Data Trash; the Theory of the Virtual Class

by Arthur Kroeker and A Weinstein
Saint Martin Press, NY, 1994.
ISBN 0-312-12211-x

Reviewed by Thom Gillespie

I picked Data Trash up at a book sale. Everything 25% off. I might have bought it anyway since it was only $16.95 (US) but 25% off was the clincher. I also picked it up because of the title: Data Trash. Hmm, what could that be? The sub.sub.title is "smelling the virtual flowers and counting the road-kill on the digital superhighway." The credits describe Kroker as 'Nietzsche for the technocratic 90's', 'our remorseless Adorno', and Marshall McLuhan for the 1990's' -- not bad company. I had just finished Rim: a novel of Virtual Reality by Bescher and Interface by Stephen Bury. I loved Verner Vinge's True Names and reread the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Dick at least once a year. Something called Data Trash sounded just right for my library. The essence of this book is on page 158 in the Data Trash Glossary: we are data trash and it's good. The 'we' he refers to is the left over meat puppets minding the gameBoy/joystick/mouse/etc back at the console. This is standard McLuhan: "The young Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image... he had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system the selection of a single sense for intense stimulus, or of a single extended isolated, or "amputated" sense in technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that technology as such has on its makers and users...Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies and such extensions also demand new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body...To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extension of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically." [ Understanding Media -- The Gadget Lover ] KrokerWeinstein like McLuhan is just saying once more: WATCH OUT FOR THOSE EXTENSIONS!

Probably the biggest difference between McLuhan and KrokerWeinstein is that McLuhan was a much better writer. KrokerWeinstein write as if English is not their mother tongue. There is a lot of sub textual post structural semiotic attempts at textual sound bites, for example: "The information highway is paved with (our) flesh." "Resequence the ruling rhetoric of particular political communities according to the global ideology of technological liberalism..." "This greenhouse for the clonal body is where culture plantings are snipped from samples around the electronic net... " It took me almost 3 months to finish Data Trash because the best I could do was 2 pages at a sitting which is fine because KrokerWeinstein seem to write in 2 page blocks for the most part. Data Trash sat by the loo in my house and I'd read as the spirit or body moved me. I guess I kept expecting something profound but it didn't really come. I usually mark books as I read them. I like to underline passages for future reference, expecting something profound. But it didn't really come. This book is unmarked but I'm not sure this means there is nothing there or if it means that I haven't found that something yet. My gut feeling is that what KrokerWeinstein is trying to say was probably said far more eloquently by Howard Beal in the movie Network just before they blew out his brains live on the tube. If you morph Beal and KrokerWeinstein you might get: "... Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals....It's a nation of some 200 odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter than white, steel belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods"... we are data trash and it is good!!