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Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 27

tourist.” Consistent with the values encoded by a Western culture of
capitalism and commodification—values underlying and reinforced
by the rapid commercialization of the Web (see especially Yoon)—the
cybertourist sees “other” cultures as merely occasions for stimula-
tion and entertainment, something like dining in an “ethnic” restau-
rant. One consumes something “different,” the palate is mildly
stimulated by difference, but then one pays the bill and goes home to
the familiar. No collisions, no culture shock, no challenge to one’s
own most deeply-seated beliefs follow. In contrast with the polybrids
and syntheses that result from leaving the cave, no enriched under-
standing of the whole complex of beliefs, values, views, and lan-
guage(s) that make up a different culture results for the cultural
tourist. Rather, “the other” is represented merely as another con-
sumable resource, to be assimilated without resistance. As our es-
says show, technology and its embedded values are not the
unstoppable force credited by (hard) technological determinism. But
the soft determinism of a Web driven primarily by commercializa-
tion, if coupled with an uncritical ethnocentricism among those al-
ready within the cultural domain defining much of contemporary
Internet and Web culture, only colludes with a cultural imperialism,
the homogenization of McWorld. In contrast with the intellectual
mutts and cultural polybrids necessary as dual citizens in an inter-
cultural global village, the Star Trek Borg—a “culture” that con-
sumes all the diverse cultural capital it encounters, reducing it to a
single homogenous sameness—is a suggestive image of the ethno-
centric cultural consumer.
As the allegory of the cave and its expression in the ancient
Stoic vision of a cosmopolitan suggest, philosophy may play a cru-
cial role in educating the dual citizens, the multicultural persons
who, unlike the cultural consumers fostered by a single Internet
culture, must now create senses of identity that stretch comfortably
across the boundaries of multiple cultures. Philosophy works to un-
cover and critique the foundational assumptions defining specific
cultural worldviews, and to reconstruct individual and collective
worldviews that emerge from the debris of cultural collisions. More
broadly, the papers collected here, along with the many other pre-
sentations and contributions to CATaC’98, trace the often obvious
and sometimes subtle results of what happens when cultures col-
lide—when Western CMC technologies are introduced into diverse
cultures. A complex but coherent picture begins to emerge. The cul-
tural collisions documented here help us uncover previously tacit
assumptions about the desirability of what turns out to be, in many