What a sight, indeed. And America’s greatest mistake at the end of the 20th century, Dery argues, has been to invent ever more efficient ways of looking away — not just from the disenfranchised who have been locked out of hyperclean gated communities but also from the flesh of our own all too mortal bodies. For Dery, that old standby the mind-body problem lies at the root of a vast set of dangerous dichotomies. His previous book, “Escape Velocity,” was also built around the trouble this ancient puzzler gives us, and he did a bang-up job there of pinpointing the folly in cyberculture’s attempts to solve it by dropping the body half of the equation altogether.

But while “The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium” is shorter by a third, it’s somehow both a bigger and a lighter read. Here Dery escapes the claustrophobic confines of pure cyberculture and allows his sharp eye to wander over vaster territory — and wherever he turns, he sees signs of a rumbling revolt of the repressed. A cinematic parallel might be David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” which Dery mentions more than a few times. With the exception of a short chapter on Celebration (Disney’s disturbingly successful experiment in corporate-sponsored community), he wastes little time strolling through white-picket-fence America and instead dives straight down to that severed ear nestled in the suburban lawn. Dery relishes his role as curator of America’s bulging cabinet of horrors, carefully selecting an item at a time — a grotesque formaldehyde photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, the “cometlike white swooshes” on the Nikes worn by the Heaven’s Gate cultists — turning it, poking it and then dressing it up with footnoted snippets of all the most interesting things that have ever been said about it.

The title itself is snipped from a 19th century description (but not by Huneker) of Coney Island, and Dery clearly revels in the carnival our culture has become. For all the fun to be had here, though, his warning of the dire consequences we face if we turn our eyes away from what’s before us — if we trade in Coney Island for Disneyland — comes through loud and clear.

Led by the right hands, this literary dance can be beautiful to behold. The variations on the theme, the subtle patterns within the overall structure, give the sterile model a unique life of its own.

Flint, a former technology journalist for Wired UK, mute and a handful of British newspapers, once traded a dissertation on chaos and complexity theory for an M.A. in philosophy and literature, so it’s hardly a surprise that he’s chosen a relatively abstract and obscure model for his story — a Habitus. The concept is “explained” in an opening quotation from Gilles Deleuze, a name that raises another flag: The universe you are about to enter is not going to behave in an orderly or predictable fashion.

“The eye binds light, is itself a bound light,” writes Deleuze. “This binding is a reproductive synthesis, a Habitus.” Got that? Fortunately, Flint’s epic casting of the idea is much more entertaining. He begins with a bit of blatant semaphore, introducing three main characters — all of whose names, like his own, begin with the letter J.

Joel Kluge is a Hasidic Jew and a mathematics prodigy (klug, by the way, means “clever” in German); for his family, however, he’s a problem. Flint’s setup for Joel is a classic heart-tugger. He knows the reader will pull for Joel as he devises his escape from his father’s Brooklyn bakery to Cambridge, where the equations of Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Whitehead and Wittgenstein once cross-fertilized, spurred and inspired each other. But Flint pulls off an emotional double whammy once Joel’s explorations in abstract mathematical theory lead him back to the roots of the kabbalistic tradition. Even geniuses get homesick.

Judd Axelrod, son of an English actress and an outrageously successful American computer salesman, is yanked from his beloved Los Angeles and plopped down in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his mother has nailed a gig with the Royal Shakespeare Company. As lonely boys are wont to do, he falls in with the wrong crowd, gets into trouble and is yanked right back to L.A. There, he’s sentenced to spend his after-school hours with Dr. Schemata, a veritable caricature of all that’s rotten about psychoanalysis. Judd is a victim of parental neglect, a strange condition called picnolepsy and the evil doctor — so it isn’t difficult at all for Flint to secure a bit of emotional investment in poor Judd from the reader.

