Tower of Power used to ask, "What is hip?" For a couple of years
Mondo 2000 was way hip, with its fabulously impenetrable
cyberdelic graphics adorning a melange of interviews, profiles and
pseudo-philosophical arcana. Now the virtual torch has passed to
Wired, the infoculture bible; a monthly magazine that, strangely,
seems to appear weekly. Like an aging hippie, Mondo doesn't really
appear in public much anymore (and when it does, nobody listens to
its increasingly embarrassing ramblings) but for a while Mondo and
Wired were battling it out side by side on the nation's newsstands;
two visions, two versions, of our undeniably electronic future.
Early on, Mondo's cover images made the transition from cybercelebs
like Todd Rundgren to heavily coifed models outfitted in outrageous
info-world paraphernalia. These Mondo babes were there to display
the gear, and to proclaim that the digital revolution would be
sexualized. Like Neuromancer's Molly (the primo-Mondo-babe) these
chicks were happy combinations of meat, chrome, plastic, leather and
LEDs. Eventually, Mondo started dressing up real players as well as
some wetware wanna-be's: Brenda Laurel, Diamanda Galas, Sandy
Stone, Constance Penley and others served as postmodern pinups (on
the cover or the glossy pages within) for a generation of thinkers
cynical of cynicism. The Mondo babes beckoned us to join their
ultra-chic party in plastic.
Then came the Wired boys. Wired posed as a more serious
alternative to Mondo, and from the first it emphasized journalism,
globalism and multi-culti-media. It reported the news all along the
electronic front, and quickly became the roadmap to the infobahn. No
less funky than Mondo, it nevertheless emphasized substance
beneath the glitz--unlike the bodiless exultations in the Mondo-verse
there WAS a there there. And the covers emphasized the do-ers that built
the datascape--the Bruce Sterlings and Alvin Tofflers and Bill Gateses and
William Gibsons. These cover girls were boys; even Sonic
the Hedgehog was pictured as Wired's "man" of the year. These were
serious visionaries, not academic also-rans and lipstick voguers. No
girls allowed, at least not front and centered.
So Wired is hunky-but-chic. Once you plow through the news from
home, abroad and the Internet you get to Street Cred--their what's
hot/what's not (or Wired/TIRED) section. OK, you turn to it first,
right? Me, too. Naked tastemongering lurches forward like the return
of the repressed (TIRED) or like an Xmas wish list from a bunch of
World Wide Webheads (Wired!). The irony is that Mondo babes and
Wired boys square off in their respective corners as if they
represented real differences, each the Other to each other. And in
fact, as my glib little descriptions suggest, there are some differences
in attitude, content and approach at work. But by gendering those
differences in the ways that they have, Mondo 2000 and Wired
simply take up some very predetermined positions to the
postmodern topography. Mondo babes are liquid metal shape-
shifters, morphing through a landscape of sensualist pleasures and
irrational realities. Meantime, their Wired brethren are Real Men--
professionals with jobs to do. They're rational, powerful, faster,
better and more knowledgeable than the rest. Wired boys--even the
hackers and pirates--manage the netscape; Mondo babes are lotus
eaters (BYTE readers are Lotus-eaters).
The problem is that under the guise of the new, some assuredly
premodern assumptions and divisions continue to inform and infect
the system. To continue to en-gender power is to essentialize both
gender and power. If Donna Haraway, in "A Cyborg Manifesto," called
for women to heed the call of the cyborg as a technologized escape
from entrenched cultural definitions, she did not mean that the
cyborg should become a fashion model, and so preserve those same
outmoded ideas. "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess," Haraway
said, but Mondo gives us cyborg-goddesses--they might think they're
doing the Haraway trip, but they're actually reversing the valence.
Everything is safely back in its "proper," premodern place. And over
at Wired, the boys are taking care of business as usual. Despite the
rhetoric of newness, Mondo and Wired protect and preserve the
status quo. Despite the radical potentialities of cyberspace, these
"alternative" perspectives remain in lockstep with the mainstream.
Not such a hip trip after all, then, but an unfortunate off-road detour
from the road to a terminal identity.
Scott Bukatman is assistant professor of media arts at the University
of New Mexico and author of "Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject
in Postmodern Science Fiction".
[email protected]
� 1995 Educom.