Walking on the streets of New York, Stillman is also writing his own
illusions, his own search for an unattainable pre-Edenic language, and Quinn,
the detective, is learning, in the process, how to do the same:
For walking and writing were not easily compatible activities. If for the past five
years Quinn had spent his days doing the one and the other, now he was trying to do
them both at the same time. In the beginning he made many mistakes. It was
especially difficult to write without looking at the page, and he often discovered that
he had written two or even three lines on top of each other, producing a jumbled,
illegible palimpsest.44

Interestingly, walking and writing are seamlessly done in cyberspace,

especially in the early days of IF and RPGs mentioned earlier. In fact, walking
could then only be done by typing out the commands or by voicing them out to
the Dungeon Master before the era of computers. The sensation of discomfort
experienced by cyberspace “newbies” can be attributed, among other things,
to this very palpable, very physical relationship between moving and writing:
the keyboard or the mouse becomes the site of repeated physical touching.
Like disabled persons, cybernauts re-learn the art of moving in the cyber-city
through the use, not of their physical body, but of language. And this
cyber-city, these cyber-pavements they walk on with their cyber-bodies, are
truly a palimpsest, temporarily “jumbled” and “illegible” for the likes of
Quinn who have not become adept at walking and writing at the same time.
The palimpsest, “a parchment or the like from which writing has been partially
or completely erased to make room for another text,”45 can be seen as the
different writings on top of one another, vying, on the texture of the page, for
survival. In Neuromancer, Gibson shows this palimpsest-like nature of
cyberspace as it vies with reality when the physical realm—in this case
music—tears Case from the language-as-code grips of the matrix:
The music woke him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own heart…His
vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging
themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of
his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the
unknowable code.46

Case is able to live, even for a brief moment, in the twilight zone between the
physical and the virtual worlds, and it is this glimpse which allows him, at the
end, to understand that the latter is also the palimpsest of its physical
counterpart.
The question I have raised throughout remains the same: is the mythical
158 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

cyber-city we have created and in which we are beginning to live hiding the
real physical polis in which we leave our body or is it the opposite? Is this why
Quinn, in Auster’s trilogy, disappears from the city—and from the physical
world altogether—the moment he learns to walk and write at the same time,
exactly at the moment when he can read the palimpsest he has himself con-
structed; exactly at the moment when, in a terrible flash, he and Case and all
cyber-flâneurs discover that all writings make up the text and none is more or
less real than the other?
The palimpsestic inter-connection between human beings, the city, and
cyberspace is clear when Case looks up at Linda and describes her as having
her hair “drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The pattern might have
represented microcircuits, or a city map.”47 Gibson was, as early as in 1984,
able to voice the beginning of a theory of cybermapping where cyber-
space—as a pattern, as a veil, as a text-tissue, and as a band of printed
silk—and the city join in a microcircuit-like dimension. Yet he was also aware
that the city model was to be used not only as a place where people live but
also, in a way reminiscent of de Certeau’s theory, as a space where new dis-
courses are constructed: “But he [Case] also saw a certain sense in the notion
that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t
there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
technology itself.”48 The new technologies have, as we have seen, used cy-
berspace as a “playground” on which to test new theories, and it is the city
which serves as the model for these new experimental grounds. Adding to
Koolhaas’ “Manhattanism” project, Gibson goes a step further and sees the
physical city itself as a digital representation:
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a
single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they
start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is
about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a
hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in
midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old
core of Atlanta.49

The city, seen from a distance, is a microcircuit and the microcircuit,

examined the way a close reading examines a text, is built after the image of a
metropolis. The physical world is the mirror image of cyberspace, and
vice-versa; this is probably, for the purpose of the present study, the single
most important message of Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Are we ready, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, not only to
inhabit cyberspace, but also to consciously spell out the new modes—among
them Roy Ascott’s vision of “moistmedia” mentioned earlier—such move has
 Cyberspace as City 159

effected? What is striking is that cyberspace dwellers, like Ng in Snow Crash,

simultaneously live, for the first time in history, in two—or more—different
places. While cybernauts are quietly sitting behind a screen, their minds and
their cyber-bodies are engaging in not less gratifying activities at the far
reaches of the planet. A curse or a blessing? Paradise lost anew or, on the
contrary, regained? But perhaps the question is, like many important ques-
tions, simply misleading. Maybe the answer lies somewhere beyond the mere
duality of right or wrong, of true or false, of, again, reality or virtuality. If we
insist on trying to understand the cyber-city in terms of opposition we will
miss the point that, above anything else, the cyber-city is a city of microcir-
cuits, and as such is the exemplary model for a theory based on relationship,
not of intrinsic, isolated identity. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic model:
A book…does not have an object. As an assemblage, it is itself only in connection
with other assemblages, in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask
what a book means, signified or signifying, we will look for nothing to understand in
it; we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what it transmits intensities
or not, in which multiplicities it introduces and metamorphoses its own multiplicity,
with what bodies without organs it makes its own body converge.50

If the objects in the physical world have no meaning and can only be defined
in context, in their relationship with one another, cyberspace and the
cyber-city, similarly, do not have objects to be defined per se. If we take this
further, physical reality as a total concept has no object and has to be defined
only in context, this time in its relationship with virtuality. The cyber-city
provides the ultimate missing link without which the rhizomatic model is
unable to go beyond the apparently totalizing nature of the physical world.
With cyberspace, the balance is regained and the virtual is defined and defines
the actual; with cyberspace as the ultimate body without organs, reality is
suddenly stripped from self-reflecting meaning and acquires in the process full
rhizomatic status. Marco Polo, in Calvino’s fictional account, is aware of the
inter-relationship between the cities of the real and those, “invisible,” of his
story-telling narrative. He tells Kublai:
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I
could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the
degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I
already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist
of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of
its past.51

The cyber-flâneur is re-constructing a relationship and a rhizomatic

assemblage through the measurements of cyberspace and the events of the real
160 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

world’s past, which have become, like Lévy’s collective intelligence, a shared
memory. As we surf what is now the Internet or as we “jack” into simulations,
we recognize the familiar and build on it as studiously as Benjamin’s
nineteenth-century Paris flâneur:
At the approach of his footsteps, the place has roused; speechlessly, mindlessly, its
mere intimate nearness gives him hints and instructions…Often, he would have given
all he knows about…the site of a surprise attack or even of a barricade, to be able to
catch the scent of a threshold or to recognize a paving stone by touch, like any
watchdog.52

Benjamin’s “imminent awakening” is indeed poised now not in the Troy

of dreams, hidden in the recesses of humanity’s desires, but in the cyber-city.
But the cyber-city and all of cyberspace mean nothing when not inhabited and
furiously crossed day and night by cyber-citizens, cyber-flâneurs, and cy-
bernauts of all kinds. If we remember de Certeau’s distinction between place
and space, we realize once again that our mapping of cyberspace is built not on
fixed ephemeral maps but on a model of relationships, and that these rela-
tionships rotate around the “everyday” practices of cybernauts re-writing, in
their cyber-cities, their pasts and their myths. It is these activities which
transform mere cyber-places—lifeless series of digital 1s and 0s—into the
cyberspaces we are still colonizing and expanding. To these cyber-citizens we
now turn in our exploration of cybermapping.

