Angels in Digital Armor: Technoculture and Terror Management

Reality is death. If only we could, we would wander the earth and never leave home; we would enjoy triumphs without risks and eat of the Tree and not be punished, consort daily with angels, enter heaven now and not die.
 

–Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps

Tree Glitch

 
There’s a “glitch” in the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that allows players to climb into a tree, thereby achieving a superior vantage point for sniping. The glitch appears on a level called “Downpour.” All a player has to do is find the craggy tree next to the shattered greenhouse, jump at its trunk, and run up into the branches.¹ The sense of power and security in this lofty nest is extremely gratifying, whether or not it leads to any productive sniping. I didn’t learn about the glitch (which is most likely a deliberate design feature) by logging hundreds of hours a week playing the game. I found it by lurking on a few of the hundreds of COD4 game forums, such as GameSpot, where I observed the following conversation in the thread “Climbing Trees”:
 

Assassin144
Oct 21, 2008 6:55 pm PT
A while ago i heard that you will be able to go into trees in multiplayer and snipe, is this true? I heard a perk will let you do it but after reading the perk list nothing sounded like it, so is the ability not going to be available?

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PSN_Boomfield
Oct 21, 2008 8:27 pm PT
The perk is called “Monkey”.

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NX01AX
Oct 21, 2008 8:31 pm PT
Actually, that proved to be false. The perk part, not the climbing trees part.

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Thehak114
Oct 21, 2008 8:32 pm PT
As far as I know, they climb the same way as you would climb any ladder. Not sure if all trees are climbable or just certain types, but it just adds another place to look before running around wildly.

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Oct 21, 2008 8:36 pm PT
I want to set fire to a tree that someone is in

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Thehak114
Oct 21, 2008 8:36 pm PT
And I am pretty sure you will have that ability with the Flamethrower perk.
….
macarbeone
Oct 24, 2008 11:11 am PT
yes setting fire to some one in a tree would be amazing and then as they fall to the ground on fire i shoot them up wildly and yell OWNED!!!!!!!!!

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_SyCo_
Oct 26, 2008 5:47 pm PT
Yeahh ^^ while i knife you in the back >_>

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AssassinWalker
Oct 26, 2008 6:38 pm PT
i will light all the trees on fire. :)

These and other forum contributors are players who practically live in the game (or perhaps wish they could), making themselves at home in its environment and documenting their most impressive tricks and cheats on video, which they subsequently upload to YouTube in the hope of gaining bragging rights. As puerile and casually apocalyptic as the above conversation may seem, COD4 has provided millions of players with an empowering existential vantage point that features a clear set of goals, opportunities to make heroic choices, a sense of belonging to a responsive and committed community, and the chance to achieve instant recognition for their actions. For only $59.95, COD4 offers more to the average player than his or her family, school, church or neighborhood community center can provide. Indeed, COD4 is part of a complex system of rituals (all of them short-lived and subject to programmed obsolescence) within what Ernest Becker might call the dominant heroic action system of today; a system which we know as “technoculture.”

 
This essay attempts to position contemporary technological being in the context of Becker’s conception of culture, to develop a well-rounded, cross-disciplinary conception of what motivates behaviours that are specific to technocultural being. Also central to this study is the work of Bernard Stiegler, who suggests that the culture of techno-prostheticization, rooted in the “unlimited organization of consumption,” leads “inevitably to suicidal behavior, both individual and collective” (Acting 42). With this in mind, I examine a variety of suicides linked to the use of media technologies, supplementing Stiegler’s grim prognosis, which he bases in part on the suicide of Richard Durn,² with that of Ernest Becker, best known for his book The Denial of Death. In Technics and Time, Stiegler develops a techno-psychoanalytic theory of human prostheticization, which leads to a critique of the cultural industry as a force that dominates contemporary consciousness, resulting in a “liquidation of the ‘libidinal economy'” (TT3 120). Like Stiegler, Becker brings together philosophy, cultural theory, and psychology to suggest that the cultural industry succeeds by meeting two persistent desires: the desire for recognition and the desire for immortality, which are manifested ultimately in the denial of death. Considered in conjunction, the work of Becker and Stiegler provides a broad existential theory of how specific technocultural behaviours can be motivated. Combined with material and economic theories of technoculture, this existential analysis helps explain how the hyperindustrial programming of consciousness can persist, even as it leaves a visible wake of destruction at the individual, cultural, and global-ecological levels. That being said, this essay is not designed to endorse wide-ranging apocalyptic media theories or truth claims levied in the name of religion or myth, but to demonstrate how religion, myth, and other cultural hero systems respond to some of the human animal’s existential needs.
 
Ernest Becker understands culture as a phenomenon of social cohesion, generated and maintained by heroic action systems through which an individual can achieve both recognition and a sense of immortality. I consider this formula at greater length below. For the sake of clarity, I note that in this essay I refer to “technoculture” as a distinct heroic action system in which technological production is viewed as an end in itself, and individual recognition and death-denial are hypermediated by technologies that permit us to feel that we transcend time and space with increasing ease. This contemporary situation results in what Stiegler has called a “war of the spirit,”³ in which older cultural hero systems such as family, school, or nation clash against a technoculture that threatens to consume all of these.
 
This clash can be put into focus by considering a number of tech-related suicides made famous in recent past by the popular media, which sometimes attempts to explain these events by pointing a finger at consumer technologies. Consider the case of Brandon Crisp from Barrie, Ontario. In the fall of 2008, his parents exiled the 15 year-old from the COD4 community and took away his Xbox, out of fear that he had become addicted to the game. Crisp responded by threatening to run away. His father even helped him pack clothes, a toothbrush, and deodorant into his backpack, figuring that Brandon, like most other teens who make such threats, would return in a couple of hours. But Brandon did not return. After an exhaustive search, funded in part by Microsoft, he was found dead three weeks later in a wooded area 10 kilometres south of his home. The autopsy suggested that he died from injuries related to falling out of a tree. This detail was especially troubling to Brandon’s family. What was he doing up in that tree? Hiding? Seeking shelter? The mystery will likely remain unsolved. This story of exile in the wilderness has a mythical air about it. To the COD4 community, Brandon is a hero of mythic proportions; or better yet, he is the Patron Saint of Xbox, a martyr who was robbed of his most sacred relic, expelled from his holy land, and like other holy men, sought refuge in the wilderness.
 

