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Hi all For me the darker side of cyberspace is more conceptual and in turn leaks into the quotidian. I'm concerned about how computers/cyberspace/cybernetics has affected our view of ourselves. Back in 1829 Thomas Carlyle wrote about his era and termed the phrase the Mechanical Age. Here he was not just referring to the fact that there was now a lot of machines in use but, more importantly, of how the machine had become an important cultural symbol. In short his concern was that there had become an excessive emphasis upon means against ends. He described this by saying that men had grown mechanical in head and heart. That is people actually started to think of themselves as machines. As has been pointed out this essay was a precursor to the thinking of Marx et al regarding alienation. My interest and concern is that, living as we are in the Information Age, what it is to be human is being reduced down to the domain of information. For example we can look at the Cyberneticist Norbert Weiner in his book *The Human use of Human Beings*. Weiner's interest is in feedback control, how the human being is reduced to being a part of a system with the same level of importance as the machine. For him the human is "whirpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves." In short we are information. This type of thinking, an extension of the religious in some respects, has engendered a whole new range of fantasy such as Artificial Intelligence and Extropianism. It has changed the way we value ourselves our lives and sensuality. It is intersting that today the Turing test for judging artificial intelligence is still taken seriously. The test involves merely the exchange of information in regards to logic with absolutely no reference to the body. What if this test were to use music - the abstract emblem of sensuality (Simmons)- instead? Can we envisage how a computer could understand this? Of course there are other concerns as well such as how these machines are reducing us to information in other ways as in marketing databases and surveillance. Our value is reduced to our entries in various databases etc So in short my worries are about perception. I'd like to write more but I'm a bit busy and I'm unable to "multi-task"! best Simon