Jennifer Several is the product of a gangbang in a mental hospital. Not long after Jennifer is born, her mother undergoes Britain’s last prefrontal lobotomy, so Jennifer never meets her. But she has her mother’s husband to care for her — until he begins to disintegrate into drink. Again, sympathy for Jennifer is all too easy to conjure up.

With all this emotional attachment taking place, some readers may become frustrated or even angry when the narrative and the very laws of nature slowly unravel — and the fates met by our three protagonists turn out to be neither tragic nor comic but just plain bizarre. But it wouldn’t be as if these readers hadn’t been warned.

Orbiting the terrestrial goings-on is Laika — the legendary, historic, first dog in space, blasted out there by the Soviets and abandoned. She was expected to live seven days at the most, but many artists can’t forget her. Songs have been written for her, and just last month, a performance in Munich sent messages floating skyward in the hopes that she’d receive them.

Flint, too, takes liberties with her story: He stuffs her with media. Like Carl Sagan, Flint seems embarrassed for our species’ habit of airing our dirty laundry to the rest of the universe by hanging it out on infinite broadcast waves. Laika is tuned in to it all. She feeds on it, and it bloats her body until she fills every nook and cranny of her tiny capsule — eventually, she becomes a sort of orbiting cyborg potato.

By the time Joel, Judd and Jennifer collectively conceive a single child, all bets are off. Up to this point, several turns in the story have been preceded by concise two- or three-page lessons taken from the histories of space flight and computers. Sputnik and John Glenn, Alan Turing and Charles Babbage — they’re all here, distantly related to our cast of characters yet grounding the fiction in verifiable fact.

But then these lessons begin to describe the development of a telepathic embryo with two hearts throughout a pregnancy that lasts two full years; the expression of a lizard that appears in the pattern of the throws of the dice; and the reasoning behind Joel’s conviction that, given enough data, he could eventually explain the Holocaust.

Can Flint pull it all together again? Here’s where another Deleuzian concept comes in handy: the rhizome, essentially an organic system of roots with a French philosophical twist. Jennifer’s mother is committed to the mental hospital in the first place because she’s become convinced she’s a tree. There’s a tree at the end of Flint’s tale, too, the only image that could be said to come around full circle. On the whole, however, the book matches its description of the impossible child:

“The girl turned towards her and for a second Jennifer was shocked by the face. She had never known it, except in fragments, and here it was complete and flooded with light. It was a face of exquisite ugliness, a face which broke every rule of proportion but so subtly that the effect was quite disarming. It lacked symmetry …”

And so does a tree. Without being too reductive, the story pulls Joel, Judd and Jennifer from their disparate roots toward a center — where they never quite align as expected — just before they’re flung away from each other again. As the title of one of the briefest sections has it, “The world has ideas of its own.”

All this would be mere fodder for yet another dissertation if Flint weren’t such a damn fine writer. His relentlessly dark humor and startling juxtapositions; the occasional sweeping passages that read more like prose poems than establishing shots or descriptions of the scenery; and the near overabundance of wild, wild ideas — all of these make “Habitus” a marvelously provocative read.

Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a self-proclaimed civil libertarian, maintains that the Internet “marks a permanent change in American and world culture. Call it ‘radical pluralism.’” If the United States or any other country were ever in danger of falling victim to the tyranny of the majority, the Net, with its ability to empower tens of millions who would never be able to afford a printing press or a radio or television station of their own, is just the right medicine.

The reader doesn’t have to swallow this assertion whole in order to recognize the historically demonstrated validity of Godwin’s second point. The Net’s wide-open informational free-for-all terrifies a lot of people, some of them powerful — and some of whom want to put a lid on it. Once Godwin outlines the severity of this “Net backlash” with numerous examples of legislative attacks on freedom of Internet speech, he spells out quite convincingly why such efforts are dangerous to the public good.

