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

Technodemons of the Digital Self 247Intelligence scientists: a perfect simulation of intelligence is intelligence. Butis a human being only intelligence? In its demonic complexity, Neuromancerunveils some contradictions and hidden anxieties motivating the contemporary“techno-Platonist” dreams of overstepping the human body into thesuperhuman realms of a postbiological era. 198 Digital eschatology has innertensions, it is a dream that can easily be read as a nightmare – underlined inGibson’s oeuvre by the way the godlike AI degenerates into a legion ofscheming Voodoo spirits. 199Erik Davis positions in his article the “digital demons” as ancestors ofthe old ambivalence concerning ideas of non-human powers; “Like theirspiritual counterparts, software demons can both serve and subjugate.” 200The demonic figures are, according to my analysis, always articulating someconflict and division in the self; Case is also the “case” of Neuromancer – anoccurrence of disease or disorder. He is deeply entangled in heterogeneitywith the other (in his case digital technology), and also morally ambivalentcharacter. The narrative gives this condition an uncanny form in Case’sdouble in the end. The digital demons, it seems, have their basis in the splitting,conflicting, and plural character of their digital selves.As a summary of my main observations in this chapter, I emphasise howtechnology has entered into our cultural perception of terrifying “otherness.”Not only do the technodemons replace the horns and wings ofbeastly devils with their uncanny prostheses, but the ambivalent fascinationwith the promise of “forbidden” knowledge is now associated with theirdigital domains, as well.The science fiction texts analysed here deal with the potential redefinitionof the self by means of technology, and employ ancient demonic imageryand mythical structures to articulate the ensuing liminal anxiety. Doingthis, they renew the demonic tradition and illustrate those many difficultiesand tensions that haunt the construction of selfhood in the(post)modern world.198 “Postbiological world” is one of the catchwords in Moravec’s Mind Children (1988,125 et passim.); it also pertains to the hubristic dreams of several fin-de-siècle thinkers(see Regis 1991, 144-76). – Sherry Turkle, who knows the MIT Artificial Intelligencecommunity intimately, writes: “Several present-day AI researchers at MIT grew up with afamily tradition that they are the descendants of Rabbi Loew, the creator of the Golem, ahumanlike figure made of clay into whom God’s name breathed life. These scientists includeGerald Sussman, Marvin Minsky, and Joel Moses. Joel Moses reports that a numberof other American scientists have considered themselves to be descendants of RabbiLoew, including John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.” (Turkle 1984, 270.)199See Neuromancer’s sequels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).The character of Angie is the next logical step in cyberspace’s evolution: she is cyberneticallyaltered to make it possible for the AIs to possess her, and thereby transgress theboundary the other way, from cyberspace into the physical universe. (See, e.g. Gibson1987, 254-55.)200Davis 1994, 46.