[Felix Hoenikker]

@, or, Being on Line
A Reply to Timothy Luke, "Digital Beings & Virtual Times"
1:2 | © 1997 Samira Kawash

· "So there I was on line, when this kid started pushing me from behind, practically knocked me down..." For a moment after overhearing this fragment of conversation, I was extremely disoriented, for if the speaker had been doing what I thought she had been doing, how could someone have pushed her or knocked her down? Then it hit me: not "on line," as in using the computer, but "on line" as in waiting in line. My confusion seems understandable, living as I do surrounded by exhortations, pleas, bribes and demands: to go on line, to bank on line, to chat and date on line, to shop on line, to work and play on line. As idiomatic expressions take on new meanings, some confusion seems inevitable. But the particular form of my confusion, the nature of mis-recognition that created a moment of incredulity, points to something more complex than simple shifts in language use. For the problem as I sought to make sense of the conversation I had overheard amounted to this: what sort of condition is it when one is on line? Is it condition that allows for such events as being pushed? My inability to reconcile being pushed with being on line suggests that at least initially my automatic assumption was that no, being on line, on the computer that is, is a non-physical activity that is incommensurable with such roughness. But as my confusion suggests, "on line" is a peculiar state, somewhere between a physical encounter and the evanescent ether of the electrical signal. And if this is the case, then what sort of place is on line, and what sort of entities--subjects or persons--might one find there?
· The possibility of such questions now, at this particular technological and historical juncture, seems both symptom and effect of the radical uncertainty and anticipation of our time. I am certainly not the first to be struck by these questions in their disorienting newness. It has become axiomatic in certain circles that new digital technologies are transformative and that we are collectively on the cusp of a new era defined by the digital in which all our old assumptions, all our old ways of thinking and doing, are about to be radically transformed. The question then seems to be, are we ready for the future?
· Timothy Luke, in the inaugural issue of Theory & Event, calls for a new political analysis, one capable of taking into account the new "digital beings" surrounding and pervading our lives.1 Luke suggests that the digital revolution is creating new forms of subjectivity and new forms of being and therefore demands a reconsideration of ethics, politics, and community. Luke thus brings a welcome sense of political urgency to a debate about the cyber-future that continues to be overwhelmingly dominated by the WIRED magazine school of smug libertarianism, personified in Luke's essay by the WIRED editor and guru Nicholas Negroponte. Luke seeks to take on the "big questions" raised by the impending digital era. Where Negroponte shamelessly and simplistically "tout[s] the exciting new world of 'being digital' as it is being invented in his digitizing workshops [at MIT's Media Lab],"2 Luke's aim is to "speculatively reconsider some vital questions about personal agency and social structure in the cyberspaces generated by telematic systems."3
· Thus, while Luke is sharply critical of Negroponte's "glibness," he shares with Negroponte a vision of this "exciting new world," a digitally revolutionized world that is rapidly taking on a life of its own independent of the intentions and designs of its inventors. It is difficult to resist being swept up in the millennial spirit shared by Luke and Negroponte, a sense of something absolutely new on the horizon. But I remain skeptical of the celebration of newness; for while I too am seduced by the geometrically expanding possibilities unfolding before me each time I boot up, I am also struck by the tenacious persistence of the kind of "old-fashioned" thinking that the so-called digital revolution claims to abolish. I am intrigued by a persistent gap between on the one hand, the increasingly popular prognostications of radical transformation offered with more (Luke) or less (Negroponte) critical self-reflection, and on the other, the way new technologies are incorporated into already-existing practices as well as theories. It is perhaps also useful to keep in mind that the digital revolution is not a necessary precondition to recognizing the inadequacy of traditional Western notions of the subject, or ethics, or community. To the best of my knowledge neither Marx, Freud, nor Nietzsche ever surfed the Web or engaged in cyber-sex.