Along the way, Godwin must teach the reader — whom he assumes (especially correctly in the case of this reviewer) is a layperson, not particularly well-versed in even the basics of the legal profession. Yes, you will have to wade through a plethora of historical cases, the nuances of their various interpretations and the subsequent ramifications of their outcomes. And yet, you will also certainly be aware that this stuff, like broccoli, is good for you. Anyone who’s ever posted to a public forum online has probably wondered at least once what constitutes libel, how much of another person’s copyrighted work may be freely quoted and so on.

Godwin does his best to pull the reader through this gray legalese with the jazziest prose he can muster — and, more effectively, by relating his personal experiences with each variety of legal issue that arises. It’s at this point that “Cyber Rights” may become problematic for some readers.

Readers of “Cyber Rights” will range from those who have never heard of Mike Godwin to those who have tangoed with him online at some point or have at least lurked silently as the debate raged. Whatever the number in the first category, those falling into the second are legion. Godwin has been online so long he’s had a celebrated law that predicts the course of online discussions named after him.

“In both my personal and professional online life, I’m known to be an acerbic critic of those I disagree with,” Godwin has written recently here at Salon. “He takes every aspect of every sentence that somebody has written and provides the refutation in detail,” notes fellow digerati David R. Johnson, co-director of the Cyberspace Law Institute. The rhetorical approach can win as many enemies as friends. In her epic history of the Well, where much of the online “action” in “Cyber Rights” unfolds, Katie Hafner refers to Godwin as “an outspoken member who was not universally liked.”

Those Godwin has angered over the years with his seemingly cold persistence will most likely be the ones to raise questions about the versions he presents of the multitude of cases and controversies in which he has played an active role. Starting, for example, with the one that put him on the map, the 1990 raid by the U.S. Secret Service on Steve Jackson Games.

Godwin claims to have brought national attention to the case, and his account may sound self-serving at first. But if you compare it to Bruce Sterling’s in his book “The Hacker Crackdown,” you’ll find that Sterling is far more laudatory of Godwin’s efforts than Godwin himself — who merely takes the opportunity in “Cyber Rights” to turn his experience into “A Primer on Talking to the Traditional Press.”

Throughout “Cyber Rights,” it becomes clear that what makes Godwin a sometimes unpleasant online sparring partner is precisely what has catapulted him to the front lines in the seemingly endless battles for free speech on the Net. It hasn’t been just that, as Sterling puts it, “here was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and confusion, genuinely understood everything he was talking about,” but also his tenacity and his insistence on wrestling every last breath out of his opponents’ arguments.

It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy it, either. Anyone who’s ever wondered just what the big deal was when Time ran a sensational cover story about pornography on the Net — given that so many other magazines, newspapers and television networks were also playing up the same story — will fully understand what was at stake after reading Godwin’s swift day-by-day narrative of that week in June 1995.

It must have been a heady time for Mike Godwin. Juggling Time and Newsweek on the phone, feeding quotes to the New York Times and the Washington Post and appearing on Nightline is a lot of fame and glory all of a sudden for a lawyer specializing in arcane First Amendment issues and how they’re played out on the Net. Godwin is so taken with this chapter of his life, he tells the story twice, albeit from different angles.

This last third of the book segues seamlessly from the discrediting of the study on which the Time story was based — and with it, a crucial centerpiece of the religious right’s attack on the Net as manifested in the Communications Decency Amendment — to the defeat of the CDA itself. Here, Godwin achieves the balance of narrative drive and outright schooling most readers will have yearned for throughout the book’s first 200 pages.

Godwin is passionate about values like truth, freedom and justice, and there are times when that passion can carry his rhetoric into territory some in the late ’90s might deem hokey — such as when he calls for a “Digital American Revolution” at a CDA victory rally.

But the same passion is evident in the patient perseverance of his explication, and yes, in that infamous online discussion style. It’s only at the end of his book that Godwin finally asserts outright what the reader has suspected all along: “The decisions we make about the Internet don’t affect just the Internet — they are answers to basic questions about the relationship each citizen has to the government and about the extent to which we trust one another with the full range of fundamental rights granted by the Constitution.”