N O T E S

1 Benjamin, Arcades, 392.

2 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1978), 242.
3 Bermudez and Gondeck-Becker, “Emerging Architectures.”
4 Amy Bruckman, “Finding One’s Own Space in Cyberspace,” Technology Review (Jan.
1996), 48–54. See also Ollivier Dyens, “The Emotion of Cyberspace: Art and
Cyber-Ecology,” Leonardo 27.4 (1994), 327–33, for a discussion of the ecology of
liquid architectures.
5 Jameson, Postmodernism, 2.
6 Ibid., 38.
7 Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps,” 38.
8 Ibid., 40.
9 Lévy, Intelligence, 120.
 Cyberspace as City 161

10 Michael Heim, “The Feng Shui of Virtual Worlds,” Computer Graphics World (Jan.
2001), 19–21, 19.
11 Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace, 10–11.
12 Gibson, Virtual Light, 85.
13 Röetzer, “Outer Space or Virtual Space?” 128.
14 Ostwald, “Virtual Urban Futures,” 662.
15 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 243.
16 Ibid., 7.
17 Ibid., 6.
18 Ernest J. Yanarella, “Plato Meets Lawnmower Man in the Virtual Polis: The Case of PS
776,” PS: Political Science and Politics 31.4 (Dec. 1998), 792–96, 795.
19 Ibid., 796.
20 Calvino, Invisible, 14.
21 Benjamin, Arcades, 522.
22 Calvino, Invisible, 73.
23 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 23–24.
24 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1996), 171.
25 Bear, Queen of Angels, 109–10.
26 Cadigan, Mindplayers, 25.
27 Benjamin, Arcades, 82–83.
28 The French surrealists have abundantly supplied the literature on “secret” and/or
“magical” Paris with wonderful texts. Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris and Breton’s
various works are just a few examples.
29 Benjamin, Arcades, 83.
30 Ibid., 83.
31 Ibid., 84.
32 Ibid., 88. The “penates” are the Roman gods of the household, and “gnōthi seauton” is
Greek for “Know Thyself” (in the Notes section, 961).
33 Calvino, Invisible, 38.
34 Caillois, Mythe, 153.
35 Ibid., 157.
36 Ibid., 158–59.
37 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 169–70. My italics.
38 Gibson, Neuromancer, 305.
39 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 170.
40 Benjamin, Écrits français, 389.
41 Ibid., 390.
42 Benjamin, Arcades, 417.
43 Ibid., 416.
162 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

44 Auster, New York Trilogy, 76.

45 Webster’s, 1039. Gerard Genette’s fascinating Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982)
relentlessly pursues the palimpsestic nature of the text as hypertext, architext, hypotext,
and others.
46 Gibson, Neuromancer, 286.
47 Ibid., 17.
48 Ibid., 19.
49 Ibid., 57.
50 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 10.
51 Calvino, Invisible, 10.
52 Benjamin, Arcades, 416.
C H A P T E R S E V E N

Mapping Socio-Cultural
Cyberspace

Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any

exercise of power.
Michel Foucault, Power1

I
presented in the previous chapters some of the most important features
that allow us to construct a model for mapping the new virtual space(s).
From the humble beginnings when gamers were imagining dungeons and
battling invisible gnomes and wizards, to hi-tech simulations, myth and
writing have joined to enable human beings to come to terms with a cogent
interpretation of their place and function within the new technologies.
Cyber-citizens have arranged their space(s) according to the tested model of
real-life cities and tried to anchor their bearings as best as they could. They
have hacked their way in, surfed the increasingly high and increasingly
exciting waves of the Internet, spent a sizeable portion of their time
communicating with others across the globe, and engaged in the most fantastic
simulations ever, whether in the name of science, warfare, or simply for the
sake of entertainment. The inescapable fact is that cyberspace does not exist
without these hardy pioneers and their descendants. If the real world has
existed for billions of years without the species homo, not so with cyberspace
which is the first full world created by mankind from scratch, continuously
expanding, universe-like, solely through human agency. It is in cyberspace
that issues which have tormented critical minds over the centuries, issues such
as gender, race, class, power and the revolt against the tyrannical forms
thereof, are divested of all external features and put to the test in the form of
disembodied ideas and voices no less potent, no less human, than in real life.
That cyberspace is not only a testing ground for existing theories but is
also way ahead of them is what worries, as mentioned before, Bailey when she
164 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

accused thinkers of merely basking in the “delirious prospect” of leaving their

bodies behind and of trying to apply old theories to completely new situations.
To Bailey, questions of race and sexuality are kept in the margins of discus-
sion. In fact, the genderless heaven envisioned in a disembodied world like
cyberspace is, to her, an illusion, and the apparent virtuality provided to the
cybersubject is, notwithstanding utopian claims, heavily gendered. Bailey
says: “Freeing up movement, communication and sensation from the limita-
tions of the flesh might be the promise of digital experience, but the body will
not be abandoned so easily.”2 At the same conference, Nancy Paterson spoke
another discourse, that of cyberspace as providing an opportunity for women
to free their voice from patriarchal oppression: she saw the new technologies
as having stretched existing notions of time and space so much that the
physical body has been re-inscribed and re-written to fit the new environment.
The body in cyberspace can be remodeled, left behind, and twisted as much as
allowed by the current technology; women are faced with opportunities to
break out of roles prescribed by patriarchal societies. Mostly because cyber-
space is not modeled after a linear organization of information, i.e., because of
its hypertextual quality, it has allowed women to transgress an order imposed
by a male view of the universe.3 In fact, changes are bound to happen just
because the new configuration demands new appraisals. Doris A. Graber says
in this context: “The needs and interests of specific audiences, such as groups
differing in ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation, or groups with
special concerns related to their vocations and avocations are more likely to be
addressed.”4 The new technologies are seen as having empowered users, and
especially women, to transmit to the world a voice hitherto suppressed. Says
Graber: “In cyberspace, a single private citizen can address hundreds of
thousands of people via computer from the privacy of his or her home.”5 Yet is
this as simple as Graber wants to picture it? Is the release of woman’s voice a
mere question of coverage? Mary Flanagan, in 2000, was raising the question
of geography and the use of mapping terms that have been traditionally male
dominated:
[W]e ask in the Basic language for the computer to “run” (not process); other
commands include “goto” and “get” or, in Lingo, “put” or “place” (rather than
compute, display, or calculate input). Such descriptions using the language of
geography must be carefully considered given linguistic ties to a historic use of
geography as a site of male power.6

Flanagan accurately traces metaphors and myths related to cyberspace such as

the frontier myth and colonization as typically male-constructed. Virtual
spaces have to be conquered, tamed, and subjugated; Gibson’s hero “jacks in”
to the feminized “matrix” in order to experience orgasm-like situations. To
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 165

Flanagan, cyberspace has been visualized in terms of performance and control

through the sheer force of mainly male will, although the nature of virtuality is
contrary to this vision: networks and the multiplicity and open-endedness of
hypertextual spaces favor models based not on ideologies of control, power,
and competition, but ultimately on the uncontrolled and the fleeting. Here
Flanagan is perfectly in tune with the basic tenets of postmodernism and
post-structuralism. Seen from a Derridean and Barthean angle, cyberspace
problematizes the hitherto sacrosanct differences between the sexes: the
disembodiment and relative anonymity inherent in cyberspace restrict gender
differences to matters of voice and/or writing. Gender in cyberspace can be
switched at will, either through avatars or through impersonation, in a way not
possible before, probably due to the visible and, at the same time, invisible
nature of virtuality for, unlike in real life, encounters can be tailored to suit
individual desires as far as what is to be revealed and what is to be hidden are
concerned.
Donna Haraway’s celebrated “Cyborg Manifesto” first lent weight, in
1991, to the inherent liberatory possibilities of cyberspace for women:
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized
and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg
is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both
imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of
historical transformation.7

Cyberspace, to Haraway, is an artificial space which can defeat the limitations

of biological sexes and elevate humans, for the first time in history, to an
asexual dimension. Such a world “without gender” can also be “a world
without genesis, but maybe also a world without end,” and can eventually
offer a leap outside of “salvation history” altogether.8 Of course, it is clear to
Haraway that such a disappearance can only be accomplished through writing:
Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late
twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle
against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning
perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist
on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and
machine.9

Haraway’s enthusiasm for a mythical cyborg-hero able to transcend

differences through a new discourse is echoed by Sadie Plant: “The Internet
promises women a network of lines on which to chatter, natter, work and play;
virtuality brings a fluidity to identities which once had to be fixed; and
multimedia provides a new tactile environment in which women artists can
166 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

find their space.”10 Expectedly, the promises offered by the new spaces have
generated extreme pronouncements such as the following by “Legba,” a
participant of LambdaMOO: “We exist in a world of pure communication,
where looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid.”11 Interestingly,
both myth—in the form of the dream of pure communication fully disengaged
from the flesh—and writing—in the form of the ultimate weapon of seduction
and control—figure prominently in such visions.
Yet, one can argue that cyberspace, as a new geography, has allowed the
same old actors with the same old clichés and stereotypes to come and inhabit
its digital realms. Although Snow Crash’s male standard avatar, the Clint, is
briefly described as “just the male counterpart of Brandy,” and has “an ex-
tremely limited range of facial expressions,” the female avatar, the Brandy, is
given a generous paragraph fully showing that cyberspace is not very different
from gender discrimination as it exists in the real world:
When white-trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they
invariably run down to the computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a
copy of Brandy. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and
ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute
and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes
are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid
ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost feel the breeze.12