· The overwhelming sense of the new, of the speed with which the digital revolution is overtaking us, has led far too often to critical paralysis, either in the dooms-day hand wringing mode, or in the glib celebratory mode that Luke so astutely criticizes. But while Luke insists that celebration be tempered with a more rigorous consideration of consequences and outcomes, Luke himself falls prey to the tendency to defer to the inevitable future as both unknowable measure and inevitable end of the overwhelming transformations being wrought in the present. Although he insists on a more complex understanding of "digital beings" than that offered by Negroponte, Luke remains trapped between the imperative to comprehend the implications of this revolution and the vertiginous experience of being caught up in something beyond comprehension. Thus, the task of reimagining ethics and community becomes a concatenating sequence of increasingly rhetorical questions. For example, Luke wonders about the ethics of "netizenship":
Is being on-line, then, as a virtual persona always an authentic moral activity by a netizen in terms of personal responsibility or is it, in fact, only a lark inside of inauthentic amoral playspaces where anything hyperreal goes? But, if anything virtually does go, from assault, murder, rape, or pornography to libel, sedition, heresy or fraud, then what laws must be upheld, when, by whom, and how? Are hyperreal estate web sites like real estate property sites in the material world? Do their owners and operators have similar property rights, trespass protection, security expectations, economic freedom? In turn, should the netizen communities in cyber-nations expect some measure of cyber-sovereignty to hold, permitting them to direct network contractors to meet certain aesthetic requirements, extend basic access rights, respect personal privacy, or pay tax rates to cultivate some new sort of info-civilization at these shared hyperreal domains of info-cities?4
· These are truly interesting and provocative questions. But what would we need to do in order to begin thinking about such questions? What will determine the ways in which these questions are resolved? What are the possibilities? What is at stake? Although Luke takes Negroponte to task for his failure to address seriously such questions, Luke too seems to balk at the specter of the looming future. Never mind shaping or seeking to affect the present; even understanding the present is abandoned to the future, as Luke concludes with a fantasy of some "future historical preservationists or data miners [who] will unpack the hard drives of old PCs to chronicle the doings of digital beings as telecommuting, cybersexed, hyperreal-estated lifeforms."5 For Luke the problem of the present is that what is happening is in an important sense beyond us, beyond our normal scope of comprehension: "the digital revolution also is revolutionizing anthropocentric forms of being and time, leading ultimately to new transhumanistic or cybertopian amalgams far beyond our physiocentric reasoning."6
· But I wonder if this revolution is really as new and unprecedented as it is made to appear. Luke suggests that it is digital being that will "revolutionize anthropocentric forms of being and time"; but did such anthropocentric forms ever exist anywhere but in the realm of the imaginary? And hasn't this anthropocentric imaginary come under scrutiny before? Moreover, is the apparent newness of "transhumanistic or cybertopian amalgams" truly a matter of something new appearing, or is it perhaps rather a sign of the inadequacy of "physiocentric reasoning" from the start? If we bracket the techno-jargon, it would appear that Luke is describing the epistemological force of the digital revolution as a continuation of the already century-old critique or deconstruction of "man" and "modernity"; this is familiar terrain, albeit with new gadgetry. But Luke's failure to recognize that the questions posed by "digital being" are already implicit in the ways we commonly think about non-digital being projects the problems of ethics and community into cyberspace in such a way as to imply that those issues have been more or less settled here on the ground. That we need a new ethics for a new kind of being ("digital being") suggests that the old ethics were just fine for our old kind of being. Thus, the kinds of questions Luke can ask of digital beings rely on very troublesome assumptions about their non-digital predecessors: "Do digital subjects inhabit personal spheres that conform to such ordinary notions of privacy? In the realm of digital being, what is harmed and how is it harmed?"7 That these questions appear as questions specific to digital being assumes that "digitality" is what makes them questions. This begs the question of how we might understand harm, privacy, personal, subject, and so on as difficult, already conflictual categories. Thus, I am inclined to be suspicious of this revolution, whose rhetorical force is to direct attention away from the persistence of such questions as well as the conflicts and asymmetries that they mark.
· For one who is as wired as one can be on an academic salary, to question the absolute rupture marked by the dawn of the digital age risks apostasy--don't I believe in the newness, the gee-whiz gizmo-ness, the happening-so-fast-the-world-is-changing-before-my-eyes-ness, of technology? Well, yes and no. Of course I believe; new technologies have materially transformed my life, who I can be, what I can do and how I do it. I do not doubt that this is the most significant event of my lifetime.8 But I also think technology is too easily fetishized as having a life, a will, an end, and a meaning all its own, independent of anything we might think or say or do. Technology is not only the arrangement of silicone chips and data streams; technology is also a system of signs and meanings. And the ways that new technologies might transform the possibilities of being and community, or not, are inseparable from the modes of signification that the new technology both forms and takes form in. That is, we cannot assume in advance that we know what any new technology will mean or what it will do. Its meanings and effects are necessarily emergent, interacting within a context that already exists and out of which those meanings and effects must be formed. In investigating the metaphorics of being "on line" and the force and signification of the technological sign @ I hope to suggest the necessarily contextual and historical interplay between the tenacious persistence of familiar meanings and relations and the potentially disruptive forces unleashed by new technological effects which can only be poorly metaphorized by familiar representations.