As the Net converges with other media and plays a greater role in more lives, those answers will only grow more critical.

Moser-Metius’ enthusiasm is to be expected, of course, but the 45-year-old’s flair for hyperbole is as entertaining as his invention. Last August, his team set up a nighttime above-ground test run, rushing a train past a two-second clip of animation. As the train pulled to a halt, the team inside broke out into cheers and popped champagne bottles, and Moser-Metius pronounced the triumph “a hypererotic kick.”

Salesmanship aside, there must be something to it. Shortly after the new medium’s debut in Berlin, films will be playing between Quai d’ Orsay and Invalides in Paris. And London and Moscow, along with a handful of cities in Scandinavia, Brazil and Argentina, have also expressed interest in using the system.

Moser-Metius has spent well over a decade and between 3 million and 4 million German marks to realize his vision. But in the mid-’80s, as he told the Berliner Morgenpost, “It was the right project at the wrong time.” There just wasn’t enough kick to the technology yet.

The projectors themselves are simple enough. Each of the retro-looking gray boxes contains a loop of film — 18 frames of exactly the same image. The strobing bulb behind the loop is astoundingly bright, since the film has to be visible to passengers inside a lit subway compartment.

The tricky part is aligning each image projected onto a long span of white screen outside the subway windows in precisely the same spot as the next image. For the passengers inside, a film will seem to be floating in darkness, just out of reach. The film will play outside every single window, so every passenger, no matter where they’re seated, will see the same film — but the ones at the front of the train will see it a few seconds before everyone in the back.

This alignment involves two complex computerized systems of sensors linked directly to the central computer of Berlin’s subway network. The first hurdle to be overcome is that not all subway trains are alike. A difference of just a few centimeters in the distance between the individual cars or the size of the windows can throw the whole affair into a senselessly flickering mess. So the exact measurements of each numbered train are passed along from the central computer to the underground cinema by the first system, while the second keeps track of the precise speed of each train.

An obvious question arises: Why, in an age of cheap and portable video monitors, go to all this trouble and spend all this money for the novelty of showing 30-second flicks outside rather than inside the subway?

Moser-Metius is quick to point out that most of these video systems, such as the one set up in the Paris Metro in 1985, have been a complete flop. “People aren’t interested in watching TV on the subway,” he says — but they perk up at the idea of speeding through a movie on a train.

“You have the feeling that ‘I’m producing this picture,’ and that reverses the established order of the media. You’re zooming through a movie.” Moser-Metius goes on to compare the experience with the “neurophysiological effect” of Douglas Trumbull’s experiments with movies shown at 65 frames per second, rather than the usual 24: “It’s a rush no one can really explain.” Metro Cinevision is currently sorting through submissions from filmmakers for content worthy of the rush. The most likely candidates for the exclusive premiere ride are respected names in, yes, European underground cinema. Jean-Jacques Lebel, Wolf Vostell and Federica Marangoni, for example.

But the system is expected to pay for itself eventually, and fortunately, 30 seconds also happens to be the ideal span of time for underground advertising. The Michael Conrad Leo Burnett Agency is handling that end of the business, and spokesman Matthias Gr|ndler is confident clients will leap at the new medium. “It’s not like the movies or television where the audience can get up and walk out or zap away from a commercial,” he beams.

What he’s talking about, of course, is a captive audience. Will subway riders appreciate a quick neurophysiological rush injected into their otherwise routine schedules? Or will they object to yet another intrusion of consumerist propaganda into their lives, even if mixed with a dash of high culture?

Come this spring, Berliners will be the first to know.

Something like Toaster. It’s not an easy find, but once you’ve poked through the long, dark cul-de-sac with its prerequisite graffiti and discarded furniture, you descend the cracked concrete steps, pay your cover and descend some more. There’s some hard-core ragga dub thing going on on the main floor, but a narrow hallway and a few more steps down will take you to the second bar, with its cocktails and thick gray air — pungency courtesy of Turkey by way of Amsterdam. Yet another passageway leads to a tiny, odd-shaped space where a DJ is working two turntables and a modest board. A classic, straight-up beat, each layered sample chopping it up and offering new insight into it.