Myth, Religion, and Cybernetic Apocalypse

 
Such religious and mythical rhetoric, as overblown as it may seem here, is by no means unique in critical studies of media technologies. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco examines myth in cyberspace narratives with the hope of “destabilizing the dominant representations of what we are supposed to be and where we are going” (16). According to Mosco, mythical rhetoric about the infinity of cyberspace and the disembodying potential of online worlds is a central component of many culturally important narratives. Like the tales of Homer and Plutarch, many cyberspace myths provide us with a buffer against some of the anxiety related to human finitude. As Mosco suggests,
 

The thorny questions arising from all the limitations that make us human were once addressed by myths that featured gods, goddesses, and the variety of beings and rituals that for many provide satisfactory answers. Today, it is the spiritual machines and their world of cyberspace that hold out the hope of overcoming life’s limitations.
 

(78)

Arguably the greatest limitation we have to face is our mortality. Mosco’s reference to “spiritual machines” deliberately echoes the title of a book by Ray Kurzweil, an uncompromising immortalist whom Mosco identifies as one of the most ardent and influential myth-makers of our time. Kurzweil is one of a number of futurists, many of them lining up to attend Kurzweil’s Singularity University, who long for the disappearance of the human body into a network of celestial circuits. As Mosco argues, the trope of digital disembodiment, from the essays of robot scientist Hans Moravec to the mutant performances of the artist Stelarc, is consistent with mythological discourse, which promises immortality to those who are willing to believe in and propagate the narrative. We might consider whether players of online video games, for example, who enjoy a sense of superhuman powers and experience infinite resurrections, have this mythic promise fulfilled — as long as they stay online.

 
Mosco turns to myth as an extended analogy for understanding the powerful rhetorics of progress that characterize technoculture. But he may very well have come to similar conclusions by drawing on a religious analogy. As David F. Noble argues in The Religion of Technology, “the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief” (5). Noble illustrates how the concept of imago dei (being created in the likeness of god) has been used to justify technological innovations, including nuclear arms and the Human Genome Project, that may seem hubristic. Echoing a common utopian strain in scientific discourse, Noble writes: “Totally freed from the human body, the human person, and the human species, the immortal mind could evolve independently into ever higher forms of artificial life, reunited at last with its origin, the mind of God” (149).
 
This Cartesian rhetoric is far removed from the adolescent chatter of gamers in online forums such as those quoted above. But as both Mosco and Noble suggest, rhetorics of technological progress, like many video game narratives, are informed by a millenarian yearning for apocalypse (“i will light all the trees on fire”), a dramatic break with the past that signals the “specialness” of a given generation. As Noble writes, “Millenarianism is, in essence, the expectation that the end of the world is near and that, accordingly, a new earthly paradise is at hand” (23). This strain is evident, for example, in Michael Benedikt’s anthology, Cyberspace: First Steps. Benedikt proclaims that cyberspace evokes “the image of a Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Like a bejeweled, weightless palace it comes out of heaven itself” (15). Mosco suggests that this sort of discourse reflects a form of “historical amnesia,” a desire to transcend history and all of the complexities that accompany life as a physical being in a material world (8). A whiff of this apocalyptic strain is discernible whenever a keynote speaker stands up and suggests that “we are living through a time of unprecedented change.” These words hold great political weight, filling listeners with a sense of cosmic importance, as if their daily lives are somehow enriched by this vague promise of specialness.
 
Benedikt’s apocalyptic “cyberbole” (Mosco 25) coincides with a number of late-90s academic projects that announce or predict the death of space, time, and politics.⁴ These proclamations, by the accounts of both Mosco and Noble, emerge from a seemingly atavistic need to deny human finitude. Mosco pays particular attention to Francis Fukuyama, whose Pulitzer Prize winning book announces The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama draws on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, which suggests that “History can end, only in and by the formation of a Society, of a State, in which the strictly particular, personal, individual value of each is recognized as such, in its very particularity, by all” (Kojève 58). From the right-wing, apocalyptic perspective of Fukuyama, liberal democracy and advanced capitalism have brought about this “end.” Like many other critics, Mosco rejects Fukuyama’s somewhat easy, perhaps uncritical resignation to this supposed end of history. Indeed, Fukuyama later retracts his own argument in light of the events of 9/11. But Fukuyama’s work should not be rejected altogether, for to do so would be to ignore his important conception of the notion of thymos, which provides a very useful tool for understanding the relationship between human desire, existential needs, and technology. I return to this subject later. For the moment, I wish to point out the limitations of mythic (e.g., Mosco’s) and religious (e.g., Noble’s) analogies as a means of explaining technocultural behaviour.
 
People create myths and religions not just out of a need for social order, but to convince themselves that they are not finite beings. The greatest contribution of Mosco’s work is that it demonstrates how rhetorics of technological progress are driven forward by a desire to overcome the constraints of human finitude. Taking a cue from Heidegger perhaps, Mosco suggests that the “danger” of mythological narrative is that it provides us with an “unfulfillable promise” (22), which masks the reality of our situation and blinds us to the problems and complexities of human history. Noble’s analysis of technology and religion leads to similar conclusions. Consider, for example, the words of AI visionary Danny Hillis, a self-proclaimed agnostic, quoted in Noble’s book:
 

I want to make a machine that will be proud of me. . . . I’m sad about death, I’m sad about the short time that we have on earth and I wish there was some way around it. So, it’s an emotional thing that drives me. It’s not a detached scientific experiment or something like that.
 

