Sally Wyatt (1)

Department of Innovation Studies, University of East London

Maryland House, Manbey Park Road, London E15 1EY

email: s.m.e.wyatt@uel.ac.uk

'The whole universe is probably one almighty power station,' said Peter Fisher - more patiently, for my sake. 'We speak of the current, or flow, of electricity, but that is a metaphor.'

'Well then,' said my father, 'if you electricians take as much of this metaphorical stuff out of the air as it seems you intend to, you will upset the balance of nature. It stands to reason. You are endangering life upon earth. Everything will run down. It will mean the end of civilisation, a return to barbarism.'

'Electricity is not consumed like gas or oil. It does its work and then - well, I suppose you could say it goes on its way, passes on.'

Mother was looking more than usually puzzled. I knew that this was because she was not sure what a metaphor was. I told her in a quiet voice that a metaphor was describing something in terms of something else.

'Why should anyone want to do that?' she asked me.

Peter Fisher was listening. I wished my old teacher Miss Pauline were there to answer for me. I did my best, poorly.

'Either because you cannot find any other way to express what you mean, or in order to make a poetic or colourful effect. Like when you say God is love, or the cats are the very devil.'

Mother turned to Peter Fisher:

'In what way is the flow of electricity a metaphor? What is it really, if not a fluid?'

He breathed deeply. 'Electricity,' he said, 'is a medium of communication between two objects.'

'Or two people?' I asked.

He looked at me. 'In certain circumstances.'

(Glendinning, 1996, pp.15-6)

In this paper, I examine some of the metaphors that are presently being used to describe the Internet in order to understand the perceptions and expectations of some of the actors involved in shaping the Internet. The Internet is not yet a stable technology, in the broadest sense of the term 'technology': its technical features are changing (though not necessarily all of them, nor at the same rate) and its uses are highly variable. There remains a great deal of interpretative flexibility regarding what it is, what problems it can solve and what problems it may create. The Internet is not simply bandwidth and routers and servers; it includes the social relations associated with the production and use of this network of networks. Because of this instability and uncertainty, policy-makers, industry spokespeople, journalists and academic commentators often deploy metaphors in order to convey their image of what the Internet is or might be. The future has to be discussed in terms of the imaginary, in terms of metaphors. Sometimes, today's imaginary becomes tomorrow's lived reality. Therefore, it is important to think about metaphors of the Internet not only because they reveal what different actors think it is but also because they tell us something about what they want it to become. For example, those who use metaphors of consumption generally and shopping malls in particular will devote resources to developing secure exchange mechanisms. Broadcasting metaphors carry with them assumptions about the nature of interaction between audiences and content providers that are more passive than those suggested by interactive role game metaphors, and applications.

The opening extract from Victoria Glendinning's historical novel, Electricity, forces us to reconsider our understanding of the relationship between metaphors on the one hand and science, technology and the real on the other. Glendinning's novel is set in England during the 1880s. Throughout the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century, electricity was conceptualised as a fluid and thus the language used for describing the movement of water was adopted to analyse the movements of electricity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, scientists were less certain of the nature of electricity. If liquids and gases were atomic in structure, then perhaps electricity was. During the same period, there was also much activity about the transmission of sound and the nature of sound waves. Scientists were investigating cathode rays which carried electric charges, but there was uncertainty about whether these most closely resembled oscillating waves, like those identified by Hertz, or whether they were streams of particles. In 1897, J.J. Thomson settled the debate in favour of the latter: electrons flow. Peter Fisher, a major character in Glendinning's novel, is correct to point to the metaphorical nature of discussing electricity in terms of currents and flows. Electricity provides a good example of the recursive relationship between language and the reality it is attempting to describe. Metaphors not only help to make science comprehensible to non-scientists, they can also guide scientific work.