· Perhaps it is best to begin without assuming too much about cyberspace and digital beings. Rather than the fantastical imaginings of future cyber-cities and netizens, we can start by thinking from more common and commonplace encounters with telematic technologies. Where am I when I am on line? The very expression seems to suggest a place, on line, on some line. But unlike the movie line or the bus line or the police line up, the line in question is not a place one can be. Rather, "on line" is a metaphor denoting a complex network of electrical signals that translate inputs to my keyboard into computer operations in some remote elsewhere. "On line" is thus less a place than it is a mechanism of translation or transportation. Nevertheless, the spatial metaphor implicit in the phrase "to be on line" provides a powerful imaginative impulse, one that forms the basis for a metaphorical mapping of that non-place sometimes called "cyberspace." "On line" is the non-localizable connection between two sites, an unstable and imperceptible link that momentarily bridges the distance between one set of silicon chips and another. Thus, "on line" fits extremely uneasily into the logic of place that is the basis of its metaphorical framework. On line is an event without location, or without the localizability that would allow us to speak of a place. This might seem a fine point to insist on, insofar as the metaphorics of place neatly sutures over this problem. That is, in everyday discourse one need not be concerned with the spatial status of "on line" since the metaphor that makes this expression into a physical location obscures the very problem of location that "on line" points to. But what of this suturing; what work does it do and what, besides the complexities of electronic transmission, does it cover over?
· To say that I am "on line" seems to suggest that I am in that in-between of the connection or the transmission. The most common understanding of this relation is to make the in-between into a place where one such as myself could be. That is, because I am there, it must be a place that is localized. But this reading cannot be isolated from its more troubling inverse, whereby the in-between of connection remains non-localizable, and the I then becomes something that is no longer locatable or localizable. This reading of "I am on line" suspends place and launches the I into some non-place, thereby transforming what that I might be. In our everyday common sense, we expect a correspondence between persons and locations, a more or less one to one mapping that insures the uniqueness and coherence of each person by allowing for the mapping of that person on to a series of coordinates: name, address, social security number. What happens to this common sense correspondence that simultaneously insures the coherence of places and the coherence of persons when the mapping of person to place occurs "on line"?
· These are the questions that crystallize in the sign @, in the multiple uses and readings it is subject to as it becomes one symbol for the technologies of the information age. When @ is pronounced, it sounds like the preposition "at"--but in important ways, @ functions as an operator that is not at all prepositional. In its proper computer use, @ signals an electronic address. If, as I will argue, @ functions as a kind of address that is not a location, then @ raises questions about these two terms location and address, about address as location and address as addressability. Thinking about the ways in which @ is implicitly or explicitly understood to denote particular forms of spatial relations promises to open a window onto broader questions of how spatial metaphors construct and constrain the possibilities for communication and community in an age of instantaneous computer access. Such questions seem important if we are to imagine an active role in shaping or responding to the ways digitalization will affect our future.
· @ signals something new, some kind of relation to place that is not like those we are familiar with. Thus, @ is not at, not a simple familiar preposition. But there is a tendency, evident in both everyday use and in corporate and media appropriations of the sign, to make @ into at: to pronounce the sign as the preposition but also to make the sign mean the preposition. The ambivalence of @, both something familiar and something new, signals both the unimaginable possibilities of the "digital revolution" and the very real material, imaginative, or representational constraints in which any "revolution" unfolds. In what follows I want to consider the tendency to make @ into at and think about both the power of this "normalization" of an unfamiliar sign and what is lost or suppressed in this transformation. @ exceeds at, but this excess and whatever creative energy it might unleash is being lost as @ is appropriated and recuperated by the logic of place and person.
