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The sources of economic divergence lie in their divergent levels and types of economic specialization. Specialization is caused by many forces, including lucky breakthroughs in technology, particular powerful individuals, decisions of key firms at critical turning points, and lock-in effects from initial advantages. Most of these forces cannot be predicted or created. But they must find fertile ground, and this ground is prepared by the ability of the regional economy’s firms, leaders, and workers to create and absorb the organizational change that is key to new, high-wage industries. Los Angeles and San Francisco are a striking contrast in these abilities, with Los Angeles’s firms and leaders persistently returning to Old Economy organizational forms and San Francisco’s firms and leaders consistently inventing the organizational forms of the New Economy that become models for the American and world economies as a whole.

This chapter charts Scientology's cultural origins and affinities based on extensive data from participant observation, historical documents, questionnaire survey research, and other sources of quantitative information. It outlines part of the complex sociocultural history of Scientology in terms of four formative phenomena: (1) science fiction, (2) science adventurism, (3) ludic systems of honor, and (4) the cyberculture. Scientology is not an isolated phenomenon, but can be best understood in terms of these cultural origins and affinities.

This chapter argues that the Internet has not displaced tradition but instead given rise to digital forms of folklore. A user-oriented folk Web may be said to active, especially among youth, that is often framed to subvert or counter a corporate, official Internet. To analyze this folk Web, the chapter suggests a revision of the “analog” or relational definition of folklore in favour of a “digital” or analytical concept focusing on the variable repetition of practices. A comparison is given of folkloric transmission in analog and digital conduits with the lore of Budd Dwyer who committed suicide in 1987. In this example and folk speech evident in cyberculture, the implication is that the practice of the folk Web is comparable to latrinalia, which suggests a projection of naturalistic feces play in response to the anxiety of being controlled by a corporate, official technology.

This chapter aims to bring out some important distinctions between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and what has come to be known as cybertheory or cyberculture. It suggests that it is in their focus on material complexity in the context of their concept of the virtual that Deleuze and Guattari dramatically part ways with cybertheory. The chapter explains that the critical impetus of their theory of the virtual lies in what is called the intelligence of the virtual in thought, and contends that what cybertheory does in its bastardisation of the concept is, in fact, to depoliticise it.

This chapter begins by discussing the interconnection of transformations in cybernetics (automation), weaponry (the atomic bomb), and human rights (antiblack racism). It focuses on cyberculture that was coined by Alice Mary Hilton and then extended conceptually and politically by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. The Ad Hoc committee, in 1964, mailed a letter to Lyndon Johnson, explaining that an expansion of industrial automation might result in an alleviation of racism and war. With a luminous gang of signatories, this letter represents a mere precursor to contemporary accelerationist movements. Yet in its more immediate effects, not as an endorsement of accelerated automation but instead as a critique of technologized violence. The chapter ends with a theory of cyberculture, which reveals something beyond accelerated automation.

This chapter talks about distortion as a form of dismantling. It describes distortion as the historical and theoretical technique by which readers learn to approach political documents as if they were science fiction. When considered as a vehicle of distortion, literature is measured for its potential to alter exploitative conditions, like those of war, patriarchy, and racism. The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany insists that transformative change takes shape neither in utopian nor in dystopian visions of the future, but rather in efforts toward significant distortion of the present. This attitude, which is also a theory and practice of literature, is one way to describe the inheritance of cyberculture in the works of writers and activists who employed speculative language to repurpose the thought of Alice Mary Hilton and the Ad Hoc Committee. These writers and activists focused not on the machines that would unveil the myth of scarcity, but instead isolate the forms of human life and relation that would follow the act of unveiling.

Regarding the question of politics and play in Chinese Internet culture, this chapter re-examines particular effects of netizens’ carnival practices, as well as the complex interactions and contradictions among cyberculture, the official culture, and consumerism in China, by centering on a specific case of “Looking for Leehom” (zhao Lihong) and its related media discourses in 2012 and 2013. The case serves as an influential online carnival, starting from an online Boy’s Love fandom of those who participated in the fantasy matchmaking of two male celebrities. Further, it raises large questions about resistance, complicity, and negotiation among different cultures and media, particularly considering that online carnival was appropriated by a performance on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in 2013 and then commented on by newspapers and magazines. The chapter inspects how the pleasure of Boy’s Love fantasy has been transferred, censored, and re-enabled between cyberculture and offline societies. By rethinking Bakhtin’s interpretation of carnival, the chapter concludes by exploring the cultural and social implications of “Looking for Leehom” and the potential power of the netizens’ fantasy.

