ce against its simulation. For there are other subjects of electronic culture out there who prefer the simulated body and a virtual world. Indeed, they actually believe the body (contemptuously called "meat" or "wetware") is best lived only as an image or as information, and that the only hope for negotiating one's presence in our electronic life-world is to exist on a screen or to digitize and "download" one's consciousness into the neural nets of a solely electronic existence. Such an insubstantial electronic presence can ignore AIDS, homelessness, hunger, torture, and all the other ills the flesh is heir to outside the image and the datascape. Devaluing the physically lived body and the concrete materiality of the world, electronic presence suggests that we are all in danger of becoming merely ghosts in the machine....