· Before they became as common and familiar as telephone numbers, electronic addresses were meticulously spelled out: "kawash-at sign-rci-period-rutgers-period-e-d-u." As the neophyte quickly learns, there is no tolerance for error in such matters; a misplaced dot or a mistyped character, and all mail is returned undeliverable. The peculiarity of the symbol character @, its specificity, and the necessity that it appear literally and not spelled out as "at," made it unpronounceable: "kawash@rci" was absolutely not equivalent to "kawash at rci." At some point, of course, this is no longer true: once one becomes familiar with the conventions, the literal spelling out of the address becomes unnecessary. One might argue that this is nothing more than the growth of computer literacy, surely a positive development. I would not disagree; it is much easier and more convenient to not have to spell out every piece of punctuation. But often, such familiarity normalizes the unfamiliar, making it unavailable for critical thought. Today @ is everywhere, marking TV programming time slots (Party of Five, Wednesday @ 9pm), radio stations (The Buzz @ 105.1 FM), lecture series (authors@mit), street addresses (Joe's Restaurant, Second Ave. @ 42nd Street), advertising copy ("Great Food & Drinks @ Great Prices"). Soon, we will not even notice it.
· The ubiquity of @ is a recent development, measured in weeks and months. While the possible uses of @ are rapidly expanding, however, the sign is still unfamiliar enough to retain a connection to its most recent origin in e-mail addresses. As used in electronic addresses, @ follows a particular syntax. The convention of e-mail addresses is given as follows: user- id@domain. The @ separates the unique element from the common element. In complex domains, such as rci.rutgers.edu, each element is progressively less specific, rci is a subset of rutgers is a subset of edu. Described in this way, @ is as much a logical operator marking the relation of unique element to set as it is a symbol for "at" referencing location in some more literal way. Thinking about @ as an operator rather than a locator is consistent with the usage of this symbol prior to its appropriation by computer programmers. Symbol dictionaries assign @ to the realm of commerce, where @ usually means "at" in the sense of "priced at," as in "30 barrels @ $40." This is not a prepositional relation; rather, it is a transformative operation combining the two terms into a third, unnamed term. That is, 30 barrels and $40 are mathematically related as the left side of an equation that points, not toward a relation of the elements on either side of the @, but toward something else, the $1,200 that will purchase 30 barrels @ $40. @ $40 is not a location that specifies where one might find 30 barrels, but rather an operation that transforms 30 barrels into $1,200.
· This transformational quality of @ is what is lost in the reading of at as a preposition. For the preposition at, OED's first definition emphasizes location: "the most general determination of simple localization in space expressing, strictly, the simple relation of a thing to a point of space which it touches; hence, usually determining a point or object with which a thing or attribute is practically in contact, and thus the place where it is." This is a classical Aristotelian determination of the relation between object and location as one of static contact, the place of the thing (Physics IV). Here, place is understood as a vessel or container, as that which holds, surrounds, and bounds the thing. Bodies or elements are viewed as distinct and separable from their places; a body may move from place to place, and the place will remain. @ read in the prepositional mode then becomes this neutral, static relation of simple contact. There are two important implications of this reading of location. First, the relation between thing and place is understood as contingent, neither thing nor place being determined or transformed by that relation. Thus, whatever exists on either side of the prepositional @ could exist separately, without or before such a relation. Second, the Aristotelian understanding of place as container for the thing denotes a unique relation, such that given a place, only one thing can occupy it, and given a thing, it can be in only one place. Thus, this idea of place is governed by what might be called a law of the proper: each thing in its proper place, one place proper to each thing.9 This is an arrangement that seems to assure order, predictability, and control. Such proper relations are assumed by the common sense understanding of location or address as unique and fixed. However, address is never so simple; when it comes to electronic addresses in particular, the assumption that @ names such a relation is the source of much confusion.
· At the moment, I am in flagrant violation of the law of the proper: I have three e-mail addresses (skawash@rci.rutgers.edu; kawash@fas-english.rutgers.edu; sakawash@wwonline-ny.com). This, I have discovered, is extremely disturbing to my potential electronic correspondents. Which one, they want to know, is my real address? A certain confusion of address, and addressability, seems to be at the root of this problem. To address me, to communicate with me, use any address; all arrive indifferently, forwarded instantly and invisibly to the one mail box I check regularly. Which box is that? That must be my real address, my proper place, the place I really am. Here, the action of addressing slips into the noun of address, of location and coordinates. If my e-mail is to reach me, one assumes it must go to my address, that is, to the place in which I am located. But e-mail is no place, or it is anyplace I want it to be. According to the Aristotelian logic of place suggested above, I cannot be at rci, at wwonline, and at fas all simultaneously. If these places are distinct, then I, being one person, must properly be located only in one of them; one of these must be the correct address, and the others must be not-correct. But in fact I am @rci, @wwonline, and @fas, all at the same time, all indifferently. To take @ seriously is to be forced to abandon the prepositional logic of place implied by at, since @ is radically disjoined from any location that "I" am in. This is not simply to say that place in "cyberspace" is different from place in ordinary space. Rather, I am suggesting that @ interrupts the very logic of place (that it should be static, fixed, and non-contingent) and that this interruption is in no way confined to the elsewhere of cyberspace. As a sign of electronic "place" that calls place into question, @ marks not only the difference of digital space from ordinary space, but equally the possibility that ordinary space may not be what we commonly take it for.
