Reality Hacking—A Reality Check: Ecological Advocacy in Jeff Noon’s Nymphomation

Technological media spectacles increasingly mediate our relation to the nonhuman world. This becomes worrisome from an ecological perspective when the powers steering the media are corporations whose primary concern is profit. Jeff Noon’s science fiction novel Nymphomation provides readers with an instructive lens through which to examine such a coalescence between corporations and media technologies. The novel presents a mediascape saturated by corporate messages as leading to environmental deterioration but also imagines media technologies as a way to intervene in such situations through the practice of culture hacking. Culture hacking engenders creative practice, resulting in the amelioration of the environmental problems caused by the profit-driven logic of postindustrial capitalism. This representation functions as a metaphor for ecological advocacy, thus staging one of the roles ecocriticism hopes to play in mitigating environmental problems: identify and critique the cultural values and ideas that inform our current environmentally destructive practices.