Metaphors are not the sole preserve of poets and writers of magical realism; nor is their use simply an innocent attempt by commentators or politicians to demonstrate their own imaginative capacities or to appeal to the imaginations of their audiences. The previous paragraph demonstrates that metaphors are not only descriptive; they may provide clues to the design intentions of those who use them and as such, they may help to shape the cognitive framework within which actors operate. Metaphors also have a normative dimension; they can be used to help the imaginary become real or true. Friedrich Nietzsche described truth as, '[a] movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths...are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.' (in Breazeale, 1979, p.84). Different social groups use different metaphors to capture and promote their own interests and desires for the future. Highways, railroads, webs, tidal waves, matrices, libraries, shopping malls, village squares and town halls all appear in discussions of the Internet. 'Windows' and 'menus' have already been incorporated into the language of Microsoft users with their misleading suggestions of choice, transparency and openness. Not all metaphors are equal. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson go further than Nietzsche and observe that, '[n]ew metaphors...can have the power to define reality. ... [W]hether in national politics or everyday interaction, people in power get to impose their metaphors.' (1980, p.157) Thus, there are both cognitive and normative dimensions of metaphors which need to be considered: metaphors may convey something about the future functions and technological configurations of the Internet and they may also reveal the political assumptions and aspirations of those who deploy them.

We need to be careful with metaphors. They can help us to comprehend the new, the unseen, the unknown; but they can also mislead - sometimes deliberately - because the kinds of experience they purport to connect may be incommensurate. Terry Eagleton makes this point eloquently, '[b]oth history and nature are matters of process, to be sure; but to over-emphasise this is to risk eliding the distinctions between them in positivist or idealist style. A river does not flow as a sonnet does, nor does time fly like a goose.' (Eagleton, 1997, p.22) The danger of elision is not sufficient reason to eschew either creating or analysing the metaphors at work in our world. Instead it means we need to recall D. McCloskey's advice concerning metaphors in social science: 'Self-consciousness about metaphor would be an improvement on many counts. Most obviously, unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking - which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them.' (1986, p.81, cited in Joerges, 1989, p.48) In an attempt to demonstrate this, I examine two other areas where metaphors are deployed to unrecognised or unforeseen effect. First, I shall return to the description of metaphors provided by Charlotte, the narrator in Victoria Glendinning's novel. Charlotte seems to be suggesting that all use of metaphor is conscious. But, as Nietzsche argues, truth and 'common sense' are what remain when self-consciousness about metaphor has disappeared. By examining economic theory and Gaia theory we shall see both how metaphors can shape our view of the world and what happens when conscious reflection about one's choice of metaphor is no longer present. Only then will I turn to examine two sources of metaphors about the Internet: the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson on the one hand and the fifth anniversary edition of Wired on the other. I shall do this in order to explore what they suggest about the normative order of the future and how we might arrive there.

In the extract from Electricity which introduces this paper, Charlotte describes a metaphor as the description of one thing in terms of another, to create a dramatic effect or because one cannot find any other way. Four explicit metaphors can be found in that extract: electricity as fluids, the universe as power station, supernatural omniscient being as human emotions and animals as other supernatural beings (the latter two draw on and reinforce the dualism of human/animal and good/evil). She also introduces the future metaphorical role of electricity as sexual attraction, crucial for the unfolding of her narrative. (2)

Metaphors are rhetorical figures of speech in two senses, both originating with Aristotle. The first includes all figures of speech which achieve their effect through association, comparison and resemblance. Antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile are all types of metaphor. This is not the dominant usage at present, although this meaning underlies the way we contrast 'metaphorical' with 'literal'. The more common way in which we now use metaphor is, as Charlotte explains, as a figure of speech which compares two things by saying that one is the other. (3) A theory compared to a building becomes a building, and as such acquires the following entailments: theories are constructed (developed) using building blocks (concepts and assumptions) to lay the foundations (evidence), and they can be undermined (subject to critique).

Aristotle's view of metaphor remains, but his additional suggestion that metaphor be used as a source of insight has not been developed within modern philosophy. Metaphor was relegated to the realm of emotion, imagination and subjectivity and thus antithetical to reason, rationality and objectivity. Yet, intellectual thought is nearly always guided by abstraction, in which 'reality' is expressed in terms of entities and their relationships to one another. (Whitehead, 1926) Metaphor is an example of such an intellectual process, and as such it pervades our language and thinking. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) propose a way of moving beyond this particular dichotomy and argue that metaphor can unite imagination and reason.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) begin with Charlotte's definition of a metaphor, but go on to distinguish between three main types: structural, spatial or orientational, and ontological. Structural metaphors are those in which one concept or object is described in terms of another, such as electricity is a fluid. We deploy a variety of structural metaphors for thinking about life: a journey, a story, a game of chance, a cosmic joke. Our choice of metaphor influences not only how we live our lives but also how we read and write biography and autobiography. Mark Stefik (1996) presents a variety of structural metaphors of the Internet: library, post-office, marketplace and 'other' worlds.

