Crash USA


'Arthur Kroker Arthur Kroker

Cyber-America is the USA as an empire of technology, where the will to technique has been so deeply interiorized as the essence of American being that technology is no longer an object which we can hold outside ourselves, but has become the dominant sign of American identity. Crash USA as the dream residue of cold seduction. Anyway, what if the United States had already disappeared into its own hologram actually vanished, leaving only a photographic negative of its own history. An unreal America under the sign of virtual technology, and a real America which is the cybernetic order of the mediascape. A transistorized, then digitalized, world of flashing memory impulses which take up no space because they are empty quanta of memory elements. The cold chill of the screen with back-lit personalities: cyborg Puritans and Pentecostal capitalism. Here there are no politics and no society either, but only the suddenly concentrated and then dispersed flow of cybernetic pulses. A strange new world populated by chip personalities, where power mutates into information, where the mediascape seeks only its own moment of cancellation, and where the body itself is seduced by its metamorphosis into servomechanism. Not a violent world but cold and gleaming as chromium, and not a speeded up world either, but deeply inertial as everything moves past the speed of light to the ecstasy of the exterminismn of information. Virtual America, then, as the final fulfillment of the modernist European dream of technology; and Virtual Europe make the sign of 1992 as the last and best postmodern frontier of Crash USA.