(qtd. in Noble,163)

According to Noble, these words reflect a religious rhetoric, falling neatly in line with the imago dei theme. But there is nothing particularly “religious” about these terms, and in fact, to categorize them as religious is to limit the scope of the analysis. To clarify, Hillis’s words do not reflect a religious calling, but an existential call to action that he is able to satisfy through the pursuit of technological innovation. The primary motivations for his actions are clearly: 1) a desire for recognition (“I want to make a machine that will be proud of me”); and 2) the denial of death (“I’m sad about death…and I wish there was some way around it”). Hillis’s words are not inspired by myth or religion, but by a cultural hero system that views technological production as an end in itself. Like myth and religion, technological innovation and the sublime rhetorics of “progress” that accompany it serve primarily to mitigate the terror of human finitude. Rather than attempting to fit such rhetorics within a religious or mythical paradigm, it may be more productive to consider them in the broader context of “culture,” as understood by Becker. In so doing, we may develop a better understanding of how contemporary cultural industries, which play a role heretofore dominated by religious and mythical narrative, are able to program consciousness.

Terror Management Theory

 
The contemporary political inflection of the word terror has no doubt led to an increase in book sales for psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg. Their groundbreaking study, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, is not about the 9/11 terrorists at all, but about psychological and existential implications of having a finite body matched with an infinite symbolic system for representing reality. The authors touch on this distinction when they introduce their theory of terror management, which emerges directly from the texts of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker:
 

Terrorism, as the word implies, capitalizes on the human capacity to experience terror. Terror is, in turn, a uniquely human response to the threat of annihilation. Terror management theory is about how humans cope, not with the imminent threat of extermination but with the awareness that such threats are ubiquitous and will all eventually succeed. Death will be our ultimate fate. How then do we manage this potential for terror?
 

(8)⁵

Terror Management Theory has led to the publication of over 300 peer-reviewed articles in psychology journals, documenting a range of experiments that test the hypotheses of Ernest Becker and have been inspired by his interdisciplinary work. Typically, these experiments involve placing participants in a state of “mortality salience,” and then studying their behaviours in controlled situations. What these experiments have proven, above all, is that individuals who are reminded of their own mortality, either consciously or subliminally, cling to their cultural beliefs more readily than do control groups, and are more apt to reject cultures that are potentially at odds with their own. Such experiments have been adapted recently by the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo, where we are attempting to identify whether technoculture, defined by a constantly renewed desire for gadgetry and a strong belief in technological progress, can itself be viewed as an immortality ideology, a terror management system for a generation raised on computer games, chatting, and iPods.

 
This brings us back to the discussion of myth and religion, both of which serve as “management systems” against the awareness of death and ever-present existential terror. One way in which myth and religion conquer terror is by bringing us closer to death, but only within the safe confines of a controlled narrative, or more specifically through ritual. As Mosco suggests in The Digital Sublime, what makes the sublime pleasurable is that it gives us a brief “near-death experience,” conveniently packaged to create the illusion that we can skirt death.⁶ This concept is explored by Fukuyama, but it is examined in greater detail and depth by Becker.
 
Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death (1973) outlines an ambitious explanation of the human condition that is based on a very simple concept: all human cultures (including those rooted in religious and mythical metanarratives) might be viewed as “hero systems” that are devised to counter the anxiety caused by knowledge of our inevitable deaths. While this may not come as a surprise to social psychologists, the application of this idea to cultural criticism and media theory remains to be explored. Today, as Vincent Mosca would no doubt agree, technoculture itself is a hero system, and it mediates the denial of death in a number of ways, from the sense of belonging one achieves through mere ownership of an iPod (an ironic sense, given the alienating effect of this device) to the hope of achieving immortality through gene therapy and other medical technologies. Our awareness of our own “being towards death” has led humans to concoct ingenious antidotes, from elaborate myths and religions to Call of Duty 4.⁷ In late capitalist culture, mythic morality tales and religious rites have given way to the calculating infinitude of Moore’s Law. As Sherry Turkle suggests, “as a computational object,” the computer holds out “a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops” (87). For critics of contemporary technoculture, the technological sublime is the heart of the matter. Technoscientific research and development face us with an immense, complex, and terrifyingly sublime array of possibilities; terrifying if only because these possibilities open up before us without warning, leading to what Stiegler, carefully echoing Heidegger, calls a state of “ill-being” or malaise. In Stiegler’s terms, our technocultural situation asks us to “identify what it is we want, given the immense possibilities that are irresistibly open to us. . . , and we must admit that we do not know what we want, while at the same time, as Nietzsche understood so well, we cannot not want. This is the meaning of ill-being and ontological indifference” (TT3 296).
 
This critique of technological being, like much of Stiegler’s work, comes not only from Nietzsche but from Heidegger. More precisely, Stiegler’s work, particularly Technics and Time, is a corrective of Heidegger. For Heidegger, living technologically means that we are constantly called on to outstrip nature, including the inevitability of our death. Technology and death are linked, then, in that the ultimate goal of technological being is to overcome the inevitability of our “natural” horizon, our finitude. Heidegger describes this technological imperative as an “impossibility”⁸ that we impose on nature:
 

The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows. The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. . . . Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus impossible.
 

(“Who” 108)

The language of “outstripping” or overstepping nature requires one to have a ground zero conception of nature as something distinct from humanity, technology, or culture. Not surprisingly, critiques of Heidegger begin with his romantic conception of the pre-modern world as something pure and untouched, and end even less surprisingly, by finding Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party relevant to this vision.

 
Stiegler, while refusing to do away with Heidegger’s theories altogether, challenges the conception of technological being as something manifestly “modern.” According to Stiegler, “technics is the history of being itself” (TT1 10). The very definition of the term “human,” or more precisely, the “invention of the human,” is in itself something technical. In Stiegler’s terms, “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” (TT1 141). The tool, and more specifically the flint cutting tool, represents for Stiegler a uniquely human capacity for “anticipation.” Anticipation of the tool’s utility for a given task leads to the making of the tool, just as anticipation of the repetition of this task leads the human to keep and reuse the tool. But perhaps most importantly for Stiegler, the capacity to anticipate is also a curse, for it gives man the foreknowledge of his own death. That is why, for Stiegler, “To ask the question of the birth of the human is to pose the question of the ‘birth of death’ or of the relation to death” (135). In this sense, Stiegler agrees with Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as “being towards death,” tying it to a “primordial situation” that is at once technological and thanatological.
 