Spatial metaphors are amongst the most pervasive in our language as they draw upon fundamental physical experiences such as up-down, in-out, front-back, near-far. Up and down, for example, are associated with emotional, physical, cognitive and moral states: 'she's on a high'; 'wake up'; 'we're engaged in high level intellectual debate'; 'she has high standards'.

Our experience of ourselves and other entities is also a rich source of of the third type of metaphor identified by Lakoff and Johnson - ontological metaphors. This is reflected in our habit of attributing human qualities, especially agency, to non-humans, both animate and inanimate; and in our tendency to think of ourselves in terms of other entities. The Industrial Revolution spawned numerous machine metaphors: 'I'm a bit rusty'; 'we're running out of steam'. Bernward Joerges (1989) suggests that the life-death metaphor organises much social science thinking about industrial technologies. For example, Karl Marx characterises human activity as 'living labour' and machine activity as 'dead labour'; Max Weber distinguishes the 'lifeless machine' of the factory from the 'living machine' of bureaucratic organisation; and Jurgen Habermas contrasts the 'system' with the 'life world'. (pp.31-2)

The development of computers has provided a rich new source of ontological metaphor, reflecting our attempts to understand these powerful machines and our own role in relation to them. The mind/body dualism is sometimes recast as one of software/hardware. Sherry Turkle (1984) observed that computers are the modern inkblot, projective devices for thinking about humans and social organisation. She suggests that children are increasingly defining themselves, 'not with respect to their differences from animals, but by how they differ from computers' (p.313). Computers have memories and are susceptible to viruses and bugs. We now crash, suffer overload and run out of memory. These are all variations of the basic 'mind is machine' and 'computer is organic' metaphors. Jason Lanier (1998), one of the contributors to Wired, writes, '[c]omputation has become the universal metaphor. The brain, the economy, evolution, and politics all feel like computer programs to an awful lot of people, even on the street.' (p.60) (4)

Before discussing emerging and competing metaphors of the Internet, I shall present two examples to illustrate the cognitive and normative implications of using metaphors to guide and structure both social and natural sciences. The first example concerns the role of metaphors from the natural sciences in economic thought; the second concerns 'Gaia' theory, or, as its adherents within the scientific community now prefer, geophysiology.

Within classical economics, the dominant metaphors derive from the mechanical world view of Newtonian physics. Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' and David Ricardo's image of the economic order as a gravitation process are examples of remote forces operating at a distance to maintain a system. Marx used biological metaphors in his discussions of socio-economic transitions in general and technological change in particular. On the whole, however, he rejected Darwinian theories of evolution because of their gradualism and emphasis on struggles for existence. Darwinism was not consistent with his vision of the class struggle, characterised by rupture and dialectical change. Joseph Schumpeter also deployed biological metaphors; his use of mutation as a descriptor of change, for example. He too rejected the Darwinian, 'postulate that a nation, a civilisation, or even the whole of mankind (sic) must show some kind of uniform, unilinear development'. (1934, p.57, cited in Clark and Juma, 1988, p.212)

Alfred Marshall, one of the first neo-classical economists, also adopted some evolutionary metaphors for understanding the selection mechanisms at play in the growth and survival of firms. His views about equilibrium, however, owe more to the laws of thermodynamics than to either Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology. Mainstream economic theory remains committed to the neo-classical model which emphasises short-term, static, equilibrium states. In this model, economic systems are understood as units of production (firms) and units of consumption (households) which exchange goods and services (including labour) in markets at prices which reflect the forces of supply and demand. Because of competition amongst both buyers and sellers, the price mechanism ensures that markets tend to equilibrium. This model of perfect competition requires that all economic actors have full information and respond rationally to changes in factor prices. Neoclassical economics draws upon two metaphors central to capitalism: 'time is money' and 'labour is a resource'. Both of these reinforce the importance of time- and labour-saving technological change and contribute to people's alienation from their own labour. Time and labour can be made to fit equilibrium models of supply and demand which are regulated by price changes. Without wishing to deny the very real political and economic aspects of imperialism and globalisation, our understanding of these processes could be enriched by consideration of the imposition of metaphors developed in industrialised, capitalist societies on other parts of the world. (5)

