Nomad Codes

dissatisfying to boot). Nowadays, we can hardly believe that our greatgrandparents experienced Ford jalopies as demonic speed machines, or that the bodiless heads of the cinema screen triggered nausea. These perceptions become normal, even though, in some basic sense, they are not.
    One reason that these uncanny experiences are important, then and now, is that they speak to the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that technology provokes—feelings we usually bury beneath the quotidian operations of getting and spending. In this sense, they are like the symptoms in a dream, except that they arise in the midst of the everyday. Even more importantly, though, they have the almost oracular ability to reveal the new and often rather disturbing social realities that are emerging beneath the veneer of business as usual. In this sense, the technological uncanny—in both fiction and paranormal “fact”—is a gateway to the new mutations of the Real.
    Consider the oft-noted resemblance between businessmen barking into their cell phones and crazy homeless people talking to their invisible companions. Late-night comics have already milked this one dry, but what does it actually tell us? Wireless technology, by removing physical connections, erases one of the last signs that our communication technologies are material and not etheric. Though we “know” that electromagnetic modulations of the spectrum are no less material than waves of electrons cruising along a wire, wireless nonetheless amplifies the experiential sense that we live and move in a world of invisible intelligences, a magic world verging on telepathy. Simply put, the more the physical apparatus disappears, the more we are simply listening and responding to voices in our heads.
    I am not saying that the mobile hordes of demon-haunted suits prove that our society has gone insane. The world is subtler (and crazier) than that. Instead, technology is colonizing zones of cultural perception previously occupied by madmen, drug fiends, and religious fanatics. Everyone knows that many schizos fear nefarious mind-control microwaves, or tune into visionary messages through their TVs and radios. But few of us recognize how old this phenomenon is and how fundamental it is to the social phenomenology of electronic media. Shortly after the telephone was introduced, for example, Thomas Watson—Bell’s famous partner—met a man who claimed that two New Yorkers had connected his brain to a telephone circuit, and used this device to give him various diabolical orders.
    Unlike madmen, cellular users are presumably speaking to other people. But even these legitimate signals have their own uncanny stories to tell. Bad connections on copper lines were often noisy or faint; satellite signals introduced delay. Now, because of cross-talk, bounced signals, and who knows what, millions of people routinely hear the voices of their friends and colleagues spliced and diced through hideous Lovecraftian Cuisinarts of sound. Our cell phones have become effects boxes worthy of the headiest dub or industrial music, and they render our intimate communications trippy. Once I heard the distant voice of my friend Christy multiply into scores of slightly off-beat sonic doppelgängers, so that the telephone call sounded like a thousand Christys were talking to me at once. It was one of the most psychedelic things I’ve ever heard. That is, until my radio talked to me.

    As with so many technologies, the penetration of wireless into global society will be simultaneously convenient, weird, banal, and deeply disturbing. We already accept the little antisocial wormholes that cell phones open up in the midst of public space, a phenomenon that, while further cranking up the knob on individualism, at least adds another wrinkle to the boundaries that define our social interaction. But the growth of wireless access to data may have a very different effect, because it erodes the sense that the world we wander through has any real variation at all.
    Here’s why. Societies have increasingly come to define reality—or, less philosophically, “the action”—by media and information flows. The old days were very “lumpy” when it came to the density and availability of cultural information, because the city had more access than a cornfield. Nowadays, though, universal wireless access to the net makes our particular somewhere feel like anywhere—or even nowhere.
    We are all familiar now with the