Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Technodemons of the Digital Self 211When new technology is developed and employed, it gains symbolicand imaginative significance that goes beyond its purely utilitarian value.Lewis Mumford, a social critic of technology, noted in 1930 that the “vastmaterial displacements the machine has made in our physical environmentare perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions toour culture.” 26 Arnold Pacey agrees with this in his The Culture of Technology(1983): there is no neutral technology. We always attach symbolic meaningto instruments and techniques we use. 27 This basic idea can be taken furtherby emphasising the complex role of technology in identity productionin an increasingly technologically saturated, and – even more importantly –technologically mediated reality. Antiquity, for example, has left us the cautionarytale of Icarus flying too close to the sun, but also the description ofthe whole world as represented on Achilles’ shield. 28 Metallic weapons, architecturalmonuments, vehicles – these have been prominent as mirroringembodiments of our status, power and achievement (notable in such designationsas “the Bronze Age,” “the Machine Age,” or “the Rocket Age”). Thecurrent era, known as “the Age of Information,” or “the Computer Age” inpopular nomenclature, is no exception in the symbolic and also unconsciousmeanings that operate in our relationship to technology. Herman Bausingerhas studied the role technology has in people’s life and imagination in hisVolkskultur in der technischen Welt (1961), and seen a clear continuum withmagical thinking. Engines and railways were at first perceived through theearlier discourse of magical powers. Bausinger claims that the developmentof modern technology into ever-increasing degrees of complexity makes itharder to grasp and control; the need for magical thinking in relationship totechnology is growing, not diminishing. 29“MAKING A MAN”: FRANKENSTEIN’S DEMONIC MONSTER‘Devil,’ I exclaimed, ‘do you dare to approach me? […] Begone, vile insect!’[…]‘I expected this reception,’ said the dæmon. ‘All men hate the wretched;how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!’ 30A mystical quality is especially seen in relation to electricity, the power thatenergises most current technodemons. 31 It can be found already windingdom just as fully and really as a runaway slave might have in the pre-Civil War period”(respondent to a New Age questionnaire; Ross 1991, 15).26 Mumford, “The Drama of the Machines” (Scribner’s Magazine, August 1930; quotedin Mumford 1934/1963, xii).27 Pacey 1983, 92; also 1990, viii.28See Iliad, 18:478-608.29 Bausinger 1961/1990, 27.30 F, 99.31Different terrifying powers (even more openly connected with the exploration ofhybridity and heterogeneity) are granted through genetic engineering, which has evolvedto play a prominent role in such SF horrors as the Alien film series.