Iron Man 2.0

I know that there are a number of comic book/sci-fi/pop culture aficionados among my readership, so this one’s for you guys.

Here’s a page I like from the Iron Man comic book miniseries Hypervelocity. Iron Man (a.k.a. wealthy and powerful industrialist Tony Stark) isn’t exactly the star of the show in this one, as he’s been sidelined by a critical injury (a high-velocity railgun shot). The real star of the show is “Tony Stark 2.0”, a personality construct based on Tony’s own neural patterns that took control of the suit when he was taken out of commission. The construct isn’t a perfect copy, as it lacks a lot of Tony’s long-term memories, but it does act, react and “think” like Tony does.

Here’s a page from the book that I rather liked, titled Tony Stark 2.0’s Top 5 Positives About No Longer Possessing an Organic Human Body, a piece transhumanist enough for me to call it either “Gibsonian” or “Cory bait”:

If you’re a follower of the “cyberpunk” genre, this page (as well as the rest of the comic) should be giving you a sense of deja vu. That’s because the Iron Man comic has always been about ten years behind the times in terms of concepts, technobabble and pop culture. Consider:

• The tune he’s listening to: Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry. Dude, that’s from late 1991. I know, because I was a DJ back then, and had the regulars of Clark Hall Pub moshing to it by early 1992.
• Really dude, only 5,096 tunes in the super-advanced Iron Man suit? Let me get this straight, this suit has a battle computer and is capable of housing a personality construct and yet you’ve only loaded just over 5,000 MP3s? Dude, I have a machine at work that’s barely qualified to run Vista, and I’ve got 6,000 tracks in iTunes.
• The whole techno-transhumanist obsession with “transcending the meat”. That was an obsession of the cyber-freak magazine Mondo 2000 back in the ’90s (who in turn copped it from a concept often used by William Gibson in the 80’s).
• Later in the book, Tony Stark 2.0 gate-crashes a rave held by the “Mecha Underground” held in a secluded location: deep underwater. Also another late-’80s/early-’90s thing, if you forget the mechanized dancers and the bit about being underwater.
• He finally ditched having just the moustache and added a goatee. Also very ’90s.

I’ll give credit to the writers for using the “2.0” thing. Although it’s old school to us computer geek types, using “2.0” as an expression meaning “new and improved” has only recently entered the mainstream.

In spite of these quibbles, I find it a fascinating read. More on this later.