Mark Dery

Mark Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books: Escape Velocity (1996), a critique of the libertarian-bro ideology that dominated the digital revolution of the 1990s; two studies of American mythologies (and pathologies), The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (2012); and, most recently, the biography Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (2018). He popularized the concept of “culture jamming” and, in his 1993 essay “Black to the Future,” coined the term “Afrofuturism.”