If you were to map a set like this, trace the sources of each beat and riff and then project all the choices the DJ has at his disposal for his next trick, you might end up with something that looks a lot like a sprawling Web site — full of tempting links, playful connections and fortuitous juxtapositions. What the Net and Euro dance music share is a celebration of simultaneity, complexity and decentralized creativity. And if you want to understand digital culture, European style, you need to spend some time in places like Toaster.

If that connection seems like a stretch, consider the recent essay “Dark Carnival” by Paul D. Miller, a k a DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. The piece is a wild and messy ride, but the gist is easy to pick up on: We live in an age of collage, all the millennia of history laid out before us as so much raw material for our own private remix.

“Today’s notion[s] of creativity and originality,” Miller writes, “are configured by a postmodern discourse characterized, one might say, by velocity: it is a blur, a constellation of styles, a knowledge and pleasure in the play of surfaces, a rejection of history as objective force in favor of subjective interpretations of its residue, a relish for copies and repetition, and so on.” And on and on. Miller hops among the centuries, drops names like needles, pulls quotes, juxtaposes philosophies, cuts and scratches text — providing more than ample evidence along the way that DJ culture and digital culture have a lot more in common than just computers.

Probably the most significant name dropped in Miller’s textual set is Gilles Deleuze. More than simply the French pomo du jour, Deleuze has become something of a patron saint for thinking DJs like Spooky and cybercultural critics alike, especially since his death by his own hand a year and a half ago. Briefly, Deleuze argued that any attempt at making a coherent narrative out of history impoverishes its true complexity. For DJs such as those on the Mil le Plateaux label — named after Deleuze’s best-known book, written with Filix Guattari — “immanent” complexity, as opposed to “transcendent” narrative, is an invitation to party.

Techno, the resulting chaotic symphony, runs against the American grain. In the U.S., storytelling is the engine of pop cultural tradition, in blues, folk and rock, in Hollywood and on Broadway. A musical act has to feature a protagonist, a star. “You see a band like Daft Punk,” says Sasha Koesch, who DJs at Toaster and other spots around the neighborhood, “and you know that that’s going to be big in America, because they work as a band; they do have a certain rock appeal as well. They can go onstage and perform. It has to work there. Same with Underworld or Chemical Brothers. They all do quite well in America.” Sure, Americans like to dance, but they also like to know who’s behind the beats and what they look like — and they like those beats wrapped up neatly within a clear beginning, middle and end. That American bias toward clear narrative and the individual artist/hero similarly conditions the differences between the U.S. and European approach to digital culture. Just as techno will be promoted by the U.S. music industry via the star system, American technology and media companies look to a concept like “push” to try to shape the simultaneity of the Web into a linear form of information delivery.

As Hari Kunzru observed in his Daily Telegraph obituary for Wired’s U.K. edition, Europe’s digital culture remains a far more populist and less, well, capitalist phenomenon than its U.S. equivalents. Kunzru, who’d been a Wired U.K. editor, wrote that Wired’s American editors kept asking, “Where were the British equivalents of the venture capitalists, the brave new software companies, the teenage millionaires who were making the running on the West Coast? I certainly wasn’t meeting them. I was, however, meeting exciting designers, musicians, hackers, artists, games companies, graphics start-ups — a uniquely British tech scene.”

In other words, because Europe is not crowded with netrepreneurs, because the movers and shakers on the business end of the Net are almost all in the U.S., digital culture in Europe is precisely that: culture, not really a business or economic phenomenon yet.

