ABSTRACT
The machine has evolved in form and sensibility since Julien de Offray La Mettrie’s eighteenth-century radical manifesto L’Homme Machine 1 An effort to unify Cartesian dualism, La Mettrie’s portrait of man as a product of Newtonian force and leveraged efficiencies was as much a radical break with existing dogma as a precursor of viewpoints to come. Two hundred years later, William Gibson’s Neuromancer 2 extrapolated La Mettrie’s mechanistic worldview with a cyberpunk man-machine vision of chip augmentation and head-jacks-entrées into the “bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void.” 3 In the less foreboding world of commercial cable TV, 4 fulsome avatar hostesses with snappy commentary serve as cyber-friendly backdrop to the latest techno-topics, tips and trends.