Indeed, Judith Squires, while recognizing the possibilities for women in

cyberspace, is aware of the dangers of gratuitous and facile generalizations
which whole-heartedly embrace new technologies mainly put in place by
patriarchal societies:
[W]hilst there may be potential for an alliance between cyborg imagery and a
materialist feminism, this potential has been largely submerged beneath a sea of
technophoric cyberdrool. If we are to salvage the image of the cyborg we would do
well to insist that cyberfeminism be seen as a metaphor for addressing the
inter-relation between technology and the body, not as a means of using the former to
transcend the latter.13

She adds: “Far from exploring an ungendered ideal, cyborg imagery has
created exaggeratedly masculine and feminine bodies.”14
If the discursive construction of cyberspace, through its insistence on
mythifying “pure” types, is finding itself proposing more masculine males and
more feminine females, it is also doing the same for most binary oppositions.
As a mythical writing and as a writing of myth, cyberspace quite effortlessly
divests itself from the “dross” of “irregularities” or “bugs” in its system and
can encourage simplistic black-or-white representations. When voice only is
heard, it is all too easy to disembody it and mythify it. Indeed, the construction
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 167

of gender in cyberspace is intimately connected to that of class, and the as-

sumptions of the former are carried to the latter. Elmer-DeWitt enthusiasti-
cally describes how cyberspace helps transcend class barriers: “The usenet
newsgroups are, in their way, the perfect antidote to modern mass media…the
newsgroups allow news, commentary and humor to bubble up from the grass
roots.”15
Such a paean of joyful liberatory self-expression can be very attractive
and Lévy, for example, tries to incorporate this social dimension of cyber-
space into his grand project of collective intelligence. To him, cyberspace is
the dream of democracy come true: the site of a “virtual agora,” true democ-
racy is a “direct democracy assisted by computer,” which is better suited than
present political systems to “help us cross the tumultuous waters of anthro-
pological mutation.”16 Far from being a technology reserved to the elite, cy-
ber-politics is now available for all: “As to the barriers facing use,
contemporary digital instruments are less and less difficult to use. An in-
creasing part of the population is now using computers at work and knows
how to handle one or two software programs.”17
Lévy’s obviously simplistic generalizations are too good to be true—and
his dismissive “one or two software programs” rather slighting. It seems that
once the machines are in place, all is well in the best of worlds. Yet
over-simplification is not lacking. How true is the famous 1993 New Yorker
cartoon which proclaimed that on the Internet “nobody knows you’re a dog?”18
How true are such assertions that “[s]tripped of the external trappings of
wealth, power, beauty and social status, people tend to be judged in the cy-
berspace of the Internet only by their ideas and their ability to get them across
in terse, vigorous prose”19? How true is it that the cybernaut, freed “from the
baggage of a biasing body; elevated into the connective flow of the digital
stream” becomes “a kind of technological angel”20? As Kandi Tayebi and Judy
A. Johnson warn, “it is important to recognize that cyberspace exists within a
social framework, which is deeply sexist and racist. Computers do not auto-
matically obliterate hierarchies, blur gender, and produce class free commu-
nities.”21 More bluntly, Lisa Nakamura said in a recent interview: “Certainly
the Net is as racist as the societies that it stems from. How could this not be
true? Is it not true of all other media forms, including literature, film, and
television?”22
Allen, in the context of intertextuality and the new technologies, believes
that “it remains difficult to imagine that technological changes by themselves
will produce more active and productive ‘author-readers’ and an increased
‘democratization’ of language, reading and the communication and possession
of information.”23 Dery, like Squires above, cautions that “cyber-Rapture” is
168 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

blinding us to the realities of the “devastation of nature, the unraveling of the

social fabric, and the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the
minimum-wage masses.”24 Despite the many utopian dreams—some would
say nightmares—of leaving the body behind and becoming pure disembodied
beings, the fact that we are still creatures of flesh and blood should act as a
safety valve reminder. Dery warns:
As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and
social rupture, between Tomorrowland the 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,”…is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus. It pins our future to wings of
wax and feathers.25

The myth of Icarus, Daedalus’ son, serves here as a warning: imprisoned by

Minos with his father, Icarus makes himself wings of feather held by wax and,
as he flies too near the sun, the wax melts and he falls to his death. Pieter
Brueghel the Elder’s famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (circa
1554–1555) portrays this event in a setting of prosperous and bustling
countryside life: Icarus’ fall only occupies a tiny space in the landscape. To the
unaware, the splash in the right-hand corner of the painting, the tiny feet still
visible as Icarus plunges headlong, are almost invisible. But as the lure of
cyberspace intensifies, isn’t the situation reversed and the greatest threat
becomes that the unheard splash is that of the minority who have refused—or
who are unable—to enter “live into simulation”? Indeed, Snow Crash’s
Brandys and Clints make up the vast majority of the virtual population
because real life users cannot afford more expensive models. Far from being a
free-for-all new world, cyberspace replicates real-life social differences.
Graber, in 1996, was saying:
In practice, cyberspace riches are available only to individuals with superior
education and financial resources. These are the publics who already participate far
more in politics than their less privileged fellow citizens. As technology continues to
evolve, the knowledge gap between the information privileged and the information
underclass is likely to grow. Since knowledge means power, an information-deprived
class is likely to suffer other power deprivations.26

Even such a practical attempt like Dodge and Kitchin’s Atlas of Cyberspace
begins with the following warning:
The…way that maps can create false impressions is through omission. For example,
many maps of infrastructure and cyberspace focus their attention—either deliberately
or unconsciously—on the developed world in the West, especially the United
States…Pushing countries to the periphery reinforces, visually at least, the existing
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 169

world hegemony in relation to the Internet.27

Kevin Robins plays on Gibson’s famous “consensual hallucination” to show

that our attitude to cyberspace is also a hallucination which refuses to see the
grim facts of reality: to Robins, this vision is “a tunnel vision” which “has
turned a blind eye on the world we live in.”28 The possibility of taking up
different personalities or inventing new ones in cyberspace has been one of the
much-vaunted achievements of virtual online communities, yet Robins also
sees in this apparent richness and diversity only “banal identities,” adding:
Only the technology is new: in the games and encounters in cyberspace, it seems,
there is little that is new or surprising…All this rhetoric of ‘age-old’ dreams and
desire—which is quite common among the cyber-visionaries—is unspeakably
vacuous and devoid of inspiration…It is the aesthetic of fantasy-gaming; the fag-end
of a Romantic sensibility.29

Another attack, in the context of this study, is also launched by Robins who
says that the “mythology of cyberspace is preferred over its sociology.”30 A
utopian vision, cyberspace is alluring because of the rich world it so easily
presents. This is a realm where people don’t die, where most actions are
“undoable,” where even eternity can be envisioned. Obviously, virtuality,
especially when it is only accessible to a well-to-do minority, is bound to make
its users ignore that a real world exists where real humans feel hunger, pain,
and death. Dodge and Kitchin write: “The reality is that cyberspace is
dominated by white, middle-class males from Western nations who can
converse in English, are computer literate, and are generally in their late teens
or early twenties.” 31 Dery uses the word “insulated” to describe such a
phenomenon: “[M]any of Mondo’s readers are sufficiently insulated from the
grimmer social realities inside their high-tech comfort zones to contemplate
the power of positive hedonism without irony.”32 Theoreticians of the virtual
have received their share of attacks when they were perceived as insulating
themselves and their enthusiastic readers from everyday reality. Vivian
Sobchack delivered such an attack on Baudrillard:
I wish Baudrillard a little pain—maybe a lot—to bring him to his senses. Pain would
remind him that he doesn’t just have a body, but that he is his body, and that it is in
this material fact that ‘affect’ and anything we might call a ‘moral stance’ is
grounded…If we don’t keep this subjective kind of bodily sense in mind as we
negotiate our techno-culture, we may very well objectify ourselves to death.33

