We are entering the Xmas period when the blogging productivity of bloggers predictably and necessarily drops off. Mine has. I'd been meaning to write about the way the human subject is digitalized and decentred through a network of data flows in cyberspace. These computer generated flows stream around us and into our mail boxes, weblogs and media channels. We are enmeshed in them.

Many argue that cyberspace offers us an escape from our physical constraints. We overcome the failures of the flesh and live inside the matrix or virtual community. The body is a burden/incomplete/disabled. In cybespace we can manufacture our identities and be whoever we want to be.

So what is actually happening in the landscape of cyberspace that transcends the old Cartesian co-ordinates and dualities? A cyberspace that is a world of representations and pure information in which there is no physical life. In this world being bound to the corporeal is deemed to be living a primitive life ---ie., one that is immersed in nature.

I say 'data flows' not 'information' flows as I've been struggling with the relentless porn spammer attacks, my weblogs going down, and building and rebuilding defences against the relentless attacks. Almost nine out of every ten emails sent globally is spam--unsolicited commercial e-mail. What is happening is that innocent mails are getting blocked. "Botnet" attacks are a major spam driver. These attacks, often facilitated by a virus, hijack groups of computers and use them to send spam messages that clog up the servers and bring down our hosting companies. This is how I've been experiencing cyberspace.

It appears that the spammers increasing the use of botnets. Australia was one of the most heavily targeted countries in 2006. Spammers are using more sophisticated techniques to dodge the ISP filtering systems, most notably the use of "image spam"--- messages contained in images designed to foil text-based filters. So we are no longer using the Internet to correspond and share information--it's choked wth porn spam. So we have a spam ecosystem and we need to install spyware shield, firewalls and anti-virus protection. This is one aspect of a virtual life is it not?

My concern has nothing to do with the moral panic surrounding the equation "internet = porn" advocated by conservatives. Nor am I reducing virtual worlds to porn data flows and viruses and spam. My question is: Why would you want to reject a corporeal or bodily existence and embrace living inside this matrix of porn data flows and viruses in a geography of elsewhere as a disembodied subject? Why would I want to forget my flesh and become one with the transcendent and realize the power of the mind? The issue is not that there is no body in virtual space, especially when it is understood in terms of pure representation, but the evaluation of the body as expendable; the flesh is the residual (immutable) something which techology is articulated against.