Cyberpunk Phuturism
There seems to be little place for the modernist linear-dynamics of progression and acceleration that I have traced in the dispersed and slackened forms of postmodernity. Whether futurists, capitalists, or communists, the avant-garde ‘passion for the real’,1 that tried to accelerate us to new human types, now seems quaint, kitsch, and politically dubious. And yet the dream and reality of speed machines is not merely the province of dubious nostalgia to be found in the remnants of petrolhead macho excess or in the fetishization of contemporary military technologies.
Acceleration, today, passes from the car, the quintessential technology of mass speed and modernity, to the computer. If the car, as Enda Duffy argues,2 was the lived experience of modernist time for many – a new mass aesthetic, when modernism tended to the hermetic – then the computer plays that role today. It is the computer, especially for those who work with them, that embodies the ‘speed-up’ of labor, as each new model becomes faster and faster (or that is the promise). The Internet provides the ‘one-click’ solution, computers speed-up and slim down, seemingly providing one of the last utopian remnants worthy of any commodity fetishism; the very frustration of a computer slowing down or freezing-up indexes our own internalized demand for speed. The computer also now vectors the alliance of speed and war, as the acceleration of computer processing permits the rapidity of ‘fireand-forget’ warfare, the drone attack, the militarization of civilian space, and, in US-military jargon, the ‘compression of the kill chain’.
So, the integration of the accelerating man-machine does not simply disappear, but mutates. Fredric Jameson comments:
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