If the above turns out to be true, then the prospects are far from reassuring. If
language forms, as I have shown, the basic structure of cyberspace, educated
users will have an edge over their less fortunate fellow-citizens and will yield
more power as their knowledge increases. In a virtual world where physical
170 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

advantage is not a concern anymore, the battle for survival is fought with
digital wit, software know-how, and informational power. Since everything in
cyberspace is, in some way or another, information, it is the possession of
information that will decide who holds power. It follows quite naturally that
those who control information are in the position to give it and withhold it at
will.
This new social configuration, the first fully informational in the history of
humanity, is not only threatening to consecrate, and probably to seal for good,
the social gap between privileged and unprivileged, but it has also created, and
this in an unprecedented manner, a new class, almost invisible, operating
solely on the acquisition, use, and dissemination of digital information. This
new class, for some, can be defined as the virtual class. Kroker and Weinstein
have defined it at length in “The Political Economy of Virtual Reality:
Pan-Capitalism,” equating it with the appearance of the new technologies as it
“fuses with the high-speed backbone of the Net,” and “[i]ts expression as the
emergent class of post-history is coterminous with the sovereignty of the re-
combinant commodity.”34 The virtual class is the first class to appear outside
of geographical boundaries, thus fully mirroring the cyberspatial characteristic
of non-physicality. Unlocatable yet human, this paradox makes Kroker and
Weinstein ascribe amphibious qualities to the new class:
A mutant class born at that instant when technology acquired organicity and became a
living species, the technological class is itself a product of combinatorial logic. It
stands as the first, self-conscious class expression of the universal net of post-human
bodies.35

Postmodernism heralds the end of history and the end of the human body as
flesh only or, as Case would put it, as “meat” and, in a Kurzweilian-like
scenario, human and machine—or analog and digital—would merge to the
extent of indifferentiation. The end of flesh and the full entry into the pure
realm of the mind is portrayed as a victory over the death instinct.
Are new technologies, such as ultra-sophisticated media and the Internet,
instead of keeping us in touch with world events and allowing us to actively
participate in shaping our future and fighting injustice, acting instead as a
mere screen behind which we have left our impotent bodies for a simulacrum
of decision-making capability? Will the end of the “meat” and the emergence
of the virtual class signal a full de-localization, as we have seen before,
leading to the incapacitation of will and the hijacking of the users’ digital
power? Virilio writes, in the context of televised media at the end of the
twentieth century: “We are in the grips of a videoscopic technology that has
nothing to do with film analysis or the critique of domestic television, a lo-
gistics of perception necessary for the progressive acquisition of the neural
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 171

targets that we have become.”36 In a scenario reminiscent of the movie The

Matrix, humanity is hooked on and unknowingly pooling its neural power for
the service of the virtual class. Time and its immediate, live, use, are becoming
more important than space itself. If classes in the physical world are pre-
dominantly built on a carefully regulated space, the virtual class, by the at-
tempted diminishing of the “flesh,” relies in contrast on a controlled use of
time: uptime, time online, time-out and other network terms betray the sliding
from a body in space to a mind—or an attention—in time. Experience, which
is partly experience through the body is, to Kroker and Weinstein, the target
set to be destroyed by the virtual class; our twenty-first-century culture, falsely
hailed as “wired,” is the sad result of a plot to achieve full digitality:
Not a wired culture, but a virtual culture that is wired shut: compulsively fixated on
digital technology as a source of salvation from the reality of a lonely culture and
radical social disconnection from everyday life…for virtualizers, the good is
ultimately that which disappears human subjectivity, substituting the war-machine of
cyberspace for the data trash of experience.37

Ironically, Kroker and Weinstein’s pronouncements are only accessible

through the same cyberspace they are attacking. Ctheory’s main repository of
articles is accessible online at www.ctheory.net and even the books they offer
are digital scans—as pdf files—of actual hardware copies meant to be easily
read on a computer screen. But what is of note in our context is that even
Kroker and Weinstein find difficulty in locating and positioning this virtual
class and the locus of its operational base mainly because of the merger
between analog and digital, between the “meat” and the digital, between the
real and the virtual. The problem is solved by a highly technical—or
“wired”—but metaphorical language which still uses physical models to
describe a-physicality. The virtual class achieves dominance “because its
reduced vision of human experience consists of a digital superhighway, a fatal
scene of circulation and gridlock, which corresponds to how the late
twentieth-century mind likes to see itself.”38
Another question is raised: will we lose, as Kroker and Weinstein say,
along with our humanity and our history, our space as well? Don Mitchell’s
1995 essay in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, “The
End of Public Space?” illustrates the shift in perspective. Mitchell argues that
public space is disappearing not only because of privatization but also, and
more insidiously, because of the changes in communications technology. If
these new technologies empower users because “citizenship no longer re-
quires the dichotomy between public and private geographies; access to a
television set, radio, or computer with a modem is sufficient,” yet at the same
time political debate can only be possible through the media and their digital
172 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

spaces and therefore a “fully electronic public space renders marginalized

groups such as the homeless even more invisible to the working of politics”
and, as such, “their needs, desires, and political representations [can never] be
seen in the manner that they can be seen in the spaces of the city.”39
McKenzie Wark believes that instead of empowering users, virtuality and,
more specifically, multimedia, are in fact fully putting the user at the mercy of
the creator or programmer. Unlike books where we can skip to the end and
browse at our leisure, multimedia forces us along a specific path and ending(s)
can be hidden for as long as the programmer wants.40 What Wark is hinting at
is that the virtual class can, under the guise of “interactivity,” domesticate
common users into either choosing the “correct” answer or having to repeat
the whole procedure in a Pavlovian-like scenario. Users become helpless in
front of a technology which will only deliver upon full compliance with a
carefully designed path; physical rebellion, for the first time in history, is ruled
out by the mere nature of the medium involved, and cybernauts, instead of
freely navigating the reaches of cyberspace, are in fact forced to turn in circles
and re-map atrophied and artificial spaces.
Elaborating on Foucault’s disciplinary societies which, through the
prison, the hospital, the factory, the school, and the family, enclose the indi-
vidual, Deleuze, in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” applies the
distinction between the two modes onto the current real-virtual problem. If
disciplinary societies, through enclosure, detain the individual, it is essentially
in a physical world, visibly and solidly mapped out; the problem quite simply
is, as Deleuze says, analogical. But the present societies of control operate
through what he calls a numerical model, through modulation, like a flexible
cast which continuously takes on the shape of the person wearing it; in a vir-
tual world, the apparent elasticity of the boundaries of control give the illusion
of freedom. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and human beings have
become “samples,” “data,” “markets,” and, most importantly, “banks” of
information. The user in pre-virtual disciplinary societies was, despite
physical enclosure, producing physical energy in a physical world; the user in
societies of control is “in orbit,” in a “continuous network.” Deleuze sarcas-
tically adds: “Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.”41
Kroker and Weinstein do not mince their words and call this society of
control, along with pan-capitalism, a “virtual fascism” quite different from its
historical real-life precedents, a “reinvention” consisting of “a set of political
symptoms of the hatred of existence, the will to will, the will to virtuality, the
(death) wish to be replaced,” 42 and in another—online—article written by
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker reviewing Bill Gates’—hardcopy—book
Business @ The Speed of Thought, the digital nervous system of the future is
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 173

envisioned:
An analytically abstract, fast circulating, highly coded, feedback loop of “good digital
information flows” and “good analytical tools,” Gates’ model of post-human business
is the key interface by which human flesh will migrate to the machine in the digital
future. Once fully operational, the digital nervous system can be quickly installed in
every form of organization.43