Why does neo-classical economics, dominant within the economics profession, continue to adhere to models of equilibrium and stasis, especially when physics itself has largely abandoned them? The first possible answer is ideological, or normative. Individual greed, sanctioned by Smith's 'invisible hand' serves the status quo very well. The second reason is cognitive. Newtonian physics and thermodynamics validate a view of nature (and by metaphorical extension of the economy and society) in which discrete entities are linked together by different forces which are capable of self-regulation. This view works well for describing the behaviour of large, inert systems; it does not, however, work very well for explaining living systems of any size or complexity. (Clark and Juma, 1988, p.214) There is a third reason which links these two. Perfect competition is the idealised system against which economic systems are judged. Even though economists know that 'reality' is characterised by numerous market imperfections (such as monopoly, uncertainty and imperfect information), they continue to promote policies that might move reality closer to the normative standard of perfect competition. Equilibrium models continue to set the metaphorical pace, in orientational and ontological terms, for economics, to the detriment of both economic theory and policy and the lives of millions.

Let us now turn to the example of a metaphor in science which has been largely abandoned by its originators. 'Gaia theory' is associated primarily with the work of James Lovelock (1991, 1995). He analyses the Earth as a single system in which the evolution of organisms is tightly coupled to the evolution of their environments. Self-regulation of the climate and its chemical components are emergent properties of the system. Gaia is simply the Greek word for planet Earth, although Lovelock appears to think Gaia is the name the ancient Greeks gave to the Earth Goddess (1995, p.3). Gaia is used to capture the essence of this theory in which the Earth is a single physiological system. Lovelock and his adherents deployed Gaia (and other metaphors, including Earth as a patient in need of planetary medicine and Gaia as a control system like the thermostat of an oven) in order to draw attention to the unified, self-regulating, interdependency of the Earth's systems. Lovelock regards the Earth as alive, not in the way a sentient goddess is alive in possessing purpose and foresight but more in the way a tree is alive. For him, the 'use of the term "alive" is like that of an engineer who calls a mechanical systems alive' (1991, p.6). In a passage which is wonderfully evocative of actor-network theory, Lovelock (1991) uses the metaphor of a trade union to analyse what is happening on Earth:

Lovelock is fully aware of what is at stake in using this ontological metaphor. In the preface to the second edition of The Ages of Gaia (1995), he discusses the reception of the Gaia metaphor by the scientific community. After a lecture during which he thought he used the metaphor in order to make his lecture more comprehensible, fellow scientists expressed their shock at his choice of metaphor. He reports, '[s]hocked they may have been but nowhere near as shocked as I was by their response. I was shocked most of all that they were more interested in my choice of words than in the content of my talk.' (1995, p.xiv) The use of 'Gaia' has left Lovelock and his colleagues vulnerable to attack from the 'mono-scientists' and to co-option from the 'new age' wing of the environmental movement. More dangerous is the self-interested adoption of the concept by industrialists to justify their inaction in reducing pollution on the grounds that Gaia will regulate herself. Indeed, the Earth may well re-regulate itself but quite possibly in a way that leaves humans out of the union. Because of the confusion and misappropriation of the Gaian metaphor and as Gaia theory itself takes on more of the features of Kuhnian normal science, its proponents are seeking to shed these potentially damaging metaphorical associations and are establishing what appears to be a more literal name to describe their work - geophysiology. Lovelock bemoans the linguistic straitjacket imposed by 'scientific correctness' but accepts that the adoption of 'geophysiology' has helped, 'to unite scientists in the common cause of a rational environmentalism' (1995, p.xv) Lovelock and other geophysiologists do not appear to recognise the ontological metaphor implied by the term 'geophysiology': physiology is normally used to describes the processes of life in animals or plants.

These very brief accounts of economic theory and geophysiology illustrate four important features of the use of metaphor. First, metaphors can assist scientists to think about new phenomena and new problems. (6) Second, metaphors can become solidified, as in the case of neoclassical economic theory, and inhibit thought about new phenomena and new problems. Third, a good metaphor can alter our understanding of the world, literally in the case of Gaia. Finally, metaphors are contestable and there are real political and cognitive issues at stake, as continuing debates about economic and environmental theories and policies demonstrate.

