Whatever are the metaphors that come to mind when discussing new media, from frontier to Frankenstein, from nervous system to Faust, any of the conceptual or technological models by which we try to understand what we are doing, and try to discover whether we are inventing or being invented by the machines we devise (the metaphors by which the technologies themselves become endowed and furthered), I am nevertheless drawn to the notion of the cargo-cult as a useful model for understanding what is happening, made all the more poignant currently by the tiresome rhetoric and hollow civic and national opportunism surrounding the year 2000.