The context of global environmental and social crises, as Hayles points out, merely accentuates the longstanding existential temptations to construct and believe in simple technological panaceas and escapes. `In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons', she writes, `it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space. A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption' (Hayles, 1993: 81, cited in Robins, 1995: 138).