User InfoTechnoDemo (review)

Peter Lunenfeld presents a collection of essays originally written for the "User" column in the international magazine Artext. Despite the nonacademic and playful style of writing that makes room for interesting iterative word games such as metroretropsychometroretropsycho, androgynovideoandrogino, infotech-nodemoinfotechnodemo or narcosacrotheonarcosacrotheo, the book deals with fascinating topics around culture, design, technology and interdisciplinary issues in a time when

actors can be singers, singers strive to be artists, painters become film directors, digital artists say that they are scientists, scientists become entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs wake up one morning thinking they are politicians, and politicians, they have always been so protean (folksy at home, regal in the state house) that they are the poster children for the millennially ambitious (p. 73).

The essays cover a far-reaching number of topics, and very shrewdly, even if it is not a lengthy book. The chapter "User Permanent Present" talks about the preeminence of the instantaneous, in which one cannot see anything beyond the current system, film or interface. Lunenfeld explains the permanent present as a consequence of science fiction's "amateur futurism," which is more concerned with creating ever-freakier aliens than with opening the door to interesting futures. Interfaces stop contributing by creating phobic users who are willing to sacrifice metaphorical brilliance and elegance of interaction for the sake of comfort.

The chapter "Solitude Enhancement Machines" analyzes how technological developments are fostered and financed for big industries—as sometimes happens with pornography—and are valued for their revenues rather than for quality. The chapter "Teo-twawki" has some rather comical first-person commentaries that deal with techno-apocalyptic imagination around the year 2000, including hysteria and faith vampires—nonbelievers obsessed with belief—who were hoping to find nourishing psychosomatic stigmata but instead found themselves starved and disappointed while contemplating the savior on burrito wrappers. By that time, they were unable to foresee what was in store for them on 9/11.

The chapter "Forever" deals with statements from the anti-death league, including instructions on proper maintenance rituals, the right combinations of vitamins and antioxidants in order never to get sick, eugenics, and descriptions of 135th birthday parties in which the birthday celebrant is surrounded by the kids, grandkids, great-great grandkids and naturally her or his new lover. Chapters such as "25/8" and "Master List" highlight the complete victory of dromocracy, the monarchy of speed, guided by the principle of ultra-efficiency, in which the straightest path is the best and the human being is constantly trying to push past the limits of flesh into the realm of pure performance.

Some chapters have plenty of local cultural references. "Urine Nation" is somewhat difficult to grasp for someone born outside of Texas; I had problems seeing the utopian potential that could unify all languages and sign systems based almost exclusively on male transgressive practices. Other topics covered in the book are architecture, narratives, art, nanotechnology, videogames, globalization and the suspicion against the cosmopolitans, films, cultural obsession with pop stars, biological and genetic metaphors in relation to cybernetic and mechanical ones, and illusions of perceptions.

Integrating a good deal of self-criticism throughout the book, Lunenfeld mainly recognizes the potential dangers inherent in toxic activities such as doing theory in real time, which he compares with holding mercury in the fingers—not only for the mercurial liquid-solid properties of the media itself but also for the relevant concern of being re-absorbed by the bigger solid-liquid puddle of media's banality. He also acknowledges the risk of interpretation, as when he recognizes the possibility of being considered an elitist, sexist or even homophobe for emphatically disbelieving those who loudly profess their love for television, not as a guilty pleasure derived from a self-referential sphere of personal consumption built around celebrities, but as something analogous to bibliomania or cinemania. It does not mean that bibliophiles are less driven by consumption when they collect books without...