Mike Davis

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  print December 1995

  Mike Davis

  ☝ FAULTY TRANSMISSION

  For those of us in the neo-Luddite resistance to the Information Millennium, the most reassuring development in 1995 was the outbreak of the FIRST COMPUTER SUPERVIRUS. The plague, which appeared at the beginning of September, infected unprecedented numbers of PCs throughout Europe and North America when users attempted to read documents created by Microsoft’s popular Word program. Although deliberately benign, the Word virus contained an ominous but inert macro entitled “payload.” It was an exemplary philosophical warning. Indeed, experts worry that future epidemics, more

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  books December 1993

  Virtual Light

  Virtual Light, by William Gibson. New York: Bantam Books. 325 pp. $22.95.

  As Bertolt Brecht once pointed out, Hell looks suspiciously like Heaven, and both look like Los Angeles. This is a maxim worth remembering as we are sucked screaming into the dark vortex of the 21st century.

  Only a few years ago, of course, pundits were romantically hallucinating the “end of history” as crowds danced on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. McDonalds, not the Internationale, seemed to be uniting the human race. Since then, however, utopian capitalism has sunk up to its metaphysical axles, from Sarajevo to South