ABSTRACT
We live, we are constantly told, in an era of revolutionary changes. In contrast to the revolutions of earlier times, our contemporary revolutionary movements are technological and informational, economic and geographic. They promise Utopian futures and limitless freedoms, though the Utopian future they envisage is a technologically enveloping design for digital living, and the limitless freedom they project is the freedom of unleashed markets and a borderless world of friction-free capitalism. 1 Instead of liberation by social and nationalist movements, it is socio-machinic networks, collectives of corporations and computers, that will overthrow the oppressive ancient regime of the state and deliver us from taxes and territory. Instead of soil, we will have software. Instead of territorial being stuck in place, we will have telemetrical becoming on the world wide web. Our capitalist technoculture already proclaims this promise of transcendence: ‘Where do you want to go today?’ (Microsoft); ‘Solutions for a small planet’ (IBM); ‘Is this a great time or what?’ (MCI-World Com).
