BODIES AND CULTURE IN THE CYBERAGE

“There is no escape from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing
transcendent. These are simply the disguises which pander to man’s
projections of his own rear-view illusions; reproductions of the same desires
which have guided his dream of technological authority and now become
the collective nightmare of a soulless integration” (Plant, 60).

“From the viewpoint of human evolution, VR (virtual reality, GLR)
resembles the invention of fire”(Heim, 69).

“Running free in cybernetic spaces, proliferating and transmuting at
unpredictable velocities, autonomous digital entities operate at a further
remove from the gaze or touch of the human agent than any prior generation
of forms”(Clark, 130).

“By prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a
person’s lived experience in any strict sense. These are implanted
memories, and the unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones are
frequently accompanied by another disruption: of the human body, its flesh,
its subjective autonomy, its difference from both the animal and the
technological”(Landsberg, 175).

“VR is less a change of levels than a mutation of circuitry; a matter of
additive sensory-motor reloopings, compressing anthropohistorical
consensus reality into a menu option as it denaturalizes the brain”(Land
203).