Between god and beast, neither beast nor god, neither immortal nor prone to perish, sacrificial beings, mortals are also and for the same reasons nascent, bestowing meaning, and “active.”. . . a technical activity that characterizes all humanity as such, that is, all mortality, can plunge out of control. To be active can mean nothing but to be mortal.
 

(198)

It is in this capacity for humanity to “plunge out of control” that Stiegler erects his apocalyptic critique of contemporary technoculture.

 
Unlike Heidegger, then, Stiegler does not consider the question of human finitude in terms of “impossibility,” but in terms of “immense possibility,” which opens up before us today by means of genetic engineering, for example. But this “immense possibility,” a virtual infinitude of being, is also opened up by the adoption of avatars and multiple identities made possible by digital technologies. Becker approaches the question of human finitude in terms that are strikingly similar to Stiegler’s. He alludes to the human capacity for anticipation as the curse of a creature, to echo Kierkegaard, that is suspended between angel and beast — a creature endowed with the ability to make tools and invent an infinite symbolic system of communication, but also with a palpable sense of its own finitude. “What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal?” asks Becker, in his typically unabashed speciesist fashion. “It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all of this yet to die” (Denial 87). Unlike Stiegler, Becker does not suggest that humans are primordially technological beings. But Becker shares with Stiegler an understanding of the human as a being defined by its motivation, a primal motivation, to move beyond itself, or in Heidegger’s terms, to outstrip itself. Following Kierkegaard, Becker suggests that people deal with the terrifying knowledge of death by erecting systems of organization to give value and meaning to their lives. Becker refers to this organizational activity as the fashioning of character armor, which is a prosthetic image in itself, “the arming of the personality so that it can maneuver in a threatening world” (Angel 83). As I argue below, today the denial of death is mediated primarily by an unbridled faith in technological progress and by a donning of what might be called digital armor. In Stiegler’s terms,
 

today the issue is absolutely that of humanity’s demise—which is also a way of talking about the death of God and of “the last man,” since the real possibility challenging us today, appreciably practicable, is the last evolutionary stage of technics: the possibility of an artificial human being who is neither “last man” nor “overman.”
 

(TT2 149)

But how did we reach the point where we are willing to program our own demise for the sake of a calculated, “artificial” immortality? An understanding of technoculture must entail a study of human attitudes toward death, as well as an understanding of the role that terror plays in human behaviour on a daily basis.

 
The case of Brandon Crisp, discussed above, is only one in a number of technology-related deaths that caught the media’s attention in the past few years. These deaths include those of many South Korean game addicts and, more pertinently here, a terrifying trend of copycat school shooters following in the steps of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people in the 1998 Columbine High School Massacre before taking their own lives. The terrorist acts in these cases are explicitly technological, or even “cyber,” because they involve the perpetrators’ use of media to rehearse or to promote their exploits in a desperate plea for recognition. These tragic events cast a light on the nature of technocultural behaviour.
 

Recognition and Thymos

 
In the midst of Cho Seung Hui’s fateful shooting spree at Virginia Tech in April 2006, Jamal Albarghouti, a fellow VTech student, made a heroic decision to run into the war zone, rather than away from it. Armed not with a Glock (Cho’s weapon of choice), but with a Nokia N70 cell phone, Albarghouti ignored the warnings of police officers to capture digital video footage suitable for upload to CNN’s iReport page. Albarghouti’s ghastly, I would even say sublime, handheld video of a campus under siege concludes with a terrifying scream. It is not the scream of the gunman or of his assailants, but the scream of a police officer urging the phone-toting student to get out of the way so that the law enforcers could conduct their business. What was Albarghouti’s motivation? Albarghouti’s rush toward immortality was not spurred by myth or religion, but by the possibility of a brief appearance on CNN. Like the contestants on reality TV programs, Albarghouti demonstrates that, thanks to the omnipotence of American media, even those of us on the sidelines can cash in on the promise of celebrity that is waved in front of us on a daily basis.
 
In response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, freelance journalist Mark Steyn suggested that the events of that day evidence a growing “culture of passivity,” populated by “selectively infantilized” twentysomethings. Steyn’s argument, which jives very well with the NRA’s agenda, expresses outrage at the fact that not a single student stood up to Cho. This “passivity,” as Steyn calls it, “is nothing more than an “existential threat to a functioning society.” But Jamal Albarghouti’s courageous actions suggest that Steyn’s accusations are misdirected. The twentysomethings of technoculture are indeed willing to sacrifice themselves—but not for the reasons that Steyn would expect. Heroism for many twentysomethings is not motivated by mythology, religion, nation, family, or some vague sense of humanity, but by what Stiegler calls a “hyperindustrial” culture characterized by the blind consumption of media artifacts. Both Cho and Albarghouti were motivated by a desire for recognition and the heroic denial of death, and their actions were all played out in the context of technological consumption. As Cho set out to become a media superstar by annihilating the VTech campus, Albarghouti was determined to capture these events forever in video, providing proof of Friedrich Kittler’s maxim: “what the machine gun annihilated, the camera made immortal” (124). Of course, Cho had his own plans for media immortality, which I discuss below, and he certainly knew how to wield a camera (Kleinfeld).⁹ But these two types of heroic shootings—one very real, with painfully physical consequences, and one virtual, geared toward disembodiment and simulation— are indicative of the shift in death denial strategies that has taken place with the increasing technologization of culture.
 
