Technoporn

Prospero's Books is part of an extensive discursive shift that includes aspects of cyberpunk, "technoporn," extreme versions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality theory, and other attempts to reconfigure desire and sexuality in terms of human/machine interaction.

In his Author's Introduction to the French edition of his technoporn masterpiece, Crash (1975), he describes what it was like to write fiction in the cultural context of the late 1950s: “a world where the call sign of Sputnik I could be heard on one's radio like the advance beacon of a new universe".

The Toronto-based queer fanzine is devoted to campy, technoporn burlesques of Star Trek: The Next Generation's “Borg” episodes.

Colin Powell prostituted himself at the UN with technoporn including CIA satellite photos of supposed Iraqi WMD facilities.

Buried amongst all the technoporn and science-as-psychedelia were a few shots worth salvaging.

If we are to survive, we mest exorcize the demons of our haunted childhood, and grow out of our fascination with "technoporn" — gleaming weaponry and beautiful explosions .

In addition to the ways in which gear-as-fetish indexes the obsessions that studio workers have with gear (Meintjes 2012) or the 'technoporn' framing of studio gear within magazines and advertising (Bennett 2012), we should understand gear fetishes with regards to ways in which 'they mystify unequal relations of exchange by being attributed autonomous agency or productivity' (Hornborg 2014: 121).

Desire and difference are organ-ized and hermetically sealed in a closed circuit of technoporn.

This includes research that examines the role that adolescent "tinkering" plays in developing mechanical interests and aptitudes; male and female patterns of participation in Internet-based communications; the prevalence of masculinist "search and destroy" narratives in video and computer games; the masculine subcultures of computing, including the close links between technophilia and technoporn; and the cultivation of gendered differences in consumer desire in technomarketing.

Technology itself is sometimes eroticized within the subcultures of elite science, creating a kind of technoporn "that rouses prurient interest, demeans the powerless, eroticizes domination," and sets up boundaries that signal they are off-limits to women and other outsiders.