· It is not simply place or location that is at stake in @. If we suspend our Aristotelian presuppositions, @ may suggest an alternative relation of address in which not only place, but also the body or subject that is assumed to correlate with place, come into question. Thus, one might ask not only: where am I when I am skawash@rci; but equally: who am I when I am skawash@rci. My street address appears as an empty box (an empty mail box, and my apartment too repeats that empty box). Tenants move in and out, mail arrives addressed to me, to former tenants, to "occupant," more or less indifferently. Such a description is based on the idea of address or place as empty container. This address is part of the fictioning of the subject, fixing my location on a spatial grid that maps each name to a place, a jurisdiction, a route. Having an address is having a place, a physical home, as well as a social place and a place within the governmental orders of the state. The bureaucratic controls that make me a state subject (the IRS, the phone company, the postal system) both rely on and insist on address as the mode of addressability. Thus, the catch-22 experienced by homeless people, who are unable to receive state benefits without an address and unable to acquire an address without the aid of state benefits. In the eyes of the governing order, each one must follow the law of the proper: each person in a place, each place for a person. On the other hand, while an e-mail address must be unique, the e-mail system of address cannot easily be made to serve the regulatory or normalizing functions associated with state or governmental control. One individual may have several addresses; addresses may be for functions rather than individuals (such as help@domain); addresses may be shared by more than one person; addresses may be fictive or misleading (how about god@heaven.gov, elvis@graceland.com, santa@north_pole.org); addresses may redirect mail elsewhere without the sender ever knowing; user-ids may be fanciful, express alter-egos, or be random strings. While the law of the proper seems to establish and ensure a stable and fixed relation between things and places, or between persons and posts, this relation is troubled when the e-mail address is not a post and the user-id is not a person.
· Of course, what I am calling the law of the proper is not really a law; it is not written down anywhere, there are no police to enforce it. It is rather a rule or principle that explains the regularity with which we commonly understand and interpret what it means to have a place or an address. But this rule is like a law in so far as, when it is violated, either the violator must be made to conform to the law or the law must be abolished. The e-mail address violates the law of the proper by evading the opposition and the apparent fixity of person and post. What are the possible consequences of such a violation? Either we must insist on the sanctity and certainty of the law by finding a way to make the e-mail address commensurable with the proper relation between thing and place, or we must entertain the possibility that the law of the proper is not a law after all. Having arrived at this juncture, it is clear that much more is at stake in @ that the status of a metaphor. What is at stake is not only our understanding of place and person, but the very possibility, necessity, and naturalness of that relation between place and person that we commonly take to be the very foundation of the social order: property.10 For what is the ideal of property in modern liberal society, if not the social and legal institution of a proper relation between I and place. That is, the right to property, a right liberal society understands as natural or god-given, can only appear as such with the support of the law of the proper. Without the ideological support of the law of the proper, there is no more property right, no more certain association of ownership or extension that would allow me an uncontestable claim to this collection of objects or that patch of real estate. Without the law of the proper, property is nothing but possession by force.
· The question of the status of property right in electronic storage and communication is a familiar one.11 Jurists, theorists and politicians are struggling to understand the implications of the new electronic media for intellectual property right and copyright and to determine favorable rules of control. The assumption of most commentators tends to be that property right can and will eventually be established in much the same manner as it currently holds for more material and definable media; it is only a matter of time, the time to fully understand the new technologies. But as the troubling status of @ suggests, property right may not be so easily maintained. Because it cannot be made to correspond to a stable mapping of persons and places, @ threatens a violation of the proper and calls into question the legitimacy of property right. Perhaps this is the danger of @, one of the reasons that @ is so quickly and definitively being transformed in to at. If @ can be made to mean nothing more than at, as location or preposition, then property and the law of the proper are less likely to come under scrutiny.