One of the primary tenets of Ernest Becker’s work, based on the theories of philosophers and psychologists including Friedrich Nietzsche and William James, is that human behaviour is driven not only by a denial of death, but also by an ongoing yearning for recognition, for heroism even. Becker’s use of the word heroism, rather than of the more common term self-esteem, allows him to draw on literary and cultural history in his analysis of culture. The term heroism also reflects the idea that self-esteem, following Kojève/Hegel, is in effect achieved primarily through recognition from others, through the sense that one is an individual of value in a meaningful world.¹⁰ Becker uses the term heroism to account for a spectrum of human behaviors. The superhuman feats of Greek mythological figures would be at one end of this spectrum, while modern society’s epic consumption of consumer goods and media artifacts would be at the other. Heroism is a relative concept, rooted in a set of beliefs shared by any given culture, from a pre-Columbian tribe of Native Americans to the bands of “netizens” in today’s contemporary technoculture. As Becker argues, it is by means of a “cultural hero-system,” a recognition from others based on a consensual set of values, that we hope to transcend death:
 

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
 

(“Beyond” 5)

The concept of “culture” itself, then, is defined for Becker in terms of heroism. Raymond Williams’s statement in a 1958 essay that “culture is ordinary” and that “every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings” (6), is reflected quite clearly in the work of Becker. In Becker’s terms, there is nothing “high” about culture, which he understands in terms of a “hero system” devised to deny the inevitability of death.¹¹

 
Becker, like Nietzsche and others before him, believed that contemporary culture offers very little opportunity for authentic heroism, and so we have to seek it in more mundane ways:
 

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.
 

(Denial 4)

This throbbing ache for a sense of specialness has been intensified in the western world by the dissolution of traditional hero systems on the one hand (religion, the family, nationhood, etc.), and the propagation of mass media heroes on the other hand, including the everyday heroes of reality TV shows and YouTube. Heroism today is rooted in the consumption of media images and objects. In 1971, Becker suggested that “people no longer draw their power from the invisible dimension, but from the intensive manipulation of very visible Ferraris, and other material gadgets” (Birth 125). Had he written this sentence in the early 2000s, he might have replaced the word “Ferrari” with “iPod” or even “Nokia N70.”

 
It is surprising the Becker only alludes in passing to Hegel, although he is certainly aware of the centrality of recognition in the master/slave dynamic. In his authoritative study of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève suggests that
 

all human, anthropogenetic Desire—the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality—is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” And the risk of life by which human reality “comes to light” is a risk for the sake of such a Desire. Therefore, to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.”
 

(7)

Stiegler takes on Kojève more directly in work, borrowed from Gilbert Simondon, where the importance of recognition within Dasein is manifest in a discussion of “individuation.” Individuation is at once singular and collective, a process through which we differentiate ourselves from others while sharing social space, and most importantly time, with others:

Dasein is time insofar as it is being-futural: anticipation, improbability, différance—both deferring in time (anticipating) and being different, affirming a difference qua a “unique time,” a singularity. . . . This individuation belongs, however, and in the same movement, to a community: that of mortals.
 

(TT1 229)

For Stiegler, Kojève, Becker, and numerous other philosophers before them (think of Spinoza’s definition of man as a “social animal”), recognition of the self by others is a key component of what it means to be human. Contemporary technologies both facilitate and hinder that recognition.

 
Francis Fukuyama, following Kojève/Hegel, suggests that the quest for recognition is “the driving force behind human history” (162), and develops this idea into a millenarian thesis that has been widely contested. What we should rescue from Fukuyama is the concept of thymos, taken from Plato, which sheds light on the relationship between self-esteem, recognition, and cultural hero systems. Thymos is most commonly translated as “spiritedness,” and is used by Socrates first of all to characterize the guardians of the republic, those who are willing to risk their lives to protect the city. Fukuyama repeats the story of Leontius, which Socrates uses as a case study in the concept of thymos:
 

He desired to look, but at the same time he was disgusted and made himself turn away: and for a while he struggled and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”
 

(qtd. in Fukuyama 164)

Becker might suggest here that Leontius is chafing against his “character armor,” that is, struggling to remain within the bounds of his cultural hero system. Similarly, Fukuyama proposes that Leontius’s anger is a manifestation of his inner sense of pride, which is threatened by his lack of self-control. The anger of Leontius, directed at himself, is a result of recognizing that his actions would not be held in high regard by his countrymen. This angry sense of pride, suggests Fukuyama, reflects a sensitivity to the value that one sets on oneself based on cultural norms, and this placing of value on oneself within the context of a cultural system helps define thymos. “Thymos provides an all-powerful emotional support to the process of valuing and evaluating, and allows human beings to overcome their most powerful natural instincts for the sake of what they believe is right or just” (171).

 
With this in mind, I am compelled to ask the following: To what degree are the actions of Jamal Albarghouti, CNN’s phone video hero, comparable to those of Leontius? This question is not a transhistorical tactic, but an attempt to examine Albarghouti’s psychological moment in the context of its specific cultural and material/technological circumstances. What motivated Albarghouti to run into the fray? Should he, like Leontius, have damned his wretched eyes (or cell phone camera) for zooming in on the massacre? Or is Albarghouti a modern mythical hero, motivated by a spiritedness, a thymos, a megalothymia even, as Fukuyama might suggest, exclusive to technoculture? To put it bluntly, what sort of cultural context makes Albarghouti a hero?
 
Recalling Plato’s guardians of the city, thymos is best satisfied by risking one’s life in defense of something one holds in high esteem. Historically speaking, war has been the ultimate catalyst and facilitator of thymotic activity. Like Becker, Fukuyama suggests that such activity has been redirected in late capitalist culture toward the pursuit of financial wellbeing, fuelled by an ever accelerating production and marketing of consumer goods, thanks to technological progress. Heroism is now mass-marketed in ways that ensure that the “guardians of the republic” fend off the enemy not in hand-to-hand combat, but by going to the mall or having multiple messages in their inbox. People now fill their thymotic needs by shopping, blogging, and playing video games. It is this lack of physical risk, so important to Kojève/Hegel’s formulation of heroic recognition, that leads Fukuyama to conclude that we are witnessing The End of History and the Last Man. In Becker’s terms, which echo those of the Frankfurt School that inspired him,¹² “something happened in history which gradually despoiled the average man, transformed him from an active, creative being into the pathetic consumer who smiles proudly from our billboards that his armpits are odor-free around the clock” (Escape 61).
 
