After being introduced by Aaron Betsky, Hal Foster begins by reciting the text of a recent newspaper ad in which AT&T argues for “Telecommunity … a vast global network of networks, the merging of communications and computers ….” Foster wonders if there is a kind of architecture that can resist “Telecommunity.”
He reviews and dismisses a range of options. Foster proposes a “neofuturism” to critically engage contemporary technology in a world in which science no longer has any existence apart from economic life, creating an erosion of boundaries between bodies, machines, nature and artifice.
Foster wonders what “a valid technopolitics for the First World” might be. He discusses some possible positions, stressing the dominance of the “permanent war economy.”
