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The secret of our present-day existence is contained in this odd expression, which in a few decades has lost all of its mystique, its shock-value, its rapture. How is it that this commodity, which has long since become so completely everyday, has not yet shed an adjective that, for every other commodity produced within a system within which private consumption is the norm, would seem redundant, if not absurd. Do we have personal cars? Personal houses? Personal clothes? Or personal books? Or even personal calculators, radios, and TVs?

The personalness of the personal computer, turned by Apple into a grammatical prefix, is the personalization of the system of production in the most general sense: the industrial-military-informational complex, indeed the entire network. It is the promise of a magical transubstantiation, in which the private individual would become identical to the system itself and the idea of the system.

The garage has always been set off within suburbia as a liminal hybrid space. It is where the transitory and static, the network of traffic and the domestic refuge, public and private meet. A place for bums, suicides, and teenagers who have outgrown their homes but not their dependency. Housewives scurry through, but their husbands dwell, given over to past-times nostalgic for lost freedoms: rock bands, fixing and making things, crime. Not surprising that it is here, according to the myth, that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made the first personal computers.

In those early years, when the personal computer was still a rare and coveted oddity, and seemed as out-of-place in the living room as a robotic butler, one was still aware of the fantasy — at once strange and childish, and absolutely radical — that would revolutionize the world. Thus in the film WarGames the hacker, having hacked his way into the military’s most intimate and secret places, saves the world from a nuclear catastrophe that he had himself, accidently, initiated. None of which could have happened had the systems engineers in the military not decided that the entire system of nuclear deterrence could not be trusted to human hands, but would have to be entrusted to the control of a supercomputer designed to constantly model the outcome of possible nuclear wars. Simulation and reality, risk assessment and effective action, come to coincide perfectly.

And in a way the personal computer did vanquish the cold war, and the catastrophe system of mutually assured destruction. Barely eight years after Wargames the Soviet Union would fall. It is said that, afraid of the vulnerability of transistors to electromagnetic pulses, they never invested in them. How could they keep up with Moore’s law?

Terrorism (of the personal WMD) and the internet (which at once personalizes the network as never before and depersonalizes the personal computer) obey the same fundamental principle: everyone can be the system (as hacker or hacked, terrorist or victim), but no one can be the whole system. It is, in the strictest sense, a baroque logic, the monadology come to life — the absolute suspension of the simulacrum eschatology of the cold war.

The serial television show began to thrive in the age of terrorism. This is no accident. The cold-war serial was always, in the end, the Christian-tragic hero of the movies: the rebel with or without a cause, the outcast, at best, as in Star Treck, the explorer. In Magnum PI and Knight Rider the hero was fused with his car. He was, in the end, a cowboy. In every case, nothing but a pale, worldly reminiscence of Christ. Just as every bad-boy in the end seeks only redemption, the true desire of every cold-war serial is to be remade into a movie. Buffy, in contrast, began as a horrifically bad movie. And indeed the mark of true greatness in a serial is to achieve absolute resistance to transmediation. The very conceit of 24 makes its cinematization impossible.

If the hero of the cold-war serial could not be sacrificed, since then he would become Christ and the world would end, the hero of the serial in the age of terror must be sacrificed over and over again to postpone an end of the world that, as the simulated end of the simulated end of a simulated world, has already happened. In this way, the serial finds its rhythm.