In this section, I present two extracts from two science fiction novels, Neuromancer by William Gibson and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and explore some of the metaphors found in Wired, the monthly journal for evangelical Internet enthusiasts. A central tenet of this paper is that our choice of metaphor reveals both what we think about today's reality and what we expect of tomorrow's; but I do not agree with Roger Burrows' (1997) endorsement of Mike Davis's (1992) suggestion to read Gibson as 'prefigurative social theory'. Burrows argues that it is difficult to disentangle the recursive relationship between cyberpunk novels and urban theory. Describing literature as social theory can be seen as an attempt by social science to colonise literature. The latter may well provide more profound and more elegantly expressed insights into the human condition than does social theory; nonetheless, literature has its own norms, standards and objectives, not all of which are shared with social science. Nonetheless, I do agree with Burrows' conclusion that we should (re)read cyberpunk novels, not as social and political theory as he suggests, but as sources of metaphor upon which social actors can and do draw.

Gibson is usually credited with introducing the term 'cyberspace' in Neuromancer, in which the following description of a children's television programme appears.

Fifteen years after its initial publication, this remains one of the best definitions of cyberspace: a consensual hallucination where we keep our money, talk on the telephone and manipulate digital symbols for a variety of purposes. It is a description which reminds us of the military origins and the popular application of the techniques to games, contributing to the emergence of the 'military-entertainment complex'. Although Gibson wrote this before what we now call the Internet had spread much beyond the military, the academy and very big business, it is a description which still resonates. Gibsonian cyberspace simultaneously deploys the orderly metaphor of a matrix with the chaotic image of the city.

Metaphors found in Wired do not always allow for the same ambiguity that Gibson suggests is characteristic of cyberspace. In the lead editorial, Louis Rossetto, the editor, reflects on what motivated the launch of Wired in 1993.

Stephen Graham and Alessandro Aurigi (1997) suggest that, '[M]uch of the current hype and hyperbole surrounding the Internet and "Information Superhighway" rests on the utopian assertion that such networks will inevitably emerge to be equitable, democratic and dominated by a culture of public space, enrolling multiple identities into new types of collective, interactive discourse and "electronic democracy".' (p.20) Within the burgeoning literature about the Internet and cyberspace, two alternative visions can be found. The first vision focuses on the emancipatory potential of the Internet, a technology which allows individuals to transcend the limitations of space, time and biology in order to forge new identities and communities with like-minded people across the globe. The second vision is the dystopian antithesis of the first. Instead of liberating individuals, the Internet becomes the focus of alienation - of people from their families and friends in their local environments, of information workers from their own labour and that of their colleagues - and it is the source of concerns about the proliferation of pornography and racism. It is important to attempt to move beyond this dualistic thinking (see, for example, Jordan, 1998) but in this paper I focus on the first vision, on the utopianism which the contributors to Wired actively assert.

Contributors to Wired recognise the importance of metaphors. Virginia Postrel (1998) attacks the engineering metaphors of highways and bridges used by politicians, suggesting they carry with them the entailments of government funding, teams of experts and large bureaucracy.

The engineering metaphor refers back to the metaphors of computing as utility, akin to electricity and transport. Such utility metaphors were more common in the 1970s (see Abbate, 1994) and were used to help construct fast and reliable networks as well as to promote models of control and regulation common in 'natural monopolies' at that time. Postrel argues that, '[d]ynamists [contributors to Wired, for example] typically are drawn toward organic metaphors, symbols of unpredictable growth and change.' (p.54) She later suggests that, '[t]hey [dynamists] see markets not as conspiracies, but as discovery processes, coordinating dispersed knowledge.' (p.56) Postrel is unaware of the contradiction inherent in holding both organic and market metaphors simultaneously. As we saw earlier, metaphors drawn from neoclassical economics carry with them the stasis of eighteenth and nineteenth century physics.

Gore's metaphor of the superhighway guided the development and implementation of a range of policies around the 'national information infrastructure' during the first Clinton administration. The metaphor has been significantly more successful than the policies.

