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From 2004-2006, the author toured North America by lecturing while running a hacked treadmill hardwired to a computer. In lectures of 5-7 kilometers, the author ran through various theories about technology and embodiment, using his running speed to control the flow of a video projection. This chapter presents the original script of that performance piece, coupled with still images from a variety of Dreadmill performances.

Roach Lab, a grad student project created in the Critical Media Lab, provides yet another example of applied media theory as discussed in the previous chapter and exemplified in every other chapter of the book. This student project, which involves live cockroaches in an environment with mechatronic roaches and a video of roach dissection, also initiates the theme of horror that concludes the book. The chapter also discusses Terror Management Theory, a social psychology concept rooted in the philosophy of Ernest Becker.

Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel, needs superpowers both to protect her hometown of Jersey City and to negotiate the pull between her parents’ immigrant Pakistani identity and US teen culture. Khan’s alien, Inhuman race also poses a fascinating analogue to the complications of young US immigrants fighting to define their identities in a xenophobic climate. The besieged boundaries of Khan’s identity echo the complicated politics of self, mapped out in Donna Haraway’s classic “Cyborg Manifesto.” Whereas being an Inhuman implies cultural, gender, religious, and biological boundaries and restrictions—albeit with accompanying superpowers—Khan is in the process of crafting an identity that rejects such boundaries, instead embracing the both/and structure of a cyborg self. This productive tension helps decode Khan’s visual and cultural iconicity, especially her place within youth culture and technoculture, and suggests a way forward for a progressive Muslim female and her fans in a post-9/11, too-often Islamophobic America.

The virtual beauty shop provides a mechanism to interrogate a Black feminist technoculture wherein we no longer treat Black women’s use and manipulation of digital technologies as deviant, deficient, or an aberration. The beauty shop metaphor demonstrates the importance of a separately constructed space intentionally created for and by Black women—an enclave. Like the blogosphere, the shop was an independently viable institution within the Black community and one of the few spaces where Black women could own and operate a business enterprise that was not dependent on whites’ patronage. This chapter develops the text’s theoretical and analytic framework, applying a critical cultural approach based principally on the interrelationship of three theories / significant departures in the literature. They are Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination, Anna Everett’s Black technophilia, and Joan Morgan’s hip-hop feminism.

This introductory essay begins with an anecdote about fishing, in which the author demonstrates his tortured ambivalence toward posthumanist philosophy. The chapter justifies the unusual arrangement of chapters, and sets the overall tone for the book.

The first chapter introduces the reader to the work of Ernest Becker and outlines his theories of death denial and “cultural hero systems.” These concepts are integrated into an existentialist discussion of posthumanism and technoculture, where Ernest Becker meets Bernard Stiegler and Cary Wolfe.

Chapter 2 describes a performance and video installation that required the author to record on video two crossings of the Windsor/Detroit border: one in his car; one on foot, during the Detroit Marathon. The concept of borders comes into play as a theme for exploring posthumanism and the concept of the human as an always-already technical animal.

This is a long reading of the film American Beauty that focuses on media technologies (telephone, pager, two-way speaker, handycam) and their capacity to betray their users in deadly ways. The author also uses the film to flesh out Becker’s concept of “immortality ideology.”

This essay looks at our contemporary technocultural hero system, and discusses how it can lead to the behaviors exhibited by school shooters such as Klebold and Harris, Kimveer Gill, Sebastian Bosse, and Cho Seung-Hui. The author argues that social media provide users with a “screen test” for anti-heroic behavior.

Cycle of Dread is the second in a triathlon of works by the author. Here, he describes the work in the context of specific concepts such as avatar, glitch, nostalgia, and flow. This public art project involves a stationary penny farthing bicycle hardwired to a computer so that a participant’s speed and heart rate cause a projected “ghost” to fly across an outdoor walkway. As in his previous work, the author draws on Romantic multimedia artist William Blake and the graveyard poetry tradition.

Here, the author presents a critique of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). His primary argument is that some flavors of OOO are not philosophy at all, but a form of poetic discourse that is at once nihilistic and animistic. The author compares this type of OOO discourse with Romantic idealism and surrealist fantasy.

This is the last in a triathlon of projects created by the author, which in this case involves a canoe equipped with three touch-screen monitors and wrapped in 7 kilometers of fishing line. Recalling the previous chapter’s discussion of “carpentry,” this chapter begins with a detailed account of how to paint a cedar and canvas canoe. This leads to a discourse on “skin” that ultimately lands in a speculative discussion of technogenesis, prosthesis, proprioception, and the death of Canadian artist Tom Thomson.

This chapter outlines the author’s concept of “applied media theory,” which is a method of humanities research rooted in the research/creation practices typical of professional artists. Applied media theory requires scholars to embrace the materiality and finitude of objects, transforming them into objects-to-think-with designed to shape contemporary technoculture.

In this final chapter, the author speaks out against what he calls “horror philosophy,” a type of discourse that threatens the ontological dignity of the human being for the sake of celebrating a speculative sort of animism. The author admits the humanist taint of his claims while suggesting that a recognition of the vulnerability of all things must not come at the expense of human vulnerability. The chapter is bookended by discussions of two video art projects: Dust by Herman Kolgen and Datamatics v2.0 by Ryoji Ikeda.

This chapter explores how the mutual interdependence between control technologies and organizational culture influences the reporting of risk information between front-line, staff functions and top managers. Based on interviews with members of the Safety Department of a large airline and direct observation of their working practices and control technologies, the chapter begins with a descriptive overview of discrete but related safety practices. The notion of technoculture is then developed to capture the way in which a specific concept of corporate culture becomes operationally expressed by reporting and other managerial systems. The chapter shows how technology and culture are entangled in this airline in three specific ways: the hard-wiring of cultural values of safety into systems, processes, and other visible artefacts; the expansion of working interactions supported by reporting and monitoring technologies; the adoption of a business partnering approach by safety experts to build respect for safety values, people, and technologies.

This chapter begins by describing the intense competition between the United States and Germany for the development of radar and atomic weapon. German and Austrian refugee scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, and their American counterparts persuaded President Roosevelt to undertake the atomic bomb project in 1940, which became known as “big science.” Big science connotes the industrialization of knowledge and the transformation of the university into a knowledge factory. Having permeated everyday life, technology has become a culture; hence the conflation technoculture. Technoculture plays with the distinction between work and labor. Some have argued that, in contrast to work in the era of mechanical reproduction, computer-mediated work eliminates most of the repetitive tasks associated with Taylorism and Fordism: a “smart machine” can interact with human intelligence.

This chapter approaches video games as computer simulational forms, emphasizing their historical pedigree in postwar military technoscientific research and development, and in the overarching logistical trajectory of the reorganization of all spheres of society as potential resources for war. It understands simulation, and video games, as the major computer simulation form of today’s technoculture, differently from the postmodern account of simulation. The key concerns of this chapter include simulation, media-led saturation and preemption of real politics and cultural expression, the end of history, virtual reality, emergent globalization of manufacturing and consumption, and recombinatory, citational aesthetics.

This chapter takes up the question of simulation and criticality to examine computer games in the contemporary technocultural moment. It characterizes computer simulation as a fictioning of the future that bears the ongoing legacy of the preemptive force of its logistical origins. The book concludes on the theme of accidentality as the necessary outcome of the effort to foreclose future eventuality, because the preemptive tendency is the opposite of a conservative program, however much it seeks to guarantee order. With this potential resides the possibility of other kinds of accident, other detours of the technocultural program, turning it toward more viable futures.