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at one and the same time. A particular kind of reading must choose
between them … no spoken reading of cspace can elide cyberspace with
space. Furthermore, a silent reading of the text on the page must unpack
and mentally vocalize cyberspace, codify the visual sign with acoustic
value, in order to hear it. (51) 12

For Tofts, ‘cspace’, which is initially announced as a concept, rapidly
progresses to an ontology which has ‘manifestations’ such as the everyday
division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (51) of technological worlds,
whether this be ‘jacking into the matrix’ or ‘speaking on the telephone’.
Cspace is heralded as a kind of ancestral trope, the inside and outside of
alphabetic writing, which is said to invoke Socratic fears about language
having spatial architectures that cannot be controlled by the subject. For this
reason ‘cspace’, it is repeated, is no less than the ‘ur-concept of technolo-
gized consciousness, as well as the grammacentrism of cyberculture’ (51).
A very different but equally inflated conflation of a nomenclature
with an ontology is that of ‘cyberpower’, put forward by Tim Jordan
(1999). Writing at the end of the 1990s, Jordan felt confident enough to
proclaim:

The patterns of a virtual life are clear enough to be mapped. The virtual
world and its social order can be traced now in its entirety, from pole to
pole. This does not mean all areas are perfectly known. Sometime in the
future we will probably look back at this map and see where it has equiva-
lents to the dragons and the sea monsters faithfully represented on early
maps of the world. (3)

This nevertheless does not prevent a self-assured vision of cyberspace as
a totality:

However, we can produce an overview of all of cyberspace’s multifarious
life, the first globe of cyberspace. This book is such a globe. It is a carto-
graphy of the powers that circulate through virtual lives, a chart of the forces
that pattern the politics, technology and culture of virtual societies. These
powers set the basic conditions of virtual lives. They are the powers of
cyberspace and together they constitute cyberpower. (3)
As the book proceeds, cyberpower turns from being a map of power
relationships on the Internet, to being indistinguishable itself from the
form of this relationship: ‘Cyberpower is the form of power that structures
culture and politics in cyberspace and on the Internet’ (208). The merit of
Jordan’s book is that it does break down the forms of recognizable power
relationship that operate in cyberspace in useful ways: individual, social
and imaginary. But as with Tofts’ fixation with his own solipsistically
invented ‘monster concept’ of cspace, Jordan valorizes cyberpower into a
theoretical dragon too indeterminable to have any analytic value.