To Kroker and Weinstein, Microsoft is not about products but about a certain
model which heralds the coming of a new technological age where human
memory, instead of being contained in physical bodies, will be virtual and
downloadable—and by the same token fully mapped and thus potentially
erasable—enabling the new virtual class, in a cyber-panopticon-like scenario,
full access—past, present, and future—to the totality of that memory.
In that context, Armitage, in a work cited earlier, describes the current
technologies as “Neoliberal,” that is, as a species of liberal fascism charac-
terized by free enterprise, globalization on the economic level, and the rise of
national corporatism. Human beings will be gradually transformed into cy-
bernetic machinery docilely executing the orders of their Neoliberal masters
who will have themselves lost their humanity in a cyborgian mixture of flesh
and machine. To Armitage, all technology is the carrier of totalitarianism and
the new technologies, by allowing humans to adopt a virtual model, looms
high at the pinnacle of control.
The implications to mapping cyberspace as the meeting place for the
digitalized twenty-first-century human are clear: control exists in the virtual
mode as it has existed in the physical one; the will to surveillance has not
abated but, on the contrary, it has adopted the characteristics of the new
technologies such as networking and sharing and has attempted, with varying
success, to infiltrate and occupy these new channels. In a fast-moving and
fast-expanding world such as cyberspace, control has to keep shifting shapes
in order to keep up with the changes in the technology. David Lyon, in his
“Surveillance in Cyberspace,” writes: “Unlike the panopticon, where the body
is subject to surveillance, it is now information flows that are under scrutiny.
Personal data is abstracted from bodies to be re-constituted as data images,
about which automated decisions are routinely made.”44 The physical, as Lyon
says, is translated into the digital, and what were hitherto human experience,
feelings, and emotions suddenly become strings of 1s and 0s neatly archived
in the data banks of control centers. Routes and paths, whether as traces in the
physical world or as traces in organic parts like the brain and the body, are
becoming obsolete because they are deemed transitory and thus unaccountable
for, largely unmeasurable, and mostly non-repeatable. If we remember de
Certeau’s practices of everyday life, it becomes clear that non-repeatability is
174 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

both a threat to the establishment and the warrant of the users’ freedom. At-
tempting to freeze these practices and transpose them into binary data tips the
balance in favor of the emerging virtual class and threatens to transform ex-
perience into information.
In 1979, Lyotard was already warning against the shift in emphasis her-
alded by the new technologies and the loss of experience as it is transformed
into binary language:
In this general transformation, the nature of knowledge does not stay intact. It cannot
pass through the new channels and become operational unless it is translated into
quantities of information. We can therefore predict that everything in our constituted
knowledge which is not thus translated will be forsaken, and that the orientation of
new research will limit itself to the translatability condition of the eventual results
into machine language.45

The end of traditional ways of power and the emergence of new means of
surveillance generated by new designs and concepts of space and the ways to
map them are heralded by Baudrillard. Mapping itself is a means of power for
the new technologies:
End of the panoptic system. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze,
and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. This still presupposes an
objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. It
is still, if not a system of confinement, at least a system of mapping.46

The panoptic system of surveillance, built on physical space, is replaced by a

strategy of deterrence centered around virtual spaces occupied not by people
but by information:
No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or
circular inflexion. No more violence or surveillance: only “information,” secret
virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion, and simulacra of spaces in which the effect
of the real again comes into play. We are witnessing the end of perspectival and
panoptic space…and thus to the very abolition of the spectacular.47

Classical notions of space no longer apply to a sociology of cyberspace where

objectivity, or the positing of an individual gaze focusing, as subject, on an
object in a perspectival mode, is made obsolete by the new technology; old
notions of surveillance are replaced by the race for informational supremacy.
Classical space is replaced by hypertextual or hyperspatial vortices
criss-crossed by the almost instantaneous exchange of information in various
forms. A map of cyberspace would have to take into account the principle of
chaos inherent in any information exchange. Baudrillard says:
Such a blending, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium,
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 175

without the possibility of isolating the effects—spectralized, like these advertising

laser sculptures in the empty space of the event filtered by the medium—dissolution
of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV—indiscernible chemical solution.48

What is apparent is that once mapping concerns are translated onto a space
where humans interact, the problems are bound to increase in complexity.
This, in itself, is not new and has been, as shown before, the object of heated
debate. What is interesting is that if this space is inherently unstable as with
cyberspace, the human element exponentially aggravates the situation: the
hypertextuality of human discursive interaction seamlessly blends with the
hypertextuality and cybertextuality of the new space; fluidity, uncertainty, and
undecidability meet virtuality, open-endedness, and expansibility on a dy-
namic map. Bey, echoing Baudrillard’s viral model, writes in this context:
If we were to imagine an information map—a cartographic projection of the Net in its
entirety—we would have to include in it the features of chaos, which have already
begun to appear, for example, in the operations of complex parallel processing,
telecommunications, transfers of electronic “money,” viruses, guerilla hacking and so
on.49

In this dangerous and highly unstable world, information becomes the only
commodity; surveillance subtly shifts to deterrence; and cyber-control is met
by cyber-anarchy in a virtual battle for survival. To Bey, the new anarchy,
“Post-Anarchism Anarchy,” combines myth, language as “poetic terrorism,”
and mapping the “despatialized” emerging cyberspace(s):
How can we separate the concept of space from the mechanisms of control? The
territorial gangsters, the Nation/States, have hogged the entire map. Who can invent
for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires?
AnarchISM ultimately implies anarchy—& anarchy is chaos. Chaos is the principle
of continual creation . . . & Chaos never died.50

The empty and unlocalized spaces of Virilio can, to Bey, be turned into a
haven: the physical landscape has been hijacked by sites of power and control
and the only refuge left is cyberspace. True, the virtual is also the locus of a
loss, a loss of nature and a loss of identity, but the risk is worth taking and the
“territorial gangsters” are met in cyberspace by the cyber-anarchists who have
honed the skills of moving in an a-physical landscape the map of which is
drawn by desire and chaos. As Bey very well says, the question of land refuses
to disappear, that is, the problematization of a space which is not prone to
mechanisms of control is paramount. Sterling, in “A Brief History of the
Internet,” shares this view: “Why do people want to be ‘on the Internet?’ One
of the main reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true,
modern, functional anarchy. There is no “Internet Inc.” There are no official
176 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders.”51 The land of

opportunities par excellence, cyberspace holds, deeply buried within itself, the
two extremes of total surveillance and total anarchy.
In this context, Bey is keen on differentiating between the “Net,” and the
“Web,” also known as the “Counter-Net”: the first, as the name implies, is a
construct which is used to trap, as a fishing net, the unwary cybernauts into a
system of control and dependance; the second is the natural outgrowth of and
reaction to oppression and, as “web,” weaves, spider-like, its own paths
through the “interstices” and “broken sections” of the net.52 The relationship
between Bey’s web and the text as tissue is obvious. These tendencies, then,
remind us of de Certeau’s practices of everyday life: places as net and spaces
as webs of narrative(s). Interestingly, “interstice” comes from the Latin “in-
tersistere” which means “to stay between, to insert oneself in; to stop in the
middle (of discourse).”53 Not only are interstices places to be filled by an
entity which will transform it by the mere fact of its presence, but they are also
intimately related to speech, discourse, and language. Bey and Sterling may
have come close to essential element in the cyberspace equation: when we
actively seek refuge within the interstices of the virtual landscape, when we
scour the text of the matrix for “broken sections,” we are also stopping or in
fact deviating discourse from its path, misreading ortho-doxy, applying vio-
lence to the weakest points of the fabric, re-creating our own discourse in the
place where the language of power is stopped.
By occupying the haven of interstices, cyber-rebels have become viruses,
from the Latin “virus,” meaning “sap, juice, humor; drool, venom, poison; bad
breath, infection, bitterness,”54 threatening and challenging what is taken to be
good, “virtus.” The virus functions as malevolent juice, as a viscous liquid
which spills, unstoppably, through the interstices of the Net, viscous as the
secretions of a spider weaving its web. Of course, the imagery is taken from
the physical world, as myth does, and history has witnessed proto-cyber-states
spilling, virus-like, onto the accepted norms of society. Bey uses the model of
the medieval Assassins as one of these networked entities, as they “founded a
‘State’ which consisted of a network of remote mountain valleys and castles,
separated by thousands of miles, strategically invulnerable to invasion, con-
nected by the information flow of secret agents, at war with all governments,
and devoted only to knowledge.”55 The network nodes scatter an otherwise
centralized control and, in a post-structuralist vein, disseminate the text which
can henceforth never be read by authoritative voices. As the reader is freed
from the tyranny of both the author and the critic, the cyber-anarchist is freed,
through the same networked hypertext, from the tyranny of the programmer as
well as that of governments. Our mapping of cyberspace, then, has also to take
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 177

into account precisely that which cannot be accounted for, the text which lies
outside of the accepted discourse, the marginalized and supplementalized
interstices into which we become viruses, virulent stoppers of a speech which
always poses itself as authoritative and final.
As virus, cyber-anarchy is just re-presenting and re-enacting the lessons
learned—and taught—since the break, the post-1960 brisure, and the almost
magical efflorescence of post-structuralism. As early as 1971, Barthes was
writing the following telltale words:
The only possible counter-attack is achieved neither by facing nor by destroying, but
only by stealing: to fragment the old text of culture, of science, of literature, and to
disseminate its traits according to unrecognizable formulas, the same way one masks
stolen merchandise. Faced with the old text, I thus try to erase the false sociological,
historical, or subjective blooming of determinations, visions, and projections; I listen
to the excited movement of the message, not to the message itself, I see…the
victorious deployment of the signifying text, of the terrorist text.56

