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This chapter deals with the cultural discourses surrounding the so-called Information Superhighway, a vast engineering project conceived on a par with the Fordist construction of the literal superhighway system in the 1950s. The Information Superhighway would realize the fantasy of a totally “wired life” that had circulated in postindustrial discourse in the 1970s. Don Tapscott's indictment of Generation X as a cohort of grumbling slackers cynically complicit with boomer technologies emerges as quite suggestive, since GenXers' transitional status makes them an especially contradictory social formation. A GenX effort to grapple allegorically with the cultural promises and perils of the Infobahn is presented. Ernest Hebert's Mad Boys struggle to find some way out of an invidious double bind, in which every prosthetic enhancement of them as consuming subjects bears with it an inescapable exploitation, a vampiric shadow that leeches their youthful substance and energy.

This chapter examines the emergence of the “World Wide Web”—the Internet's best-known hypertext system—when the global nature of the Internet became an animating idea in news media and popular culture as well as for policymakers and academics. It explores how, despite being understood as global, the Internet is nonetheless identified as a distinctly American space, or an “American virtual nation.” This Americanness was visible in the organization of the Internet, including the ways the U.S. government retained control over Internet addresses and domains. The American virtual nation was also visible, however, in news media and policy language describing the Internet as a “new democratic frontier” and an “information superhighway.” These terms were enabled by hopeful U.S. policymakers, who aimed to colonize the Internet before competitors arrived. Major Internet corporations also capitalized on this presumptive Americanness of the Internet in their efforts to become “American corpoNations.”

This chapter looks at the structure of feeling created in the early 1990s as knowledge workers began to discover the pleasures of online communication and elites groped for an organizational framework under the umbrella of the “information superhighway.” Web browsing articulated itself with a structure of desire centered around an endless “what's next?” and spread in a context in which middle ranks knew things that their superiors did not, adding to that articulation a romantic sense of rebellion; one could in theory rebel, express oneself, and get rich all at once. Taken together, this fusion of romantic subjectivity and market enthusiasms, exemplified and enabled in the early Wired magazine, created the conditions that fueled both the rapid triumph of the internet as the network of networks and the dotcom stock bubble.

In a discursive essay on the impact of computer technology on libraries and learning, Wolfe opens by arguing that contemporary America is adapting to ignorance and illiteracy and characterises American youth as disinterested in learning. He considers the ’information superhighway’ as inherently discriminatory and likely to provoke resentment towards the educated class. Anticipating, correctly, that much of the information on this superhighway will be fake, bypass peer review, and be the product of pranksters, he adopts an antagonistic stance towards computers in the first half of his article. In the second, he recognises the interlinking of library computers will provide an opportunity for those educationally and economically marginalised. He concludes by seeing librarians as instrumental in safeguarding the education and development of the disenfranchised.

Just as everyone offering odds was beginning to feel secure that comet impact is not an immediate threat to life on earth, I heard several planetary scientists state confidently that there was not even a chance of our seeing a comet-planet collision in our lifetimes. Since then Jupiter suffered the humiliation of being lashed by no less than 21 comet fragments, most of them sizable objects in their own right. The saga began on March 24, 1993, when Carolyn Shoemaker discovered a “squashed comet” in a photograph that had just been taken by the team of which she was a member. She and her husband, Eugene, together with David Levy were using the 18-inch Schmidt telescope on Palomar Mountain near San Diego to hunt for near-earth asteroids and none of them had ever seen a squashed comet before. What happened to set the scene for the discovery of the squashed comet is now apocryphal. The previous night had been perfect for the search, but someone had apparently exposed a box of film to daylight so that the exposures turned out totally black. The box of film was set aside, which was no immediate loss because on the fateful night the skies were mostly cloudy, which made comet hunting very difficult. Apparently David Levy, not wont to waste any opportunity to take more pictures, suggested that they go ahead and use some of the ruined sheets of film just in case some were not totally useless. At a cost of $4 per sheet, the film was usually very carefully used, given that they took photographs every ten minutes or so, all night long. Normally they would not have taken data that night, but why not go ahead and fire off a few exposures with the bad film. between and through the clouds. As luck would have it, the sheets of film deeper into the box were only light-damaged around their edges, so they managed to get some nice photographs. It was Carolyn Shoemaker’s task to place a pair of developed pictures taken 45 minutes apart of the same area of sky into a stereo microscope.

The object that slammed into the earth to precipitate the dinosaur demise was no stranger to the solar system; it had been lurking about its outer regions ever since the sun and planets formed 4.5 billion years ago. Like a construction site littered with builder’s materials after the work is done, debris left over from the formation of the sun and planets is scattered throughout the solar system in the form of comets and asteroids. From among this population the great impactor that triggered the K/T extinction event originated. Unfortunately there is no way to cart the debris away so that earth won’t smash headlong into another comet or asteroid. Whether we like it or not, we live with the hazard of occasionally finding some of this stuff directly in the path of the earth’s orbit around the sun. In fact, every day something from space slams into our planet. The generic name for icy, dusty, rocky, or metallic objects that wander about in interplanetary space is “meteoroid.” After the process of planetary formation was essentially complete, a great deal of meteoroidal material was left over. Depending on its fate, a meteoroid hurtling into the earth’s atmosphere today earns a new name. It is called a meteor in the case of a tiny pea-sized particle that burns up in the atmosphere to produce a momentary fiery trail known as a shooting star. These have long been the focus of superstitions because of their obvious associations with the heavens and, therefore, with gods that might reside there. Even in our time, it is common to “make a wish upon a star” when a meteor is seen. Every night you can see dozens if not hundreds of meteor trails. On a good night in a clear location half a dozen an hour is about as good as you can expect. In addition to the meteors that burn up to leave a visible trail, there are countless that are too small to be seen, enough to allow tens of millions of wishes a day. These heat the atmosphere enough to produce trails of hot gas that reflect radar signals.