The pursuit of consumption for the sake of consumption, which is characterized today by a radically unequal distribution of wealth, is a result of what Fukuyama calls megalothymia; not just the desire for recognition, but the desire to dominate or even “own” others, as reflected in the lingo of COD4 gamers. The ultimate goal of this heroic pursuit is the achievement of immortality. Megalothymia can be satisfied vicariously and temporarily, for example, through engagement in sport,¹³ from being an enthusiastic spectator of the World Cup¹⁴ and the Superbowl to actually participating in challenging physical activities such as marathon running, or even Ultimate Fighting. “In the social world,” Becker suggests, “one continually pushes against death in sport-car driving, mountain climbing, stock speculation, gambling: but always in a more-or-less controlled way, so as not to give in completely to the sheer accidentality and callousness of life, but to savor the thrill of skirting it” (Birth 175). From theme park rides to bungee jumping, the heroic and sublime denial of death is now readily available for purchase, accompanied by a documentation of the event in digital photography or video for mass distribution on social networking sites, proof that the experience really happened. “The fight to the death for recognition” that characterizes human consciousness (Kojève) has been commoditized, rendered programmable by the cultural industry. As Stiegler suggests, the result is a radical change in the very formation of consciousness. With the increasing industrialization of culture, individuals are “deprived of the possibility of deciding how [they] want to live,” and this results in “a reversal and a denial of what Hegel described as the master-slave dialectic” (Snail 39). In technoculture, a person is threatened by the possibility of losing the ability to “participate in the trans-formation of her milieu by individuating herself within it” (39). The apotheosis of technocultural heroism is the individual who is “famous for being famous,” as evidenced by multiple friendings, Twitter trending, headlines in gossip sites, and most importantly, as I argue below, in a TV spinoff about nothing more than his or her day-to-day life.
 
As Fukuyama suggests, the ordinary heroes of these mass-marketed, consumable victories may recognize the emptiness of such existential projects:
 

As they sink into the leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question.
 

(329)

The “open question” is not answered, as Fukuyama might expect, by the waging of war or a return to religious “roots.” It is answered instead when a megalothymic person like Jamal Albarghouti throws himself into the scene of a massacre to feed a news program. More tragically, the limits of “metaphorical wars” are revealed when young people who have heretofore satisfied their desire for heroic action in an on-screen simulation wield real weapons against an unsuspecting enemy. The violent acts discussed below put into focus Stiegler’s prognosis that a culture of “unlimited organization of consumption” leads ultimately to “suicidal behaviour, both individual and collective.”

Hypermediated Heroism

 
On the morning of December 27, 2004, after playing 36 consecutive hours of the computer game World of Warcraft, 13 year-old Zhang Xiaoyi jumped from the top of his family’s 24-story apartment building. He left behind a suicide letter, explaining that his actions were an attempt “to join the heroes of the game he worshipped” (Xinhua). The boy’s parents filed a lawsuit against the game manufacturer, and the incident was referenced by the press and government of China as evidence of a growing computer addiction problem in the country. A 2005 report by the China Youth Association for Internet Development suggests that 13.2 percent of China’s 16.5 million youth are computer addicts (Xinhua). In response to this problem, the Chinese government backed the creation of an online game called “Chinese Heroes,” which promotes traditional values among the youth. According to a game designer, “the heroes gather on ‘Hero Square,’ where gamers can click their statues to learn about their experiences and carry out tasks like moving bricks and catching raindrops on a building site. Gamers will be asked about the heroes’ life stories to earn scores” (Xinhua). It seems that “Square Heroes” would be a more appropriate title to this game, as reflected in the reaction of a 14 year-old boy interviewed by the Xinhua News Agency: “The game sounds boring to me, it’s a turn-off.” The game produced similar reactions among other test subjects at the Beijing Internet Addiction Treatment Center, who found it “too simple” or even “comical.” These players prefer the action, violence, and consumption built into popular role-playing games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), which has enjoyed huge popularity around the world. As the director of the treatment center attests, “If hero games do not focus on killing and domination, gamers will definitely not play them” (Xinhua). The number of Internet-addicted youth in China has almost doubled since 2005, and the Chinese government is backing its infamous Internet addiction boot camps, rather than promoting games with traditional content.¹⁵ The camps themselves are waging a brutal war of the spirit, countering the heroic action system of technoculture with traditional Chinese values.
 
The story of Zhang Xiaoyi is a parable of the way media technologies have evolved into cultural hero systems in their own right. The World of Warcraft, like any other culture, comes complete with “its own shape, its own purposes, its own meaning” (Williams 6). Of course, one difference between WoW and an indigenous tribe or a medieval hamlet is that WoW is experienced on a screen, through a process of disembodiment and tele-action. What makes the Warcraft world especially appealing as a society, besides the fact that it offers everyone the opportunity to be king, is that its purposes and meanings are clear-cut—they are provided in the form of a rule-set by which all players abide in order to play the game. As Sherry Turkle suggests, “At the heart of the computer culture is the idea of constructed, ‘rule-governed’ worlds” (66). The case of Zhang Xiaoyi demonstrates what happens when this disembodied culture of “rules and simulation” (66) clashes with the physical, meat-based culture of the real world. For a player whose hero system exists onscreen, life off-screen—with its unpredictability, lack of a clear rule-set, antiquated value system, and scant opportunity for heroic action—can be a grave disappointment, or at the very least, crushingly “boring.”
 