The post-brisure text as terrorist text, as text of excess, as guerilla text; not
destroying, but subtly and elegantly deconstructing and destabilizing the old
nefarious concepts; appropriating the otherness of the margin by tactically
displacing, transforming, playing with, and disseminating meanings; masking
and masquerading; appearing and suddenly vanishing in an ever-moving and
ever-expanding sphere. Bey writes: “Beyond the temporary autonomous zone,
beyond the insurrection, there is the necessary revolution.”57
It should be clear by now how naturally and how effortlessly was cyber-
space able to acquire, from its inception, the fundamental qualities and capa-
bilities of contemporary textual theories. The effort at upsetting the
established interpretive maps found fertile ground in virtuality, and the some-
times insurmountable difficulties faced by underground movements of protest
against oppressive control are, in cyberspace, addressed from a different
perspective. George Woodcock, in his seminal book on anarchism, both de-
plored the end of anarchism as a movement and gave hope to it as an indi-
vidual endeavor. In the prologue he prophetically wrote that, although the
historical anarchist movement is dead, “it is possible that the theoretical core
of anarchism may still have the power to give life to a new form under
changed historical circumstances.”58
I maintain that cyberspace may be this new major historical circumstance
that could allow the idea of anarchism to take on, with the help of
post-structuralist theories, a new shape and renewed vigor. How else can we
interpret the numerous and daily calls, on the Internet, for the freeing of virtual
territory before it is too late? The “mirroring” of threatened and subsequently
banned protest sites is now an established practice: when authoritarian control
178 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

threatens to shut down a web page, individuals, maybe located thousands of

physical miles apart, volunteer to “mirror” the entire contents of the site in an
attempt to thwart the silencing of voices. Without a centralized body, with
minimal financial costs, with only a wild thirst for truth and freedom, anar-
chists are born again in cyberspace.
Indeed, De Certeau describes the practice of everyday life as the “delin-
quent narrativity in a society” when and where pedestrians create their own
mapping paths, criss-crossing the city with memories and stories, imposing
and inscribing their own bodies in movements on the city grid: “The opacity of
the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what
indefinitely organizes a here in relation to an abroad, a ‘familiarity’ in relation
to a ‘foreignness’.”59 Similarly, cyber-users inscribe, through their hypertex-
tual jumps, links, and mirrors, a virtual map where the obvious foreignness of
the new medium is tamed, appropriated, and familiarized. It is a “delin-
quency” which at the same time firmly anchors the cyber-users in unfamiliar
territory and allows them to paradoxically extend and reduplicate their pres-
ence and make themselves invisible to centers of control.
These invisible spaces, these islands in the Net, Bey calls the “TAZ,” or
“Temporary Autonomous Zones,” the title of his most famous book. He
writes:
The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla
operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves
itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it…The TAZ is an
encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire
tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web.60

The TAZ is temporary because its nature is that of simulation itself: a

collection of binary data exposed to hardware loss anytime, threatened by
network failures and memory leaks. Yet it is this very uncertainty—which, in
a way, mirrors the uncertainty of physical reality—which gives the TAZ its
chances of survival: similar to Baudrillard’s nihilism, the Temporary
Autonomous Zone uses the enemy’s own weapons to carve out a niche for
itself. The cyber-rebel acquires a strange double nature, living in both worlds,
moving virtual encampment like American Indians escaping the onslaught of
the white colonizer. Here we come to a reversal of the myth of the frontier
presented above: the Net is not only a frontier to be expanded “westward,” a
happy-go-lucky adventure of exploration and discovery; the terrible truth of
the colonization is that it must erase or deface the image of the colonized in the
process. As Edward Said said about the United States’ expansion westward,
“[t]he broad tendency was to expand and extend control farther, and not to
spend much time reflecting on the integrity and independence of Others, for
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 179

whom the American presence was at very best a mixed blessing.” 61 The
Temporary Autonomous Zone is a forced and at the same time willed
migration to the margins, to the places of real but invisible power, in order to
masquerade as a supplement yet in reality to exist as a necessary presence,
ambulant and ambivalent, that is, disseminated and uncertain, autonomous
and temporary. De Certeau says:
Every culture proliferates in its own margins. Irruptions happen, described as
“creations” relative to stagnations. Bubbles emerging from swamps, a thousand suns
go on and off on the surface of society. In the official imaginary, they appear as
exceptions or as marginalisms…In reality creation is a disseminated proliferation. It
pullulates. A multiform feast infiltrates everywhere.62

Bey similarly writes in Hieroglyphica: “In the Dark Ages the monasteries
made points of light on a map of spilled and featureless ink. In these Lite Ages
we need monasteries of darkness, holes of black light from which nothing
emerges but a thin blue radiance of esotericism and some woodfire smoke.”63
Bey’s points of lights and later, free enclaves on the Net carrying on their
“festal purposes,” echo de Certeau’s “multiform feast,” and both rejoin the
essential Barthean and Derridean principles of game and playfulness.
Mapping this new social—or even anarchic—cyberspace is also one of
Bey’s main concerns:
The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual
location in space. But clearly it must also have “location” in the Web, and this location
is of a different sort, not actual but virtual, not immediate but instantaneous. The Web
not only provides logistical support for the TAZ, it also helps to bring it into being;
crudely speaking one might say that the TAZ “exists” in information-space as well as
in the “real world.”64

The double nature of cyberspace is what allows virtuality to provide

cyber-anarchists with an alternative to real-world societies of control.
Occupying virtual locations on what is now the Internet, cybernauts
instantaneously lay claim to a new dimension of information space which can
be switched at will, replicated almost to infinity, and disposed of at any
moment. Barlow, in the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”
cited previously, declares that the new space is “naturally independent of the
tyrannies” governments try to impose on citizens; that the “legal concepts of
property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply” and that
citizens “must declare [their] virtual selves immune” to the supposed
sovereignty of tyrannical powers.65 If bodies are at the mercy of totalitarian
regimes and oppressive government, not so with the mind that has taken
cyberspace as its ultimate haven. Bey likes to compare the nature of the
180 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

relation between cyber-anarchists and virtuality to that of 18th-century

sea-rovers and corsairs and the oceans around them: both can only function, in
an otherwise unmappable medium—the digital matrix and watery
expanses—through information networks linking the outlaws’
hideouts—islands both physical and virtual—with each others.66
However, it is the notion of nomadism that can best put the mapping of
socio-cyberspace in a fresh perspective. In Deleuze and Guattari’s famous
twelfth chapter in Mille Plateaux entitled “1227–Traité de nomadologie: la
machine de guerre,” they posit their first axiom which possesses all the fea-
tures I have been leading to: the concern for mapping, myth, writing, and
ludicity:
Axiom I: The war machine is external to the state apparatus.

Proposition I: This exteriority is first attested by mythology, epic writing, drama, and
games.67

Deleuze and Guattari write that, seen from the point of view of the State, “the
originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appear under a
negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin.”68
Expectedly, cyberspace will be painted as a waste of time, as mass hysteria, as
an illegitimate mode of existence, as a usurpation of reality, and, most
importantly, as the cardinal sin against Creation: the arrogant appropriation of
the Creator’s prerogative in creating the world.
The main threat to centers of control and to novice users is that cyberspace
functions on a fundamentally different concept of territory and movement. To
Deleuze and Guattari, nomads situate themselves according to points of ref-
erence, but these points are used or subordinated to wider trajectories; these
points, which to migrants would be points of arrival, are to nomads there only
to be left behind. In cyberspace, hypertexts are never final resting places for
cybernauts: the very essence of hypertextuality resides in the un-stoppable and
ultimately unpredictable movement from one information node to the other.
Another important difference Deleuze and Guattari make between nomadic
space and sedentary space—our cyberspace-physical space pair—is that the
state apparatus, primarily sedentary, distributes closed spaces to individuals
by allotting parts and opening communication channels between them, thus
enabling full surveillance and control; nomadic space, on the contrary, takes
individuals and distributes them in open spaces; communication, if it does take
place, remains within individual free will.69
Paradoxically, nomads in their smooth space do not move. Keeping to a
forever changing trajectory, they ride, as it were, the crest of a wave which,
while immobile, allows them to cross huge distances; the analogy is perfect:
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 181

disembodied Internet “surfers” intersect and interweave the vast tissue of

cyberspace without actually moving; leaving what they see as the gross body
in physical space, they are free to roam at will in playful response to the prison
of reality created by the state apparatus. Deleuze and Guattari explain:
[I]t is wrong to define the nomad by movement…the nomad is on the contrary the one
who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves a place which has become
amorphous or ungrateful, the nomad is the one who does not leave, does not want to
leave, sticks to this smooth space where the forest recedes, where the steppe and the
desert increase, and invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.70

