Sci-Fi me promo

This ad for the Sci-Fi channel originally aired in the late 1990s and is exemplary of the pre-dotcom-crash technophilia.

This short promo for the sci-fi channel lends itself to any number of critical interpretations. It is at once a shameless example of the 1990s-Wired-Magazine-style technophilia that dominated much of the cultural discourse around digital media in that era. Its use of an African-American woman as its spokesperson echoes the tendency to imagine "cyberculture" as a utopian, race-free zone. But if we look closely at what this promo is actually celebrating, it is a very conservative and conventional take on consumerist society.