Between the covers of Wired (7), six overlapping metaphorical themes can be found: revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism and the 'American dream'. Revolutionary fervour is sometimes mixed with religious imagery. George Gilder (1998) reminds us of the book of Genesis: 'In the beginning was the word - the code - and it is not reducible to anything else.' (p.42) Randall Rothenberg (1998) mixes religious imagery with highways in order to discuss markets: 'The Net ... is the highway leading marketers to their Holy Grail: single-sourcing technology that can definitively tie the information consumers perceive to the purchases they make.' (p.76) This marketing Holy Grail can only be reached because of the omniscient facilities of surveillance technologies.

Metaphors of revolution also appear frequently. Po Bronson (1998) describes what is happening in Silicon Valley.

One of the people Bronson interviews designs telephony software. He exhibits some weariness with the constant change of the digital revolution: "I've got a friend who's 24, and he's at his fourth start-up. How many revolutions can you join? It's like Monty Python's Life of Brian: you can't keep straight the People's Front of Judea from the Judean People's Front." (p.110) Such weariness is rarely found between the covers of Wired.

Evolutionary metaphors are the most common, and often also carry images of progress and salvation. Four short examples are given below:

Leaving aside the mixed metaphor of Godzilla and the snowball and the attribution of voice to the concept of evolution, the repeated invocations of evolutionary change, progress and salvation require more careful scrutiny. Recall the caution with which Marx and Schumpeter treated evolutionary theory. They rejected what they perceived as its inevitability and universalism. The contributors to Wired deploy evolutionary metaphors while at the same time they invoke images of revolution, of massive social change towards a society characterised by greater freedom and progress. What are the agents of this revolution? It seems to be a mixture of the market and the technology. Yet, as we have seen, the market within capitalism is meant to operate in accordance with models of static equilibrium. The technology, as Gibson recognised, is not neutral. It is largely the product of military research applied to the lucrative markets of games and entertainment. The reasons for optimism about a dynamic and egalitarian future would seem to be misplaced. Presenting technology as the asocial mechanism for emancipation removes people from the historical process of change, which might occur in different ways in different places.

Langdon Winner raised similar concerns in 'Mythinformation', published originally in 1984, during what was then more commonly called the 'computer' or 'microelectronics revolution'.

Winner invites the reader to consider the goals of the putative computer revolution and how they might contribute to greater social justice. One of the traditional claims of political revolutions concerns universal rights: to land, education, the democratic process, the means of production, for example. In this final section, I shall examine the claims to universalism implicit in the metaphors of the 'information revolution'.

Internet enthusiasts often claim that connection is a global process, albeit an uneven one. This is not unique to the Internet. Similar claims can be found in much literature and policy about industrialisation and modernisation more generally. Individuals, regions, nations will 'catch up'; those who are not connected now, will or should be soon. This is the real annihilation of space by time: the assumption that the entire globe shares a single time line of 'development', in which some groups are further ahead than others along this shared path.

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is committed to the emancipatory potential of the Internet. He reports on his visit to Africa, where he went to test his optimism about its potential to, 'proceed directly from the agricultural epoch into an information economy' (1998, p.143). He took with him fifteen pounds of solar panels, two 3400 Apple PowerBooks, a Newton 2000 MessagePad, a Jaz drive, five incompatible transformer bricks and a large bag of power and telecom adapters. He remains optimistic, not least because of what he perceives to be the, 'overlap between the ability to make music - one of Africa's prowesses - and the ability to make code.' (p.158) '[A]ll this suddenly melds into a vision of a prosperous Africa of small towns and rural communities, networked to the global grid through a web of wires and hearts opened wider with estrogen.' (p.156) Women are central to his vision of the future, arising from what Barlow perceives to be women's greater capacities for work and lateral thinking. He observed that women effectively ran both the agricultural and information economies in the African countries he visited. His optimism is thus partly based on an essentialist view of the talents and capacities of black people and women. Barlow downplays the transient inconveniences some people will experience. 'Will there be data sweatshops? Probably. But, just as the sweatshops of New York were a way station for families whose progeny are now on Long Island, so, too, will these pass.' (p.158)

Bronson is less certain than Barlow regarding the extent of the changes to come. He leaves open the extent to which the norms of the industry are transferable from Silicon Valley to elsewhere in the world.

Like Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (not least in its choice of name), Bronson also uses metaphors associated with the 'American dream'. He extends the metaphor of the 'melting pot', the great US assimilation metaphor, in his description of Silicon Valley.

