Biography

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His writings on fringe culture, technology, and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, Mondo 2000, Virtual City, New Media, The Discovery Channel Online, and The Village Voice. He is the author of "Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century" (Grove Press, a critique of fringe computer culture).

http://www.well.com/user/markdery/ESCAPE/VELOCITY/links/

Quotes

Marc Dery
Wild Nature
Increasing intolerance for transgressions against the rule of biology

Superficially, the Net큦 embrace of the Unabomber has much to do with the black humor of the terminally ironic, but just beneath its brittle suface lies a gnawing anxiety at the superhuman speed of technological change and the deadening, disorienting white noise of the info-deluge. The Unabomber gives vent to simmering resentment toward the digerati who blithely advise the rest of us to keep our hands inside the moving vehicle at all times as the joystick our wired society into the coming millennium. Psycho killer though he is, he speaks for more reasonable minds, many of whom resent Alvin Toffler큦 inexorable Third Wave and AT&T큦 imperious "You Will" ads, whose peremptory tone forecloses any alternatives to a corporate brand future. In the taunting letter he wrote one of his victims, computer scientist David Gelernter, the Unabomber counters the corporate futurologist Stewart Brand큦 contention that elites drive civilisation [an article of faith among Wired editors and like-minded digerati] with the assertion that "there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world."