The terrible irony, for Victor, of course lay in the fact that his creation proved deadly, turning in the end on his maker.

But Mary Shelley had the last laugh, because her creation—the book, Victor, and the monster—turned out to have a life of its own.

Her novel can be read on many levels. On the surface, it works fine as a scare-the-pants-off-the-kiddies tale, as Hollywood discovered long ago. Far below the surface, it’s a narrative filled with unpleasant, unfaced truths about gender and family reality in this highest of civilizations.

Somewhere between those two extremes, Frankenstein is a fairly obvious warning: This is what can happen when rambunctious little boys start tinkering with Mother Nature. Shelley certainly knew what she was about, as the subtitle—"A Modern Prometheus"—shows. Victor Frankenstein, like the original Prometheus, gives humanity fire/life, but is it a gift or a curse?

Our own ambiguity toward science, which ranges from the primitive anger of the Luddites to the sophisticated unease of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 2001, continues to this day.

We’ve now pretty well backed off from nuclear power, rejecting the unknown evil and choosing to retain the familiar one of petroleum with all its toxic by-products. And we seem to be in the early stages of a knee-jerk rejection of genetic modification of both plants and animals, again choosing the known evils (have you visited a feedlot lately? have you weighed the tons of pesticides laid on the veggies at your typical mega-farm?) over the unknown.

Consider, please, the present media/computer culture. Look, if you will, as its very foundation, which can be represented quite simply as:

1 / 0.

The digital world. The present wired world and the coming unwired world.

We have reduced visual and aural reality to 1’s and 0’s. Which only shows how much cleverer and more efficient we are than Victor Frankenstein was. He had to take a leg from this corpse, an arm from that one, a brain from another, and look at the trouble that messy process got him into. (The whole business of Igor and the brain, by the way, a late, Hollywood addition; there's no Igor in Shelley.)

Us? Give us enough 1’s and 0’s plus the means to manipulate them very very fast, and we’re off to the digital races, lickety-split.

Here’s the Mona Lisa in 1 million pieces. What? You want a better Mona Lisa? No prob. Here’s Mona Lisa in a billion pieces. Still not good enough? You want a really, REALLY good Mona Lisa? Hold one second… here it comes… WOW! look at that, a super-ultra-hi-rez-terabyte Mona Lisa! Ain’t that something!

Such pride is nothing compared to our feelings in the presence of dynamic digital modeling. You want the earth’s weather updated every couple of minutes? Easy as pie. How about taking earth’s weather right NOW and extrapolating so we know what it’ll be tomorrow, or next week? Sure nuff. Or, you need a new, more efficient nuclear weapon? Coming right up. While we’re at it, we can also model a star. Or, or, even A WHOLE UNIVERSE!

Wow! Aren’t we something!

Before you know it, we’ll have our brains wired directly into the world of 1’s and 0’s. Cybersex, here we cum! And then it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to moving this self out of its mushy, meaty, death-limited housing called the body into something more, um, permanent. Immortality, here we come!

Such is the high-rez, long-range view of digital visionaries.

So far, the creative warnings in response to this bipartite, binary Eden fall into two simplistic categories: the dystopian and the paranoid. The dystopian view (Blade Runner, Snow World) is that, yes, we’ll achieve all these digital wonders but it ain’t gonna turn out to be heaven on earth. The paranoid view (2001, The Matrix) is that we’re only replicating our own flawed consciousness, and the devil take the hindmost.

We know where the modern-day Victors, the creators of the monster, are. Stewed to the gills on caffeine (And God knows what else), they're locked away in a thousand Silicon Villages around the world, up till all hours writing brave new code, which does seem to be opening vast new arenas, undreamt of fields for expanding creativity in both the arts and the sciences.

IPO’s thrive, academics get hip tenure, cool marketing ploys blossom by promoting (or occasionally) denigrating the utopian vision of a wired/unwired world. Tiny nations suddenly become critical centers of chip manufacturing. Whole populations discover a talent for programming. Productivity rises. Creativity blossoms.

The rising digital tide truly lifts all global ships. So where’s the monster?

Is it the reduction of the world to 1’s and 0’s? Maybe, but probably not. We are such intensely analog creatures that we seem to have no difficulty accepting, integrating, and enjoying segmented reproductions of reality. From flip books to movies, from alphabets to the word flood that is the Internet, we take endless delight in playful manipulation of symbols.

No, the medium is neither the message, nor the monster.

The monster is the media trance,

the brainwashed dream from which nowadays we do not awake very often. The monster is us, or at least the entranced us we have become while immersed in digital reality.

The trance induction is simple, with only two steps:

    1. Watch me;
    2. Buy me.

Watch me; buy me. Watch me; buy me.

Watch me, says the television, because I give you beautiful colors, fascinating pictures, involving stories, plus news, weather, and sports. And then here comes the buy-me part, every five minutes: buy this, buy that, buy the other.

Watch me, says the Internet, because I give you beautiful colors, fascinating pictures, involving stories, news, weather, sports, and all the games, people, and information in the world. The Internet hasn’t got the buy-me part down yet, but it’s coming fast. Soon we will laugh at the primitive crudity of banner ads, pop-up windows, and the like.

You become what you pay attention to.

Hypnotized, we become entertained, (more or less) well-informed consumers. Watch me, our lovely digital media say, so we do. Buy me, our lovely digital media say, so we do.

Put another way: our entranced media consciousnessness are the monster.

And what is it that we don’t pay attention anymore? Why nothing less than the paradox which is at the heart of existence: unity.

Culture arises from the denial of unity. Born separate, we infer separateness as the way of the universe. I am, clearly, not the tree, not the stone, and, thank goodness, not the sometimes fascinating, sometimes irritating "Other" which is YOU.

From that perceived division, which our every waking moment seems to confirm, all distinctions and discriminations arise: me/you, male/female, good/evil, happy/sad, and, yes: 1/0.

To accept, indeed to celebrate, a binary world is to build one’s house on sand.

The media culture, for all its beautiful rewards, is a metaphysical Potemkin village. Except the Potemkin village was a false front erected to fool the Czar, while we have erected the lovely false front of the media culture to fool ourselves.

And here we are, hurtling into the new millennium, going happily, boisterously along with the gag.

Why should it matter? What’s wrong with a binary world which lifts so many economic boats around the world?

Nothing, as long as we are aware of what we’re doing. But we’re not only not aware, we are instead preaching very loudly to ourselves that the information highway is the road to Oz, the path leading out of the brambly wilderness of vulgar squishiness ("meatspace" in the current jargon) and into the digital delights of an unmessy, perfectly controllable Eden.

The danger is this: Rooted in unity, we are trying to learn to live in digital disunity. Unaware of our origins, the source of our very consciousness, we create a world of 1’s and 0’s, a world, alas, without roots. Without access to the hidden nourishment from the unity that sustains us through the co-creativity of every moment, we die—eventually. The culture collapses, and we die.

We divide our lives into work and non-work, we divide leisure into tiny segments, we divide pleasure into sex and non-sex, and we lose contact with the well of unchanging, the silver stream of union which flows through and beyond all such ignorant distinctions, the unity that makes day night, and night day and guides us gently toward the nameless, unnamable ground beyond unity itself.