Escape Velocity by Mark Dery

that will return us to our former state-a cyberdelic gloss on the popular sixties thinker Norman O. Brown's argument, in Life against Death, that repressive modern society can only be healed through a return to something resembling the undifferentiated infantile sexuality Freud called "polymorphous perversity."
    Mondo essayists have embroidered this thread. In issue number five, the cyberdelic philosopher Hakim Bey theorizes "temporary autonomous zones"-impermanent Utopias-in which the collective libido of "repressed moralistic societies" might obtain brief release. The temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, "does not engage directly with the State"; rather, it is a "guerrilla operation which liberates an area-of land, of time, of imagina-tion-and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it."^"* One example of a TAZ, writes Bey, is a party "where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. government?"^^
    In the same issue, the pseudonymous Mondo regulars Gracie and Zarkov admonish ''Monde's technoerotic voluptuaries" to
    [cjreate and communicate examples of intense eroticism to others! . . . High technology enables us to explore sensuality far out on the New Edge. . . .Why settle for passe kinkiness when you can actualize techno-aphrodisia from the infosphere?^^
    The obvious problem with a psychopolitics whose challenges to the status quo are a return to Dionysian excess and abandon is that consumer culture eats such challenges for breakfast. The sexually repressed puritan-ism that is the bane of Mondoids runs deep in the national psyche, to be sure, but it is subverted by a consumer culture that offers instant, oral gratification and a return to adolescent, even infantile, fun-"social irresponsibility" with a vengeance. As William O'Neill points out in Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s,
    Where consumption was concerned, [capitalism] urged people to gratify their slightest wish. ... It was, after all, part of Aldous

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    Huxley's genius that he saw how sensual gratification could enslave men more effectively than Hitler ever could. . . . Sex was no threat to the Establishment. . . . [T]he shrewder guardians of established relationships saw hedonism for what it partially was, a valuable means of social control."
    What's more, taking refuge in "republics of gratified desire" diverts attention from governmental and corporate challenges to personal liberty right now, all around us. "To 'turn on and drop out' did not w^eaken the state," notes O'Neill. "Quite the contrary, it drained off potentially subversive energies."^^
    Finally, it takes only a modicum of class consciousness to see Mondo's visions of Dionysian liberation and its Revenge of the Nerds fantasy of a high-tech cultural elite of chemically pumped-up megabrains for w^hat they are: the daydreams of the relatively privileged. According to the East Bay Monthly, Queen Mu (nee Alison Kennedy), a self-styled "New Age Pollyanna" w^ho believes that "fun ... is going to be the saving grace of our universe," grew^ up in a sixteen-bedroom mansion in upscale Palo Alto and attended boarding school in Sw^itzerland; the "comfortable legacy" she inherited from her "prominent, eccentric family" provided the seed money for Mondo, w^hich is headquartered in her sprawling Berkeley Hills home.^^
    Similarly, many of Mondo's readers are sufficiently insulated from the grimmer social realities inside their high-tech comfort zones to contemplate the power of positive hedonism without irony. In a 1990 interview, Sirius asserts that a "large portion" ofMondo's audience consists of "successful business people in the computer industry."^^ A 1991 advertising brochure claims that the magazine's readers, 80 percent of whom "work in information or communications fields" and whose