Pan-capitalism: The economic situation in which contemporary

capi- talism for the first time is unchallenged, either by an

artistocratic (traditionalist) or proletarian (revolutionary)
opposition.
now has no critic and no organized opposition: it must try to take care of itself.
Capitalist organizations rely on the ideology of disciplinary liberal- ism as a way
of controlling labor, and appeal to fascism when they are in trouble.

Spasm: The state of living with absolutely contradictory feelings all the time, and
really loving it: fascinated yet bored/panicked yet calm/ecstatic yet
terminal/apathetic yet fully committed. 1) Terminal shddders that suddenly
appear from nowhere, convulse the media-net in frenzied attention and then
disappear from view, never to be heard from again (John Bobbitts missing
penis, the L.A. earthquake, Nancy,Kerrigans knee) ; 2) the TV image of O.J.s
Bronco on that slow, surrealistic drive down the L.A. freeway, like an electronic
Days ofthe Locust; 3) asampler music CD by Steve Gibsoh to take with you on
your journey: across the
.electronic frontier.
Virtual Reality: Where flesh goes to die and the electronic body struggles to be
born at the fin-de-millennium. Strap on a head-mounted scanner, wire your flesh
with digital trodes, slap smell patches on your data suit and take an out-of-body
flight across the outer galaxies of cyberipace.
Virtual Culture: The substitution of a technologically fabricated spatio- (temporal)
perspective for the spatial-temporal perspective of,ordinary
waking perception. The perfection of virtual reality is to constitute an environment
(totality) in which the virtualized body is completely immersed and with which the
virtualized body can intet-act. Full virtuality would constitute an environment
that would be felt by the virtualized body to be complete, but would not be felt by
the virtualized body to be an incident within a more genuine environment.

Virtual Class: The social strata in contemporary pan-capitalism that have material
and ideological interest in speeding-up and intensifying the process of
virtualization and heightening the will to virtuality. The elite components of this
class include technotopians who explicitly advance the cause of virtualization
through offering a utopia of juvenile power (virtual reality flight simulators in all
the entertainment com- plexes) , and cynical capitalists who exploit virtuality for
profit.
The Will to Purity: The politics of the nineties: sexual cleansing, ethnic cleansing,
intellectual cleansing, racial cleansing, Internet cleansing. The politics of an
entirely fictional search for apurity that never existed and never will.
Will to Virtuality: The prevalent drive of contemporary culture to seek to give itself
up to virtual reality and become an incept in the media-net. The will to virtuality is
grounded in the fascination with technology as a reaction-formation to the deathwish.