All of the preceding examples focus on the metaphors used to convey alternative images of the Internet. In this final example, I shall look at an example in which the direction of the metaphor is reversed. Bruce Sterling (1998) uses different generations of software as a metaphor for understanding the history of Saint Petersburg. 'Modern Saint Petersburg is Petersburg 3.0: the first release was czarist, the second was the communist Leningrad, the third is global-capitalist Sankt-Piterburg... Built as Russia's Window on the West, it has become the visiting Westerner's Window on the East.' (p.119) Just as new releases of software black box the messy process of development, its metaphorical use in this passage obscures the historical processes which have shaped Saint Petersburg.

Sterling continues to extend the window metaphor, ostensibly to reflect upon the nature of contemporary Saint Petersburg, but also to meditate upon the moral, economic and social uncertainty which pervades cyberspace.

Sterling does not address the way in which this description reproduces global economic power relations, in which the visiting American observes (as if through a glass, darkly) the quaint 'natives' of St. Petersburg.

Metaphors about the Internet abound. Much is at stake: the design, use and control of a global communication infrastructure that has the capacity to transmit data, speech, sound and images in a variety of configurations for many different purposes. This paper has only scratched the surface, but it has illustrated - through the examples of economics and Gaia theory - how metaphors can influence public debate, policy and theory. Metaphors not only help us to think about the future, they are a resource deployed by a variety of actors in order to shape the future. Thus, it is important to continue to monitor the metaphors at work in order to understand exactly what work they are doing in building the future.

This paper began with an extract from Victoria Glendinning's historical novel, Electricity (1996). It will end with an extract from Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel, Snow Crash (1992). Early in the novel, Stephenson provides an introduction to the norms and codes of his 'metaverse', the combined chat room and role play game featured in the novel. This extract captures many issues important to the contemporary Internet, including the rules and norms governing behaviour with this new medium, technical skill and access to hardware. Adolescent fantasies are evoked: the first paragraph reminds us of the association between new technology and sexual desire; later we are reminded of Star Trek. Most significantly, unlike the contributions from Wired, this extract uses the metaphor of the street, an urban space of difference - a metaverse of plurality. This is very different both from the engineered constructions of politicians and from the peculiar metaphorical world of r/evolutionary change inhabited by the contributors to Wired.

1. This work is supported by the Virtual Society? Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council, grant no. L132251050. Versions of this paper have been presented at two workshops: 'Urban Futures/ Technological Futures', Durham, England, April 1998 and 'Politics of Technology', Maastricht, The Netherlands, May 1998. I am grateful to the oganisers and participants of both for the opportunity to present these ideas and for the comments and feedback. I am also grateful to Tim Jordan, Hans Radder and Jon Turney for comments on an earlier written draft. Mistakes and omissions remain my own.

2. Similarly, chemistry entered the metaphorical lexicon for describing human relationships in the eighteenth century.

3. In abstract terms, A is to B as X is to Y is used to make A is to Y as X is to B. For example, life is to old age as day is to evening is used to talk about the evening of life. Richards (1936) attaches the labels, tenor, vehicle and ground to the different parts of a metaphor, thus providing us with a good example of a mixed metaphor. In the example above, life is the tenor, day is the vehicle and time is the ground. In our understanding of electricity, it is the tenor, fluid is the vehicle and flow or current is the ground. By the end of the extract, sexual attraction becomes the tenor and electricity the vehicle. Sometimes a metaphor is defined as the vehicle alone; sometimes the combination of tenor and vehicle and sometimes all three.

4. There are, of course, alternative metaphors of the mind: a sponge which soaks up information, an empty vessel to be filled, a Swiss army knife. Each of these metaphors can be found in neo-Darwinian accounts of human evolution as well as in theories of pedagogy and human cognition and learning, with concomitant theoretical and policy implications. Whether one accepts or rejects these types of metaphor reflects one's position regarding the nature of human consciousness: is the human brain simply a powerful computational devices where neurons are on or off, or not?

5. Contemporary evolutionary and institutional economists, such as Christopher Freeman, Carlota Perez, Luc Soete and others, have revived the more organic metaphors occasionally to be found in Marx and Schumpeter in order to develop economic theories which they argue are better able to explain the dynamics of both technological and economic change. This approach to economics also has roots in the Cambridge school, especially the work of John Maynard Keynes who focused on the problems of disequilibrium, in particular on the problems associated with the under-employment of resources, especially the under-employment of labour.

