xxvii. Poster links the contribution of the technologies of the virtual to their nonlocalization in physical space—that is, to the deterritorialization they accomplish, as well as their transitoriness:
If cyberspace is the occasion of a great spiritual renewal of the planet, have we not surpassed in some sense the historic forms of ethnic identity and begun to move toward some as yet unknown relation of individual to group? ... Linked to the continuously shifting global processes of textual, graphic, and aural formations, individuals in cyberspace cannot attach to objects in the fixed shapes of historic ethnicity." (169–170)
In my opinion, this (like the work of Pierre Lévy from which it draws) represents a massive overstatement of the impact of computer technologies on ethnicity which stems from the conflation of technology with archive. Rather, as I see it (and this is the burden of Piper's work), the archive forms the raw material which must be differentially actualized in a particular process of ethnicization. Rather than being (solely) the material support for the archive, technology facilitates this entire process.
xxviii. I borrow this term from Bernard Stiegler's brilliant analysis of Leroi-Gourhan in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, 134-179.
xxix I borrow this term "collective intelligence" from Pierre Levy. Collective Intelligence: An Anthropology of Cyberspace.
xxx. As the mechanism for articulating figures of ethnicity that reflect their "electronic constitution in virtual spaces" (Poster 164), digital technology does not simply furnish a new, nonphysical place for memory, as Poster suggests; on the contrary, it brokers a new phase in the ongoing coevolution of the human and technology in the technico-social-cultural differentiation, characteristic of the human species, that French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan names (in specific opposition to genetic differentiation) ethnic differentiation. On this view, ethnicity has always been technical, in the sense that it coincides with the possibility for passing on memory that is nongenetically programmed, that is external to the individual: ethnicity is, in a word, "epiphylogenetic," to use Stiegler's felicitous term.
xxxi. Piper, quotation from the "Background" section to "Tagging the Other," on the CD-ROM, "Relocating the Remains"; emphasis added.
xxxii. Indeed, it is hardly incidental that the originally envisioned CD-ROM project was to have been titled after this work. In answer to a question about the racial construction of cyberspace, Piper explains why:
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