1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), p. 51.
The box office smash from spring 1999, The Matrix, projects a vision
of a world in which “real” world objects are actually simulations
emerging from streams of bits. Finding himself pursued on a rooftop
with no escape except a helicopter, the movie’s hero asks his guide,
“Can you fly that thing?” “Not yet,” she says, as she calls their home
base systems administrator for software that uploads just in time.
In a similar vein, one of Intel’s 1999 ads for the Pentium II proces-
sor articulates the consumer’s desire for ever-faster uploads, and ulti-
mately for fusing the digital and the real. As a skydiver plummets to
earth alternating anxious glances between the camera and his chute,
which appears on the screen one agonizing row of pixels at a time,
the voiceover asks: “Time for a Pentium II Processor?”
Such images are amusing fantasies. They are also reminders that
we are becoming immersed in a growing repertoire of computer-
based media for creating, distributing, and interacting with digitized
versions of the world. In numerous areas of our daily activities, we
are witnessing a drive toward the fusion of digital and physical real-
ity: not the replacement of the real by a hyperreal—the obliteration
of a referent and its replacement by a model without origin or real-
ity—as Baudrillard predicted, but a new country of ubiquitous com-
puting in which wearable computers, independent computational
agent-artifacts, and material objects are all part of the landscape.
To paraphrase the description of the matrix by William Gibson in
Neuromancer, data are being made flesh.
1
These new media are re-
289
All but War Is Simulation: The
Military-Entertainment Complex
Tim Lenoir
Stanford University
Configurations, 2000, 8:289–335 © 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press and the Society for Literature and Science.