This chapter examines one of the newest modes of life-writing – personal internet blogs. Cyber-writing, in its increasing diversity of form, offers perhaps the most dynamic mode of autobiographical construction. Firstly, blogging culture has fundamentally altered the very nature of autobiographical narration in that it put authors and their readers in direct communication, often in real time. Secondly, no longer a retrospective prose, cyber autobiographical writing has become the voice of Arab youth. This chapter explores and theorizes the genre of autoblography using Ghada Abd al-Al’s I Want to Get Married as a case study.

This book concentrates on Latin American cyberculture, emphasising Latin American cyberliterature. It suggests that Latin American Internet users do not conceive of themselves as passive recipients of online information foisted upon them by the developed world but as active participants in cyberspace. This book shows that cyberspace can elaborate the new concepts of community and citizenship in a Latin American context. It also focuses on both the positive and negative aspects of new technologies for Latin American people and for cultural production in the region. An overview of the chapters included in this book is also offered.

This chapter analyses a key figure of cyberculture — the cyborg — and its manifestation in two recent Latin American films. It demonstrates how the cyborg functions as a microcosm of the cultural fusions and transfusions of the megalopolis in Guillermo del Toro's Cronos. It illustrates the socially disavowed presence of the dictatorship in Fernando Spiner's La sonámbula. It tries to show how the technological mise-en-scène is further complicated in these films. This chapter reveals that these films deploy their prototype cyborgs at the threshold of the failure of representation, on the spatio-temporal boundary where representational logic phases into and out of an order of simulation.

This chapter focuses on Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a leading figure in Latin American cyberculture whose Netart straddles both political and cultural expression. It describes how Gómez-Peña investigates the link between body, identity and nation space. It specifically analyses some of the games, identities and techniques used by him as an online performer. It shows that ‘The Chica-Iranian Project’ and ‘The Fourteen Commandments’ are areas on the website in which Gómez-Peña, and his collaborators, explore the representation of ethnic identities online and the challenges faced by subalterns in a highly stratified society in the digital age. This chapter suggests that the Internet has provided Gómez-Peña the possibilities to reach a wider audience.

This chapter discusses Jorge Luis Borges as a major literary precursor of contemporary posthumanist cyberliterature. It argues that Borges' speculative fictions and other prose writings provide glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more fully portrayed by writers such as William Gibson or Philip K. Dick. Borges' special value for critical posthumanism lies in the fact that his writings constitute an archive of the future even before it arrived. This chapter suggests that studying the connections between Borges and emerging cyberculture and its theorisation can offer significant and broader statements on the relations between literature and the post-human(ist).

This chapter presents concluding remarks on Latin American identity and cyberspace. It has been clearly shown that there are neo-colonialist assumptions that are fundamental to many of the value-laden terms that are utilised to describe online activity. In recent years, some practitioners and theorists have tried to advance new Internet terminology that resists neo-imperialist drives. This chapter suggests that the most interesting and radical use of the Internet in a Latin American context will occur if the new media allows new identities and forms of expression, and allows for the expression of postcolonial consciousnesses. Cyberspace and cyberculture may provide strategic opportunities for Latin American practitioners to express new and resistant forms of identities online in the future.

This chapter explores the growing trend among urban Ghanaian youths to interact with foreigners over the Internet and establish extensive contacts. The youth of Accra repeatedly visits Internet cafés of the region with the desire to interact with foreigners and increase their list of contacts. The cross-cultural nature of these online social interactions provides information about available literature on such digital communication and theories of cyberculture, which have been restricted by the limited socioeconomic and geographic characteristics of Internet users. An increased number of youths are also exploiting the technology and interfaces to engage in fraudulent missions over the Internet. These people are exploiting the weaknesses of foreigners and engaging in fraudulent missions, taking undue advantage of the online media.