The evolution of techno, and the DJ culture that surrounds it, isn’t an incidental story on this side of the Atlantic. The European press would never assume an attitude that giggles, “Here’s another neat angle: The kids are using computers to make music!” Here, this isn’t some human interest sidebar; it’s an essential part of the whole digital scene — tightly woven into Net-based art, media theory and the ways Europeans are incorporating computers and the Net into their lives.

On the U.S. pop charts, techno is likely to seem a sudden, out-of-the-blue phenomenon with the short shelf-life of any imported musical trendlet. While American labels snap up any band that sounds like Prodigy and repackage the sound as “electronica,” few are confident this particular beat will go on. Whereas in Europe, it’s been steadily ticking for decades — at the very least since the emergence of the hugely influential Kraftwerk. With its sheer elegance and hypnotic simplicity, Kraftwerk got German youth to think twice about its anti-technology party line. When Kraftwerk sang about “Computer Love” back in 1981, it was difficult to tell whether that voice was tainted with cynical irony or filled with childlike wonder.

Mercedes Bunz, who covers the current scene for Easy, a Berlin drum ‘n’ bass zine, also writes for Spex, one of the best-known music magazines in Germany. With its leftish stance, Spex was pleased as punch with punk, but has been perplexed by the success of techno all these years. “It’s ironic,” Bunz says, “because the left is so anti-technology — but techno is still happening.”

And how. This summer, Berlin will host the ninth annual Love Parade, which is precisely that, a parade to the techno beat. Last year’s drew 750,000 celebrants from across the continent and was treated by the city as a major tourist attraction. Surely this is the antithesis of hip, a clear sign that techno is on its way out.

“I wouldn’t say so,” offers Koesch, the Toaster DJ. “There is this movement in which everybody is building their own little scene somehow, while at the same time, the rave scene is collapsing. But all of these little scenes are connected to each other more than ever. There’s no longer this one techno thing, but they’re still all working together.”

One of the influences that helps hold DJ culture together is the Net itself. Web zines such as Koesch’s own soundlab keep the scene up on dates, news, interviews, reviews and the like while pulling a few other tricks print magazines can’t. DJs swap samples and dubplates or broadcast entire sets across the Net, and of course, there are mailing lists galore. Koesch’s roommate, who was filling the apartment with eerie electric drones when I dropped by, once arranged an entire U.S. tour via mailing lists.

But DJs do more than just use the Net the way everyone else does, to stay in touch and provide information; their scene partakes of the hierarchy-leveling, everyone’s-an-artist impulses that made the Web the global free-for-all it is today.

“One of the basic techno ideas is that the people are the party,” says Koesch. “This idea is going to bring a lot of people to make exactly this happen. To link the people more to the music.”

One example is the appropriately named Involving Systems. Three modules are set up in a room, each featuring various lit buttons and dials. Module 3 is outfitted with a record player, and anyone can snap up samples and play with them. All in all, it’s something like an interactive installation. “It is,” says Bunz, “and at the same time, it’s not just for listening. It really works for dancing, too. It’s fun, it’s not just something experimental. People can really use it at parties, making their own music.”

This participatory ideal pops up all over the map. Musicians such as Oval and Brian Eno have been experimenting with software that allows listeners to set their own parameters and either let the customized tune go where it will or actively interfere. And Sony Music has just released Phosphoric Brain Massage, a unique offering from the Austrian artists Station Rose, who view their music, graphics, animation, even their hosting of the Frankfurt conference at Electric Minds as a singular, ongoing artistic project.

The overriding idea is to dissolve the artistic ego and engage the people. Gary Danner, the musician of Station Rose, describes a live performance: “What we do is set up four screens, virtual rooms, and we are not present. And this was the same with techno music in the beginning. And then it became focused on the DJ, on the star.”

Star DJs will continue to flare up and burn out, and Berlin’s 1997 Love Parade will no doubt be a smashing success, raking in loads of cash for the city and the scene. Still, the heart and soul of both digital and DJ culture is not the top-down sales pitch pushing a product — it’s the dark carnival in which all voices are heard, none louder than any other.