Hips'n'Hypes

If I were a computer, I wouldn’t expect from myself to be a digital Dorian Gray version of my humbly imperfect humanness. Neither would I expect from it to be a confirmation of my erroneousness and, thus, humanness. Unlike the imagined robotic variant of myself, I have embarrassing, illusory hopes—half-hidden even from myself—that one day there will be a laptop that does not freeze, a desktop that does not eat files, a printer that does not run out of ink. I shamefully cherish a desire that that day were now.

Most of the time I forget about such secret aspirations. And keep living. Partly as a human version of my digitalized mirror image. While in that hyperworld, I wonder if not to be hip is to be hyper now. In that democratic fairy tale called the web, one might experience a tremendously liberating effect of the communication freed from a sanctioning Father’s voice. Hence, one is free to chat, search, play, prey, loot, seduce, flirt, have sex, read, create…you name it…on the Internet.

In an age when faith in science evokes a gambling spirit, unbelievers sinfully seek answers on the net. Moreover, technology in a broader sense offers reasonable responses for numerous conundrums. jan jagodzinski, Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004): “Consumers are told which foods are likely to cause cancer, and then which foods can help prevent it! Given that nobody knows for sure, we invest more and more authority in technological solutions like Viagra, and mood drugs like Prozac to avoid responsibility” (182).

But then, one wonders why that authority recentering is necessary to comfort one’s doubtful soul. Isn’t the whole enterprise called hyperreality so appealing precisely because it frees one from a sense of authority? Eerie dialectic, indeed. Shifts nothing short of the creepiness of the land of shadow readers and robodogs in Jeff Noon’s novels. Inhabiting hyperspace bears semblance to wandering through the labyrinth of empty spaces in the mind deprived of dreams in Pollen (1995). The air we breathe, marbled with an invisible telecommunication jungle, is sometimes heavy. As if saturated with the particles of the dispersed vurt hayfever bomb.

Seemingly, terra digita is the land of opportunities that requires no strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to imagine effortless round the clock hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all ridiculous ethical burden, threatening to overshadow the light from the screen, at least one unpleasanty  remains: that one has the body. jan jagodzinski: “ Such technology has made all of us walking cyborgs. So where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (186).

In this cyperspace there are yet other cyberspaces. And they are this one, called vurtuality. Not unlike silence that is not one in Stewart Home’s novel Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010). Interaction stripped of speech. Communication relocated in the 1&0 linguistic sphere. Literature rendered abstractLiterature is dead. Time and space died yesterday. You eat dead food, you fuck dead men, even your words die in your mouth. Your sentences are rolled into the ebbing waters of modernism and then wash back like a bulimic’s forced vomiting. (10)

:Devouring  an undistinguishable amalgam of cultured milk, broth, coleslaw, sunny side up, cottage cheese, pizza, ketchup, lasagna, slow-rinsed lobster, wieners,  industrial amounts of garlic ice cream cake, baked catfish, chocolate mousse, tiramisu, wild salmon pancakes, gravy, matches, overcooked chair bottoms, porridge immemorial, scorched barn’s roof, walls of an ancient temple, frames of the pictures from the family album, curtains from the cellar, covered with thick layers of dust, rusty oven, stunned skeletons, massacred buses, busted clouds:

Literature is dead. Time and space died yesterday. You eat dead food, you fuck dead men, even your words die in your mouth. Your sentences are rolled into the ebbing waters of modernism and then wash back like a bulimic’s forced vomiting. (10)

:And then me darkish camera and then me sunrise and then me coffee/cigarette and then me voddy /vodichki/vodochka and then me supergreen food and then me oatmeal pie and then me seaweed crackers and then me mulled apple cider and then me crunchy white chocolate-spiked biscuits and then me then me cherry jelly and then me strawberry tart and then me coconut-vanilla ice cream and then me candy bar and then me milk chocolate and then me dried currants and then me vegetable garden soup and then me eggplant zucchini pancakes and then me Caesar salad and then me royal rice pudding and then me beefheart-stU and me peach yoghurt and then me and then me cheese cake!