4.2.1 Fuller's Phantom Captain seems to be a perfect place to start when looking at emergent identities on the net. Being a transcendentalist, Fuller was consciously working with his own image creation and projection:

4.2.2 This meant that in my "first life" I had often rushed thoughtlessly to assume responsibilities being my physical or legal means. . . . In inaugurating my new life I took away Robin Hood's longbow and staff and gave him only scientific text books, microscopes, calculating machines, transit's and industrialisation's network of tooling in general. I made him substitute new inaminate forms for animate reforms. I did not allow Robin any further public relations professionals or managers to "promote" or "sell" him . . . (Fuller, 1981, pg. 134)

4.2.3 As noted earlier, Fuller recognises the computer as a human extension very early on, never losing the organic quality in his interpretation of the human/machine relationship. In Nine Chains to the Moon, he describes man as a machine driven by the "Phantom Captain," without whose guidance the "human" mechanisms are reduced to imbecile contraptions. The Phantom Captain is likened to a variant of a polarity dominance in our bipolar electric world, which, "when balanced as a unit, vanishes as abstract unity I or O." With the Phantom Captain's departure, the mechanism becomes inoperative and very quickly disintegrates into basic chemical elements. The Phantom Captain is a mix of cybernetics (navigation) and spirit. Margaret Fuller's influence can be felt when reading Fuller's interpretation of the human/machine extensions-it is psychical. Many years later, McHale resurrects the idea of the psyche in the machine in his essay "The Plastic Parthenon," in which he argues that aesthetics go beyond the visual, and he comments on media that extend out not only the physical world but our psychical environment, "providing a constant stream of moving, fleeting images of the world for our daily appraisal. They provide psychical mobility for the greater mass of our citizens." (McHale, 1972, pg. 51)

4.2.4 Fuller's elaboration on the Phantom Captain provides fertile ground for the imagination. The infinite communicating code, based on the processes and continuities and not on static fixation identities, enables the Phantom Captain to signal, via the complicated visual, aural and oral, tactile and olfactory systems of his machine, to captains of other machines, who receive the messages through complementary mechanical systems of reception. Those captains, being phantom, abstract, and infinite, are related. (Fuller, 1938, pg. 20) He goes on to talk about how the Phantom Captain's habitual association with his mechanism creates an illusion of the extension being an actual part of himself and an illusory attitude of possession of the mechanism which further extends out to possession of worldly goods. [top]