11 Hegemony

Chapter Overview
All kinds of people know a little something about hegemony.

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Hegemony
This chapter situates flash reason within the context of contemporary political theory. (Ernesto Laclau describes the empty universal and its relationship to Lacan's object a, which introduces the applicability of flash reason to contemporary society.)

Specifically, Ulmer claims that avatar, as an updating of prudence for the dromosphere, is the most recent development of hegemony. That is, according to Ulmer, avatar (re)distributes agency from the political elite to the public intellectual, by unifying the communications among agents' observations and activities.

Significantly, this (re)distributed agency commits individuals to invention through experimentation (See Joke), working by analogy from the genealogy of literacy, to simultaneously discover and design the practices of electracy for an Internet culture.

Experiment


=Lab of the Dead= It is the zombie apocalyse, only you are not just some random bystander. You are a scientist trying to understand what went wrong in an underground research facility. Gain points by conducting experiments on the hoard of zombies that were brought to the facility. These experiments involve using weapons on the zombie, giving them food, and other objects. The more you play the more research you collect. Use YOUR MOUSE to click on various objects. Have fun! Read more at http://www.funny-games.biz/lab-of-the-dead.html#IU51OoOMsx5SiqLl.99

From Literacy to Electracy
Electracy is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing: an apparatus that is part technological, part institutional. Grammatology demonstrates that the invention of literacy included new experiences of thought that led to inventions of identity.

Electracy is being invented in a similar way, which will not replace orality (religion) and literacy (science) that came before. Rather, electracy can supplement orality and literacy with an additional dimension of thought, practice, and identity.

In contemporary society, we take for granted the skills that comprise literacy. What specific skills might someday comprise natively electrate people?

Significantly, the update from literacy to electracy represents an ontological shift from an investigation of the relationships between nature and culture to one that explores the relationships between human and non-human nature. This shift, according to Ulmer, opens, rather than forecloses inventive possibility.

PATCHWORK GIRL

What if Mary Shelley's Frankenstein were true?

What if Mary Shelley herself made the monster -- not the fictional Dr. Frankenstein?

And what if the monster was a woman, and fell in love with Mary Shelley, and traveled to America?

This is their story.



Virtue and Electracy
Virtue is the dimension of human experience ontologized in electracy.

Science, as a worldview, had to be invented by distinguishing from reason from religion

Machiavelli believed that a certain craft of thought could cause virtue to triumph over fortune.

Antonio Gramsci later updated Machiavelli's "craft," shifitng the primary site of hegemonic power from the ruling elite to the political party.

Hegemony's Remedy
The remedy for hegemony is not directly experienced, but discovered-designed through a virtual (re)distribution of agency in which citizens participate in an Internet public sphere.

Because tracing the historical trajectory from orality to electracy helps us appreciate relationships among  human and non-human nature, it likewise turns our attention to the potential of digital literacies as virtual (re)distributors of agency, which opens the possibility for us to imagine what digital literacies might look like in the future.

Dromosphere
The guiding scene and proposed attunement for thought and action in electracy. Player with avatar.

Chora
Here is how chora is used in this section.

Flash Reason
Here's how Flash Reason is dealt with in this chaper.