· I do not mean to suggest that the reduction of @ to at is deliberate or calculated. Rather, I want to suggest that more is going on in the transformation of the unpronounceable sign @ into the syntactically legible signifier at than simply force of habit or familiarization. The popular press, and in particular corporate advertising, is playing an active role in this transformation by seeking to capitalize on the very ambiguities of @ that I have been suggesting. In popular contexts, @ is increasingly used to signal high technology while facilitating the play between symbol and syntactical meaning: @ means both "high tech" and "the preposition at." Thus, for example, the home computing section of a popular PC magazine is called "@home." By deliberately using @ to mean at, such appropriations work to tame the strangeness of @, restoring this sign to its "meaningful" position as a preposition. Significantly, this simultaneously symbolic and syntactical use of @ is only possible if @ is removed from its original domain, that of e-mail addresses. Thus, the possible meanings of @ are fixed between these two terms: high-tech symbol and preposition. @'s excess, its working as a transformational operator of non-localizable address, disappears. The emerging popular and especially commercial uses of @ thus suppress the non-prepositional reading of an address such as skawash@rci, thereby forestalling the dangerous dissolution of proper persons and places. One particularly telling example is AMD's (Advanced Micro Devices Inc.) new advertising campaign titled "AMD@work."
· According to an AMD corporate press release, this campaign, launched in October 1996, was "created to raise awareness of the company and reinforce AMD's position as a major worldwide supplier of microchips for the converging computation and communications markets."12 In other words, these ads are meant less to sell product than to create a corporate image, one which will result, one assumes, in the eventual increase in product sales. The image being created and sold in these ads is not simply that AMD technology is at work in computers, fax machines, or the Internet, but more precisely the image of "AMD@work," where the @ operates as a graphical link between technology itself (AMD's chips) and what the technology can do (AMD at work). Indeed, one might say the @ is the trace of what has disappeared into the interior of the machine, for what we see in these TV spots is not microchips, but rather images of users of telephones or computers, described by the company as "people in everyday situations becoming more productive by using technology."13 Superimposed over these images are captions, each of which employs the @: "video conference@10:30," "dating@internet speed," "imaginations@play." Work, communication, recreation, and play are technologized not only because they use technology but because the very language of the technological is appropriated to name and describe these otherwise mundane activities. This syntactical reappropriation of @ makes @ "meaningful" by recuperating the sign as preposition in an old idiom while visually signaling the projection of this old idiom into the new technological future. The effect is to assure the continuity of our old ways of meaning and communicating despite the enormous transformations being wrought in communications technologies: @ may look new, but its meanings are reassuringly familiar: "nap@noon," "dinner@your place...or mine?"
· Six television spots were prepared for this campaign; two of these are essentially the same, one being a longer version of the other. We might take this particular spot, titled "Mt. Rainier," as having a certain signal importance in relation to the campaign more generally. It is in this ad, repeated for emphasis, that the full force of @ as preposition comes to bear. The ad begins with "mt.rainier@dawn," mountain climbers making their way up a sheer cliff. The long version cuts to "rescue@hand" and then "climbers@risk," as we see para-military scenes of helicopter readiness and helmeted rescue workers preparing to go in after these intrepid adventurers. "fracture@pelvis" prepares us for the worst; but fortunately, AMD is on the scene: the rescuers are seen making use of a hand-held satellite location device, captioned as "AMD@work" and we hear in the background "we have located the party..." A voice-over concludes: "We make the chips that help make it possible to know within just a few feet exactly where you are, anywhere on earth. AMD, at work in your life." Although it is the actions of the rescue workers that save the hapless climber, technology is the true hero of this drama: technology itself is seen coming to the rescue. In the mythical frame constructed by this ad, @ signals the perfect and complete technologization of place, a newly created possibility of global positioning in an objective coordinate system that removes all subjective measures and all possibilities of error.14 In the form of the global positioning device, technology rescues the climber--and by extension, humanity--because it has mastered place, because it has transformed place into absolute coordinate. Thus, @ references both the micro-chip technology of the locating device and the prepositional logic of the locator "at," thereby symbolizing and standing in for the teleological end to the technological narrative of mastery of space and time. The Aristotelian correspondence of body to place is more absolute, more irrefutable than ever. Perhaps we might also read the narrative of this ad as an allegory for the modern condition. Humanity, like the climber, is frail, certain to fall and to fail. Technology rescues humanity from its own weakness, promising salvation as the remedy to the fall. And in turn, @ has become not simply a preposition but the very essence of location. What better way to serve the law of the proper? And what better way to assure the profitability of AMD in this new geography, since it is only AMD--the source of this redemptive technology--who can tell us where we are.
