Mark Dery

Mark Dery (markdery@optonline.net) is a cultural critic. He is the author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. His seminal essay, ‘Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs', popularised the guerrilla media activism known as ‘culture jamming'; widely republished on the web, this text remains the definitive theorisation of this subcultural phenomenon. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, an academic anthology he edited, Dery coined the term ‘Afrofuturism' and kick-started academic interest in black technoculture in particular and cyberstudies in general. An independent scholar, he was the Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at University College Irvine in January 2000 and was an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University from 2001 to 2009. He blogs at www.markdery.com and is at work on Don Henley Must Die, a book about the cultural psyche of Southern California.