To fend off this boredom, some players at Internet cafés in South Korea may log 10-15 hours a day in front of WoW or EverQuest (endearingly nicknamed “Evercrack” by aficionados), breaking only to use the toilets. In August 2005, a man from the city of Taegu died from heart failure related to exhaustion after playing the game Starcraft for 50 hours straight (BBC). This feat was nearly as heroic as that of a 24 year-old man from Kwangju who died of the same condition after playing for 86 hours straight in October 2002 (Kim). Such incidents, which are reported on an increasingly regular basis, point to a new form of heroism rooted entirely in digital culture. Outside of South Korea, which hosted the first three World Cyber Games, and where game players are celebrated as national heroes, these deaths seem senseless. Media critics in North America are likely to lay blame for these deaths on parents who allow their infantilized children to spend most of their waking hours in front of a screen. Parents, on the other hand, are likely to blame (and sue) the video game companies, who design games specifically for what Turkle calls their “holding power” (30). But very seldom do critics or parents blame the culture that values technology, wealth, and consumption above all else; a culture in which heroism can, and perhaps must, be purchased; a culture in which value is meted out in shiny boxes packed with circuits and in abstract bits of code that scroll by horizontally at the bottom of a television newscast. In his critique of Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history at the hands of capitalism, Vincent Mosca suggests that post-industrial society, fueled by a capitalist ideology that has no “moral sensibility or any sense of limits,” is “far from the technological sublime” (67). But it is precisely this lack of limitations that makes capitalism sublime in and of itself — like myth and religion, capitalism is an ideology of infinitude, not through the promise of eternal life, but, as Stiegler points out, through an overbearing “imperative to adopt the new” (Acting 44).
 
Faced with this protean, consumerist heroic action system, there are very few opportunities for legitimate heroism, unless one holds out for the promise of reality TV, the lottery, or one of the endless draws for the latest iPod. These are common desires, which people palliate by purchasing the same consumer goods as many others and watching the same television programs as others, at the same time. According to Stiegler, this way of being results in a liquidation of self-esteem, an inability to distinguish one’s self from others, resulting from a global program of monoculturization mobilized by hypercapitalism. This programming of desires, suggests Stiegler, “will end in the exhaustion of conscious desire, which is founded on singularity and narcissism as an image of an otherness of myself” (60). Stiegler notes that this loss of self-esteem, resulting from an inability to distinguish oneself from others and thereby achieve recognition, will lead to catastrophic behaviours:
 

The liquidation of primordial narcissism, leading to a loss of self-esteem (the self, losing its diachrony, can no longer inspire in itself the desire for self), authorizes all transgressions, insofar as it is also the liquidation of the we as such, which becomes a herdlike they, and which in turn produces the great political catastrophes of the twentieth century.
 

(55)

While Becker does not focus specifically on media technologies, he also blames the late capitalist law of consumption on an ominous “crisis of heroism”:

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times. We are living a crisis of heroism that reaches into every aspect of our social life: the dropouts of university heroism, of business and career heroism, of political-action heroism; the rise of anti-heroes, those who would be heroic each in his own way or like Charles Manson with his special ‘family,’ those whose tormented heroics lash out at the system that itself has ceased to represent agreed heroism.
 

(Denial 6-7)

The anti-heroic Charles Mansons of today, a group that includes increasingly younger members such as Cho Seung-Hui, may attempt to construct a “family” online, and when they fail, or become disillusioned by the lack of fulfillment such families may provide, they turn on the people and institutions that failed to recognize them in the non-digital world.

The Digital Anti-Hero

 
In what might be described as a Marxist critique of his peer group, Sebastian Bosse posted the following message on LiveJournal before engaging in a copycat shooting spree at his German high school:
 

If you realize you’ll never find happiness in your life and the reasons for this pile up day by day, the only option you have is to disappear from this life. . . . [We live in a] world in which money rules everything, even in school it was only about that. You had to have the latest cell phone, the latest clothes and the right ‘friends.’ If you didn’t, you weren’t worth any attention. I loathe these people, no, I loathe people.
 

(Jüttner)

This post forecasts the videotaped suicide message left by Cho Seung-Hui, which rails against “rich kids” and their “debaucheries”:

Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

What Bosse and Cho manifest in their suicide pleas can be called in Stiegler’s terms a form of “symbolic misery,” an “a-significance—the limit of significance, beyond insignificance and as an unbearable limit—to the point where it leads to an act of massacre” (55). Stiegler uses these terms to describe the motivation behind the actions of Richard Durn, who expressed his lost sense of self, his “inability to signify,” in a journal that was reprinted in Le Monde. But Durn didn’t ask for his thoughts to be published. This distinguishes him from a generation that is deeply embedded in the technocultural milieu, a generation for whom the promise of recognition, of significance, comes in the form of networked computer games, blogs, and other forms of “social media.”

 
While video games have been the technological scapegoat for school shootings over the past few years, very few critics have pointed a finger at the potentially dangerous rehearsal platform facilitated by online journals, blogs, personal web sites, and even chat. The most crucial clues in the death of Brandon Crisp, for example, are not buried in the violent actions coded into Counter-Strike, but in the social interactions that the online version of the game offered Crisp. Social networking media, rather than computer games, should be the object of attention for those who are interested in studying, and intervening in, terrorist-style school violence. Before committing their infamous exploits, all of the school shooters since Dylan Klebold and Ryan Harris spent a great deal of time rehearsing their violent actions and trying on their heroic identities with the help of media technologies. Eric Harris posted elaborate death threats to fellow students on his web site, and he and Klebold made several videotapes of themselves fiddling with an arsenal of weapons in preparation for the attack on Columbine High School. More recently, Kimveer Gill posted what amounts to a storyboard of gun and knife-toting self-portraits at vampirefreaks.com, before engaging in a shooting spree at Montreal’s Dawson College. Only a few weeks later, Sebastian Bosse, whose website portrayed him as a military hero/trench coat-wearing avenger, shot up his high school in Emsdetten, Germany. Bosse took Gill’s storyboarding technique one step further and published a vengeful and self-vindicating video on YouTube, which seems to have been inspired as much by Gill as by Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver.
 
