Ballardian

Something Awful is currently taking the piss out of ‘cyberia’ and the early days of the internet, looking back to a time when hyperlinks were revolutionary because ‘we don’t have to look at text as linear anymore, because it’s all connected now. Information wants to be free. It wants to rape itself and bear its own children.’

(the article may be more forward-thinking than it seems: the accompanying primitive web graphics seem strangely reminiscent of millions of myspace pages).

The hatchet job also includes an ‘interview’ with the patron saint of ‘fractal artists and anarcho-physicists’:

CyberViews: Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard
By David Thorpe

In his 1973 novel Crash, J.G. Ballard grabbed humankind by the hair and dragged us through the broken glass strewn on every highway in the Western world. He scraped our brains into a pulp, with bits of gravel and glass scabbing into our blood-matted hair with every turn of the page. He forced our wide-open eyes onto the still-spinning tire of a freshly wrecked car, the hot rubber excruciatingly scraping away our corneas until we arrived at a new vision: mankind had become reliant on a technology that was killing us at a rate of dozens of thousands per year. As our vomit began to ferment, clarity emerged. We are a society of technology unfettered by humanity… where can we go next?

CyberFrontiers: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Ballard. So, where do you think this whole cyberspace adventure will take us next?

J.G. Ballard: It’s my pleasure. I quite enjoy a good discussion of technology. You see, my only aim is to slide a glistening shard of rent metal across the eyeball of the human race, to bisect the eye, so that the warm fluid streaks down onto the human face and dries there, caked into a nightmare realization of the human subconscious. Where does man end and technology begin? We have built our own chromium prison of nightmare landscapes. Consider the erotic geometry of the toaster, gleaming like a chromium breast upon my kitchen counter, built only to be penetrated. When does humankind stop penetrating the toaster with bread and wake up to the new nightmare of erotic injury-toast? We see our toaster before us, rounded like the breast of a woman, and our hands are drawn to press down the plunger, to light the coils, and we watch in erotic agony as the coils turn red, then orange, glowing like the nightmare of toast and semen, and we must penetrate the toaster. The toast can no longer mediate our lust, and we must slide in one digit, then two, and the pain is an exquisite nightmare as our fingers slide past the chromium labia of the toaster’s top and into the red-hot slots of erotic agony. We smell our own flesh burning, fusing with the metal, and our orgasm is the orgasm of nightmares. The chromium geometry of the toaster melts our agony into humanity, and we know then that we must penetrate the toaster further, and we grasp the blinding pain of the searing slot with our hand and we bring the toaster down to our pubis. We must penetrate the chromium labia with our phallus, and so we do.

CyberFrontiers: OK.”

This is what the bloke in the corner store was on about when he was telling me that Ballard was “sooooo last century”.

[ via Joe McNally ]