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1 - Cyborg Agonistes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Philip Mirowski
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

The first thing you will notice is the light. The fluorescent banks in the high ceiling are dimmed, so the light at eye level is dominated by the glowing screens set at intervals throughout the cavernous room. There are no windows, so the bandwidths have that cold otherworldly truncation. Surfaces are in muted tones and mat colors, dampening unwanted reflections. Some of the screens flicker with strings of digits the color and periodicity of traffic lights, but most beam the standard Day- Glo palette of pastels usually associated with CRT graphics. While a few of the screens project their photons into the void, most of the displays are manned and womanned by attentive acolytes, their visages lit and their backs darkened like satellites parked in stationary orbits. Not everyone is held in the thrall of the object of their attentions in the same manner. A few jump up and down in little tethered dances, speaking into phones or mumbling at other electronic devices.

Type
Chapter
Information
Machine Dreams
Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science
, pp. 1 - 25
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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  • Cyborg Agonistes
  • Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: Machine Dreams
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613364.001
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  • Cyborg Agonistes
  • Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: Machine Dreams
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613364.001
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Cyborg Agonistes
  • Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: Machine Dreams
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613364.001
Available formats
×