The story of Cho Seung-Hui follows the same general pattern, but as suggested by Andrew Stephen, Cho represents a new kind of technological anti-hero.one who rejects the ersatz hero games of online social networking, and understands how to get straight to the bottom of our increasingly swampy media ecology:
 

What singled out Cho Seung-Hui was that he was the first post-YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and IM disaffected youth of his kind – a product of 21st-century technology, rather than just that of the 20th. From his addiction to a ghastly, violent video game called Counter-Strike in his teens, he had moved on: he knew exactly how to produce 28 QuickTime video clips and 43 photos of himself, aware that by sending them to NBC, his first and last moments of stardom would not only reach the MM (as the mainstream media are nowadays derisively called by his generation), but would also be flashed around the world in seconds via YouTube and the like, allowing him to leave his own brief but indelible mark on history. Manifestly delusional though he may have been, he knew exactly how to look a camera in the eye and address it like a pro.

Cho’s strategy of media manipulation reflects the existential motivation of many in his computer-savvy generation. To be significant, one must “make history,” and history is made on television, where a captive audience shares a synchronized experience on the nightly news and other psychotechnological programming. “From the moment you adhere temporally to the same channel of information every day, ‘meeting’ at the same time, you adopt the same history of events as everyone who watches these broadcasts” (Stiegler, Acting 61).

 
What many disaffected youth today crave is not the mundane and mostly text-based, day-to-day, passing recognition of “friends” and “contacts” on social networking sites; nor is it even the quaint appearance of one’s images on a blog or one’s DIY video on YouTube. These extensions of the self can result in a crushing sense of anonymity as one discovers that his or her “inbox is empty,” or that his or her message to the world has resulted in only a handful of “views” or “hits.” The chronological progression from personal web site to blog to YouTube as seen in the media artifacts of the school shooters outlined here merely charts an ever-shifting rehearsal stage designed to perpetuate an illusion of heroic recognition. These violent rehearsals of the self on proliferating, asynchronous social media networks are merely a staging for the ultimate performance on a programming network. This group’s megalothymia is itself programmed around that rare and spectacular form of celebrity that only the “MM” can offer. Anything else is boring by comparison.
 
In his critique of Internet culture, Heideggerian philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus suggests that the radical flexibility of identity offered by the Internet might be less of a liberating experience than it is a superhighway to boredom, or even nihilism. Like Mosca, Noble, and others, he notes that certain enthusiasts of telepresence (from chat rooms to robotically facilitated surgery-at-a-distance) celebrate the idea that “we are on the way to sloughing off our situated bodies and becoming ubiquitous and, ultimately, immortal” (50). Although Dreyfus is writing before the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, he seems to be right on target in suggesting that the Internet fosters ubiquitous communities of opinionated selves that are desperate for recognition, or even immortality, and willing to reinvent themselves infinitely in its pursuit. But this search for recognition, Dreyfus suggests, lacks a ground in any material reality or local practices, and will thus only lead to disillusionment. Rooting his arguments in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, who was an adamant critic of uncommitted “coffee house politics,” Dreyfus suggests that the net result of the Net is a widespread “flattening” effect, producing an extensive network of desperate, would-be heroes, who are “only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere” (79). A simple Google search today on pretty much any topic will reveal a populace of desperate individuals eagerly broadcasting their innermost thoughts and daily travails, as if to say, “Look at me! Acknowledge me! Make me your hero!” Blog culture is an ideal breeding ground for megalothymia, serving a generation (or two) reared on the promise of celebrity.
 
What is lacking in this disembodied culture, Dreyfus argues, is any real presence of “risk:”
 

Like a simulator, the Net manages to capture everything but the risk. Our imaginations can be drawn in, as they are in playing games and watching movies, and no doubt, if we are sufficiently involved to feel we are taking risks, such simulations can help us acquire skills, but in so far as games work by temporarily capturing our imaginations in limited domains, they cannot simulate serious commitments in the real world. . . . The temptation is to live in a world of stimulating images and simulated commitments and thus to lead a simulated life.
 

(88)

The achievement of heroism, as we have already seen in the work of Kojève, Becker, and Fukuyama, necessarily entails physical risk, the willful skirting of mortal danger for the sake of recognition. Social networking sites provide a relatively risk-free opportunity (even if we do include the associated risks of obesity and carpal tunnel syndrome) in which to achieve recognition, for example by making bold and perhaps risky claims, or by taking on heroic postures. But claims made in these simulated environments are not necessarily manifested off-screen, and hence there is relatively little at stake in being a “risky blogger.” Likewise, computer games can simulate risk very effectively, but they cannot provide the intensity of risk experienced in the physical world when the body is situated in a precarious position, be it on the battlefield, on the city street, or in the classroom.¹⁶ The death by gaming South Koreans mentioned above, who discovered a way to make video game play physically risky, have achieved, perversely, what many gamers are really after: an authentic, embodied existential action. The same can be said for Cho, Bosse, and Gill, whose desire for recognition could only be satisfied “offline,” in the world of flesh and bullets.

Coda

 
The only confirmed sighting of Brandon Crisp before his death was on a rail-to-trail path, three hours after he left home. The witness noted that Crisp appeared to be having trouble with his bicycle, which he abandoned soon after this sighting. This scene is worthy of reflection: a hero exiled from his disembodied digital realm, crouches dejectedly over his bicycle, helplessly confronting the inert and very palpable broken toy that had once propelled him forward. This scene presents the impossible reconciliation of the real and virtual worlds through which we wander as both object and idea. A rigorous and far-reaching confrontation of this impossibility must be approached through a collaborative reflection that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
 
The goal of this discussion has not been to suggest that role-playing games, social networking, and digitally broadcast mass media are to blame for the suicidal behaviours described here. Rather, I have attempted to illustrate, through the use of high-profile examples, the role that media technologies play in the existential pursuit of recognition and death denial, as explored by Becker, Stiegler, Kojève, and others. A broad and profound understanding of digital media as existential media can only come through a merging of disciplinary discourses, including social psychology, critical theory, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. As mentioned briefly in my description of the Critical Media Lab’s research in Terror Management Theory, there is a specific need for psychological and cognitive studies that apply critical theories of media toward the investigation of technology’s role in human behaviour. I hope that this mode of “applied media theory” will both test and temper apocalyptic media theories, including those that I have endorsed here, which should not be rejected outright for their rhetorical tactics.