The Digital
Sublime: Myth, Power and, Cyberspace
by Vincent Mosco
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
232 pp. Trade, $27.95
ISBN: 0-262-13439-X.
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt
Arts and Social Sciences
The University of Waikato, New Zealand
seanc@waikato.ac.nz
In his previous book Vincent Mosco made
the most significant intervention in research
on the political economy of the media
in the last decade. Drawing on the geographical
analyses of scholars loe, Sassen, and
Castells and on Giddens' sociology, Mosco
singles out co-modification, spatialisation,
and structuration as the critical processes
of the contemporary telecom and media
regimes. Not content with an innovative
analysis, Mosco proposed a synthesis of
political economy with critical cultural
studies, which is at the centre of the
new book published this year.
There appears to be something special
about the Canadians; perhaps the geography
that leaves them at once subsumed into
the North American media market and marginalised
within it. Innis, Smythe, McLuhan and
Grant, Theall, the Krokers, Berland, Marchessault,
Straw, Attalah and Raboy, and younger
scholars like Laura Marx and Acland have
consistently brought together disparate
streams of philosophical and empirical
research to propagate their own rich hybrids.
A mature figure in this constellation,
Mosco has extended his analyses of cash
and exchange into the turbulent domain
of futurological rhetoric in The Digital
Sublime.
The core of the book is the rhetoric of
"endings," especially the end
of space, the end of ideology, and the
end of history. Indeed, in a typically
astute and witty trope, Mosco reviews
the titles of every book received by the
Harvard Library between 1998 and 2002.
Over the millennium, over a hundred books
announced the end of everything from change
to imagination, and baseball to modern
medicine. Francis Fukuyama's End of
History, like Frances Cairncross'
Death of Distance, imagined the
world reconfigured around the loss of
something crucial: the sense of destiny
or the differences that geography makes.
Mosco's quest is to read through the avatars
of digital radicalism, to spot the myths
they build, and to offer critiques that
bring their flights of fancy back towards
the sweat and strife of the real world.
Not that Mosco is without an interest
in the ways that cultures change. For
this reader the richest and deepest vein
he taps comes in the final chapter. Like
many books written in North America in
the early years of the century, the long
shadow of the twin towers looms over these
pages. The difference is that Mosco has
researched the World Trade Center. Built
regardless of the thriving light industries
of Radio Alley that used to be there,
the Rockefeller dynasty, not only bankers
but long-time governors of New York State,
set about building not just skyscrapers
but, also a global centre for the trade
in financial services. The WTC was to
be the hub of a new New York; one grounded
not in the mix of docks and advertising,
culture and commerce, industry and services,
but one fit for the neo-liberal triumph
of finance capital. Corrupt from the start
(the fireproofing sub-contractor was found
bobbing in concrete boots at the bottom
of the Hudson), the ambitious, ugly buildings
never made commercial sense, which is
why City of New York offices occupied
floor after floor. The architectural equivalent
of the dot.com crash, the WTC was symbolic,
all right, but not of the community that
formed in its ruins.
The point of the detailed history of the
real estate that crashed and burned in
2001 is that myths have the peculiar capability
of becoming realities. Alvin Toffler's
Progress and Freedom Foundation may be
dotty, but it has sponsors to burn. Al
Gore's information superhighway still
inspires politicians years after he and
it have proved their redundancy. Legends
of the end of atoms, hard energy, geography,
and history are all absurd, as the hurricanes
produced by global warming battering Florida
and the Caribbean in 2004 should surely
prove. What we do has physical consequences;
and even Amazon has to use FedEx to deliver
the goods to its one-click shoppers. But
the myths of cyberspace, absurd as Mosco
shows them to be, are myths because they
satisfy other cravings than rational ones.
Perhaps only economists still believe
in rationality. Here at least is one who
knows that perfectly well informed consumers
making rational choices is a really stupid
description of the world.