· The issue of corporate control and profitability is rapidly becoming the primary concern in another area of accelerating technological change: the emergence of the World Wide Web as a medium of information, entertainment, and advertising. Millions of dollars are being poured into software and site development but so far there has been little revenue to show for it. Grandiose plans are being drastically scaled back as developers and investors realize that profitability hinges on transforming this electronic network into some form of property that will generate revenue. No one as of yet has the definitive answer to this problem. But already we can observe the Aristotelian logic of place and property insinuating itself into the complex non-spatial geography of the Web. The metaphor for browsing on the Web has shifted from surfing, suggesting a boundless fluidity of movement, to visiting (as in "visit us on the Web"), suggesting transportation to a fixed and static location. If we take this new metaphor of visiting literally, it would appear that the Web is rapidly transforming from a sea of possibilities to a constellation of destinations.
· In the early days (c. 1994), prior to commercialization and widespread use, the Web was largely made up of individually produced and maintained "home pages" providing links to others' "home pages." In its non-commercial, low-tech form, the "home page" was not a place to reside, but a point of departure. Such home pages are being quickly overshadowed by new, usually commercial, technologically complex "web sites" whose design is intended to keep you there for as long as possible. As the emphasis has shifted from movement to destination, the standard for home page or web site development has shifted from quality and number of links to quality of content. While anyone with a computer account can gather and post a menu of web addresses for others to peruse, "content" demands resources: not only server space, but more importantly writers, graphic artists, programmers and managers who work together to design a site. Successful content also requires constant maintenance and updating, to keep the content current and to provide incentives for browsers to visit and revisit the site. Thus, the Web has become increasingly the domain of entities--corporations, schools, governments--with the resources necessary to launch and maintain a high-quality site.
· As a geography of destinations, the web is increasingly dominated by two players: search engine/indexers, and corporate information/advertisers. Search engines generate addresses as places to go; corporate web site sponsors provide the entertainment once you get there. The possibility of collusion between the two has not gone unnoted; recently, it has been suggested that corporate sponsors might be able to buy improved results by paying search engines to produce certain sites as the result of searches more often. The point then is precisely not to provide links except internally; external links provide a seamless way of going somewhere else, while the success of the corporate message depends on each visitor remaining a captive audience (the official Disney site http://www.disney.com, for example, provides links to Disney resorts, Disney stores, and Disney movies, but not to other vacation sites, other amusement park sites, other animation or film sites). Such "dead end" sites reinscribe location as static and fixed, and place as discrete and separate. At the same time, content providers are devising barriers to access, from site-specific restrictions on access to registration and passwords to demands for payment. The result is a reintroduction of hierarchy and a subtle but steady erosion of the promise of infinite connectability and mobility that the Web initially seemed to create.
· Prophets of the transformative power of cyberspace imaginatively construct a dizzying array of new geographies and new relations that will become possible in a fully interfaced world. But the electronic architecture of cyberspace does not exist independent of the spatial configurations of everyday life.15 The current tendency, driven simultaneously by the power of common sense and the interest of property and profit, is to reduce the impossible non-place of the Internet into a mapping of ordinary places. But just as the built environment both reflects and in turn shapes and gives meaning to social space, so too will the emerging electronic environment take shape in a dialectical interaction with its social context. There is both a danger and a possibility here. The danger is that the thrill of newness blinds us to the persistence and power of our current ways of thinking. The possibility is that, by recognizing this danger, electronic citizens and builders will be better equipped to recognize and resist the current tendencies toward "normalization." Technology has always been seen as the source of salvation, whether from human frailty, from the errors and limitations of the past, or from history itself. And while we speak easily of technological revolutions, the long view suggests that new technologies are more often the means of strengthening existing power relations than of transforming them. "Cyberspace" is a indeed something new to be shaped, built, colonized, possessed, imagined; but whatever is new in it will not come from its technological essence, but from us, from being able to imagine and build something new.

Samira Kawash is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and is the author of Dislocating the Color Line (Stanford University Press, 1997). Her current research explores place and body in relation to the theoretical and cultural significance of security, home, and homelessness.