6. See Miller (1996) for an interesting realist account of the role of metaphor in scientific creativity, especially in physics. He argues that metaphors are an essential part of scientific creativity because they assist scientists to move from descriptions of the unknown to literal descriptions - scientific theories - of the world around us.

7. At a public lecture at the Royal Festival Hall, London on 21 February 1998, John Browning, European contributing editor of Wired, suggested that its designers wanted it to look, 'as if it had dropped from the future'. The fifth anniversary issue is not atypical: it is dayglo orange with the aphorism 'change is good' superimposed in another shade of dayglo orange. To me, it looks as if it has been unearthed from the 1960s. I am unsure whether this is more revealing of my age or of the age of the designers of Wired.

Abbate, Janet. 1994. 'Analogy is Destiny: The Role of Metaphor in Defining a New Technology'. presented at MEPHISTOS conference, February.

Barlow, John Perry. 1998. 'Africa Rising'. Wired. January, pp.142-58.

Breazeale, D. (ed and trans) 1979. Philosophy and Truth, Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s. New Jersey: Humanities Press International.

Bronson, Po. 1998. 'Is the Revolution Over?' Wired. January, pp.98-112.

Burrows, Roger. 1997. 'Virtual culture, urban social polarisation and social science fiction' in Loader, Brian (ed) Governing Cyberspace. London: Routledge.

Clark, Norman and Juma, Calestous. 1988. 'Evolutionary theories in economic thought' in Dosi, Giovanni et al (eds) Technical Change and Economic Theory. London: Pinter.

Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz. London: Vintage.

Eagleton, Terry. 1997. 'Spaced Out, review of "Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference" by David Harvey'. London Review of Books, 24 April 1997, pp.22-3.

Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. London: Victor Gollancz. (page references in this paper are to the 1993 Harper Collins paperback edition)

Gilder, George. 1998. 'Happy Birthday Wired'. Wired. January, pp.40-2.

Glendinning, Victoria. 1996. Electricity. London: Hutchison.

Graham, Stephen and Aurigi, Alessandro. 1997. 'Urbanising cyberspace? The nature and potential of the virtual cities movement'. City 7, May, pp.18-38.

Joerges, Bernward. 1989. 'Romancing the Machine - Reflections on the Social Scientific Construction of Computer Reality'. International Studies of Management and Organization, 19,4. pp.24-50.

Jordan, Tim. 1998. Cyberpower: The culture and politics of cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge. (forthcoming)

Jordan, Tim. 1998. 'New Space, New Politics? Cyberpolitics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation' in Tim Jordan and Adam Lent (eds) Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change. London: Lawrence & Wishart. (forthcoming)

Keynes, John Maynard. 1973. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. (first published in 1936)

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lanier, Jaron. 1998. 'Taking Stock'. Wired. January, pp.60-2.

Lovelock, James. 1991. Gaia, The practical science of planetary medicine. London: Gaia Books Ltd.

Lovelock, James. 1995. The Ages of Gaia. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCloskey, D. 1986. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Marshall, Alfred. 1890. The Principles of Economics.

Miller, Arthur I. 1996. Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art. New York: Springer.

Postrel, Virginia. 1998. 'Technocracy R.I.P.' Wired. January, pp.52-6.

Ricardo, David. 1973. The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. London: Everyman. (first published in 1817)

Richards, IA. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rothenberg, Randall. 1998. 'Bye-Bye'. Wired. January, pp.72-6.

Schumpeter, Joseph. 1934. The Theory of Economic Development. Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press.

Simon, Julian. 1998. 'The Five Greatest Years for Humanity'. Wired. January, pp.66-8.

Smith, Adam. 1974. The Wealth of Nations. London: Pelican. (first published in 1776)

Stefik, Mark (ed). 1996. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Steinberg, Steve G. 1998. 'Schumpterer's Lesson'. Wired. January, pp.80-4.

Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. London: Penguin.

Sterling, Bruce. 1998. 'Art and Corruption'. Wired. January, pp.118-40.

Turkle, Sherry. 1984. The Second Self. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Whitehead, AN. 1926. Science and the Modern World. London: Free Association Books.

Winner, Langdon. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor, A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.