Indeed, cybernauts, far from being the embittered and a-social creatures
cynically portrayed by Neo-Luddites, are the last of the nomads and, as such,
present us with alternative ways to stake our individuality and free choice
amidst mounting informational oppression.
The “war machine” can be translated as Bey’s TAZ, cyber-anarchism, the
smooth space of cyberspace as opposed to the striated space of physical real-
ity. Indeed, Bey makes use of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the war ma-
chine in order to bring his TAZ theory forward and come up with what he calls
“psychic nomadism” tactics:
These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both
need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones,
hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, “liberated” bits of jungle and
bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.71

In a surprisingly familiar description of the Internet underworld, Bey is able to

put together Barthes’ notion of the readerly and the writerly, de Certeau’s
practice of everyday life, and the hacker’s mode of existence. More, Bey is
also aligning himself with a long tradition which makes of the writing of myth
an essential feature of defense against oppression: “If the TAZ is a nomad
camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of
the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up
the flowlines of tribal economy.”72 In Lévi-Straussian terms, Bey writes:
Whether through simple data-piracy, or else by a more complex development of
actual rapport with chaos, the Web-hacker, the cybernetician of the TAZ, will find
ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net…As a
bricoleur, a scavenger of information shards, smuggler, blackmailer, perhaps even
cyberterrorist, the TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal
connections.73

Lévy, likewise, is very interested in this kind of new-technology nomadism:

“we have become nomads again…To move is not to travel from one place to
182 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

another on the terrestrial surface, but to cross universes of problems, lived

worlds, and landscapes of meaning.”74
Whether as islands or as Mandelbrot-like fractals, the TAZ’s areas of
“chaos” are embedded—as cyberspace—in the very fabric of physical reality,
disappearing at will but always present in a map made up of the light-speed
control, appropriation, hijacking, and camouflaging of information. Kroker
and Weinstein also picture the new “wired body” as “perfect,” since it is now
able to travel “like an electronic nomad through the circulatory flows of the
mediascape,” having become, after its many metamorphoses, not much more
than the “virtual biological form of a multi-layered scanner image.” Relieved
from the fetters of a heavy and awkward body, the wired body has finally
“crack[ed] its way out of the dead shell of human culture,”75 and the zones
crossed by wired bodies are, because of their specific nature, invisible to
normal mapping processes and have to remain so. The classical mapping spree
which ended with the twentieth century is indeed powerless when it comes to
the new landscapes of virtual space, and has allowed private space to acquire
renewed meaning. Bey says:
The “map” is a political abstract grid, a gigantic con enforced by the carrot/stick
conditioning of the “Expert” State, until for most of us the map becomes the
territory…Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map is not
accurate; the map cannot be accurate…Revolution is closed, but insurgency is
open…the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open.76

What Bey proposes is the coining of a new term to replace the defunct
“cartography of Control,” what he calls “psychotopography” which, for the
first time, will be able to draw 1:1 maps of reality based on the individual
human mind, and not on state concerns. At a genuine 1:1 projection scale, the
new map will have no room for control because it will be virtually identical to
itself. What can be obtained from these psychotopographic maps will be
approximations and hints, for they can “only be used to suggest, in a sense
gesture towards, certain features.” Bey is “looking for ‘spaces’ (geographic,
social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous
zones…Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.”77
Dowsing is the search for underground currents—water, minerals, met-
als—by the use of divining tools, usually a rod, a bricoleur’s creation par
excellence. An uncertain and thus marginalized attempt at mapping what
cannot be seen; a myth, the utopian dream that we can, through magic, escape
the two forces that have oppressed us as humans from the beginning of time:
first, a government where injustice, inequality, and tyranny are the rule and,
second, a nature which, though it bestows the gift of life, is perpetually re-
minding us that it can take it back anytime.
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 183

N O T E S

1 Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984, vol. 3, James D. Faubion, ed. (London:

Penguin Books, 2000), 361.
2 Bailey, “Virtual Skin.”
3 Nancy Paterson, “Cyberfeminism,” Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art
(ISEA), Montreal, Canada (Sep. 18–22, 1995).
4 Doris A. Graber, “The ’New’ Media and Politics: What Does the Future Hold?” PS:
Political Science and Politics 29.1 (Mar. 1996), 33–36, 33.
5 Ibid., 34.
6 Mary Flanagan, “Navigating the Narrative in Space: Gender and Spatiality in Virtual
Worlds,” Art Journal 59.3 (Fall 2000), 75–85, 76.
7 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Bell and Kennedy, Cybercultures, 291–324, 292.
8 Ibid., 292.
9 Ibid., 312.
10 Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations,” in Bell and Kennedy,
Cybercultures, 325–36, 325.
11 Qtd in Randal Woodland, “Queer Spaces, Modem Boys and Pagan Statues:
Gay/Lesbian Identity and the Construction of Cyberspace,” in Bell and Kennedy,
Cybercultures, 416–31, 416 (note the Voodoo allusion in the user’s avatar). See also
Graham Brown, Bruce Maycock, and Sharyn Burns, “Your Picture is your Bait: Use and
Meaning of Cyberspace among Gay Men,” The Journal of Sex Research 42.1 (Feb.
2005), 63–73, on Internet usage by gay men in Perth, Western Australia.
12 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 35.
13 Judith Squires, “Fabulous Feminist Futures and the Lure of Cyberculture,” in Bell and
Kennedy, Cybercultures, 360–73, 360.
14 Ibid., 364.
15 Elmer-DeWitt, “Welcome,” 10.
16 Lévy, Intelligence, 65.
17 Ibid., 70.
18 The New Yorker 69.20 (Jul. 5, 1993), 61.
19 Elmer-DeWitt, “Welcome,” 9.
20 Wertheim, “The Medieval Return of Cyberspace,” 56.
21 Kandi Tayebi and Judy A. Johnson, “Feminism’s Final Frontier: Cyberspace,”
Academic Exchange (Winter 2004), 190–95, 191. See also Michelle M. Wright,
“Finding a Place in Cyberspace: Black Women, Technology, and Identity,” Frontiers
26.1 (2005), 48–59, for a discussion of African American users of the Internet.
22 Geert Lovink, “Talking Race and Cyberspace: An Interview with Lisa Nakamura,”
Frontiers 26.1 (2005), 60–65.
23 Allen, Intertextuality, 206.
24 Dery, Escape, 17.
184 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

25 Ibid., 17.
26 Graber, 34.
27 Dodge and Kitchin, Atlas, 5.
28 Kevin Robins, “Cyberspace and the World we Live in,” in Bell and Kennedy,
Cybercultures, 77–95, 77.
29 Ibid., 80.
30 Ibid., 92.
31 Dodge and Kitchin, Mapping, 42.
32 Dery, Escape, 39.
33 Vivian Sobchack, “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get out of this
Century Alive,” in Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace, 205–14, 213.
34 Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, 78.
35 Ibid., 78. It is interesting to note that the language used below to describe such a class is
highly technical and, ironically, geared to quite a sophisticated, elite readership. Kroker
and Weinstein’s readers are definitely not hungry, illiterate, citizens of third-world
countries.
36 Virilio, Desert Screen, 22.
37 Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, 4, 6.
38 Ibid., 6. An interesting parallel can be found in Marshall Berman’s classic All that is
Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1999), where Robert
Moses’ “expressway world” is pitted against Jane Jacobs’ “shout in the street” in the
struggle for New York; the current struggle for the control or the liberation of
cyberspace is also opposing the information highway to the nomadic spaces.
39 Don Mitchell, “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and
Democracy,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1 (Mar. 1995),
108–33, 122–23.
40 McKenzie Wark, “The Virtual Sensoria: Notes on New Media Art,” Sixth International
Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Montreal, Canada (Sep. 18–22, 1995).
41 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, October 59 (Winter 1992), 3–7.
42 Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, 63–64.
43 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, “Digital Ideology: E-Theory (1),” Ctheory (Sep. 15,
1999), online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=116, as article a073 [Last
accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
44 David Lyon, “Surveillance in Cyberspace: The Internet, Personal Data, and Social
Control,” Queen’s Quarterly 109.3 (Fall 2002) 345–56, 349. John Perry Barlow’s article
“Decrypting the Puzzle Palace,” Communications of the ACM 35.7 (Jul. 1992), 25–31,
describes the NSA’s role in using cyberspace for surveillance and intelligence.
45 Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, 14.
46 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 29.
47 Ibid., 29–30.
48 Ibid., 30.
49 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z., 110.
 Mapping Socio-Cultural Cyberspace 185

50 Ibid., 63.
51 Bruce Sterling, “A Short History of the Internet,” originally published as "Internet," in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Feb. 1993), later available online at
http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html [Last accessed Oct. 12, 2006].
52 Bey, T.A.Z., 106–14.
53 Auzanneau and Avril, Dictionnaire latin, 334.
54 Ibid., 666.
55 Bey, T.A.Z., 96.
56 Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 15–16.
57 Hakim Bey, Millennium (New York and Dublin: Autonomedia and Garden of Delight,
1996), 30.
58 George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 443. My italics.
59 De Certeau, Practice, 130.
60 Bey, T.A.Z., 99–100. It is interesting to note how Bey rejects his previous enthusiastic
espousal of the Internet in his preface to the second edition of T.A.Z. in 2003: “I think
perhaps the least useful part of the book [T.A.Z.] is its section on the Internet. I
envisioned the Net as an adjunct to the TAZ, a technology in service to the TAZ, a
means of potentiating its emergence. I proposed the term ‘Web’ for this function of the
Net. What a joke. Time magazine identified me as a cyber-guru and ‘explained’ that the
TAZ exists in cyberspace. ‘Web’ became the official term for the
commercial/surveilliance [sic] function of the Net, and by 1995 it had succeeded in
burying the anarchic potential of the Net (if any really existed) under a mass of
advertizing and dot-com scams. What’s left of the Left now seems to inhabit a
ghost-world where a few thousand ‘hits’ pass for political action and ‘virtual
community’ takes the place of human presence. The Web has become a perfect mirror of
Global Capital: borderless, triumphalist, evanescent, aesthetically bankrupt,
monocultural, violent—a force for atomization and isolation, for the disappearance of
knowledge, of sexuality, and of all the subtle senses,” xi. Previously, in Arthur and
Marilouise Kroker’s Digital Delirium, Bey was already beginning to have doubts as to
the future of cyberspace. Venting his frustration in a piece called “Notes for
CTHEORY” (152–55) he wrote: “No matter how much more exploitation of conceptual
space occurs, the structure of the space is now defined for all practical purposes. Hasn’t
something similar happened with the Internet?” (152).
61 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 289.
62 Michel de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 213–14.
63 Anonymous, Hieroglyphica (New York: Autonomedia, 2002). Although “anonymous,”
the booklet is believed to be the work of Hakim Bey.
64 Bey, T.A.Z., 107.
65 Barlow, “Declaration,” 18–19.
66 Bey, T.A.Z., 95–96. See also Zhou Yongming, “Living on the Cyber Border: Minjian
Political Writers in Chinese Cyberspace,” Current Anthropology 46.5 (Dec. 2005),
779–803, on the political activities of minjian online writers, and Birgit Bräuchler,
“Islamic Radicalism Online: The Moluccan Mission of the Laskar Jihad in Cyberspace,”
186 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

The Australian Journal of Anthropology 15.3 (2004), 267–85, which explores the ways
in which radical Muslim Indonesian groups acquire and develop an extended visibility
and reach through cyberspace.
67 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 434.
68 Ibid., 437.
69 Ibid., 471–72.
70 Ibid., 472.
71 Bey, T.A.Z., 105.
72 Bey, T.A.Z., 107–8.
73 Bey, T.A.Z., 111.
74 Lévy, Intelligence, 10.
75 Kroker and Weinstein, Data Trash, 1.
76 Bey, T.A.Z., 101.
77 Bey, T.A.Z., 101.
C O N C L U S I O N

What Lies Ahead

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and
enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was
Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a
butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be
some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly!
The Book of Chuang Tzu1

It was the Cat who persuaded me to write down these memories. I don’t know what to
call it yet…I might just call it after my name, or after what I am. What I have become.
Maybe you’re reading it now. Or maybe you’re playing the feather. Or maybe you’re
in the feather, thinking that you’re reading the novel, with no way of knowing . . . No
matter. The game is over soon. Just one more moment . . . And then it’s gone.
Jeff Noon, Vurt2

W
e have entered into a new age where, like in the story by Zhuang Zi,
reality and virtuality are so similar, and so overwhelmingly real to
our senses, that we hesitate to decide which is anterior, i.e., more
genuine than the other; Zhuang Zi’s impatience, more than two thousand years
ago, is not only understandable but is also a pressing problem today: there
must be some way to differentiate between the two worlds. Yet what has
survived from this wonderful story is not the tomes of Daoist wisdom
produced as much as the seduction created by the tantalizing hint that we
already are on the side of the simulation. Too long have we been occupied by
our own reflection to realize that the mirror’s function is not only to present
another image of ourselves but also to problematize the very existential nature
of this image. We have become, in Derrida’s words, so “attentive, fascinated,
glued to what it is that presents itself,” that “we are not able to see its real
presence which itself is not present [does not introduce itself, ‘ne se présente
pas’].”3
188 Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth

Our tentative journey in cybermapping, from myth to écriture to the vir-

tual city and its denizens, has allowed us to realize, first, that not all spaces are
similarly or equally mappable. The lesson is a humbling one, and rejoins,
again through the different paths of contemporary critical theory, the great
mystical traditions of unnameability and silence. What this mapping demands
is a sideways glance, one that does not look directly but, paradoxically, sees
more things which are invisible to a frontal gaze, and sees them more clearly
as well.
Second, our journey has led us to a tragic—in the Greek sense of the
word—realization of our own physical and social limitations. The nature of a
new space where the old myths of humanity can be experienced and enacted
again and where the fiat of an instantaneously performative writing act can be
practiced anytime has made our situation all the more tragic because it has
allowed us to glimpse a dimension where the equivalent limitations in eve-
ryday life can be, for the first time, surpassed.
But should they be surpassed?
Homo Sapiens Cyberneticus, for all the hype surrounding the new chal-
lenges facing us today, may just be a gimmick born out of technological ad-
vances so fast that they bring with them an illusion of power we are loathe to
forsake. Although the real world can be a daunting place to live in, yet it is the
only one we human beings were created for, and we cannot remain for long
glued to a cyberspace which denies us a panoramic view of the sometimes dire
social realities surrounding us. Are world conflict, world hunger, the atrocities
of war, only simulations, or are there indeed real people with real pain suf-
fering out there?
But then, are we to dismiss the whole of cyberspace and relegate it to a
by-product of the new technologies as a toy which served its mechanical
purpose and nothing more? Or should we rather give it its due as a necessary
step in our on-going evolutionary history, a window into another cognitive and
interpretational dimension from which, as if from a vantage point, we are able
to see what we call the “real world” with different eyes? Is the distancing thus
offered a terribly catastrophic event which threatens the whole species, or is it
a salutary jump out of the bound, saturated, overworked, and overserious self?
If writing, that best means of expressing oneself, is given for all to use
without the traditional constraints, if the ability to voice one’s emotions and
ideas is given free rein, and if this language proves to be, by the same token,
the key that will open the rich mythical stores buried in humanity, shouldn’t
we at least acknowledge these obvious benefits and wisely weigh them against
the equally obvious shortcomings which have accompanied—and always
will—hand-in-hand, all technological advances?
 What Lies Ahead 189

Cyberspace is, beyond doubt, calling us, en masse, and offering its for-
ever-changing vistas for us to explore, to collectively write, and to enact our
fantasies and myths. If our mapping of cyberspace is in fact our creation of
new realms which we may one day inhabit, then what beckons to us from
behind the mirror, what begs to introduce itself, may not be, after all, just our
reflection, but that of a new species of humanity feverishly asking to be born.

N O T E S

1 The Book of Chuang Tzu (London: Penguin Arkana, 1996), 20.

2 Noon, Vurt, 341–42.
3 Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 381.