Everything that happens, happens now. The essays, narratives, and essay-narratives gathered under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the 'presentist' bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly: our non-periodical, continuous publication is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions.

Initially presented as a thread in two parts, green and grey, Critical Ecologies continues to explore convergences among natural and constructed ecosystems, green politics and grey matter, silicon chips and sand. A 2004 Festschrift, with over a dozen essays on Joseph McElroy, hints at the literary implications of an ecological, medial turn in literary theory.

For many who are committed to working in electronic environments, an electronic "review" might better be named a "retrospective," a mere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. There's a technological subtext to the declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring that subtext to the surface will be part of ebr's agenda.

After a full generation of constructivist thought, after close to a decade of Internet construction and nearly as long a period of activity at ebr/altx, we're ready to put an end to the construction of periodical issues. Instead of working within an unconsidered paradigm inherited from print media, the ebr editors intend to construct our own ends, over time and on terms that we set for ourselves (within the constraints of the web environment).

A field-defining collection published in March 2004 by the MIT Press, First Person - the book - already included in its pages numerous sustained critiques of its own positions. Remediated in ebr through the Summer of 2004, the book's illustrations have been recast in color and the critique has been taken to a new level. A relation of games and narrative? . . . for first order practitioners, that's a given. The next-level relation - between game/narrative and literary tradition? .... that's up to critics.

As "sound" approaches ever more closely the condition of music it too approaches a kind of writing, which is then retroactively revealed to have been "noisy" all along.

Like the webarts here under discussion, ebr approaches the Internet, in the first instance, as a unique art medium.

Postmodern politics (against the capitalist culture of postmodernity) after bosnia, kosovo, the 2001 U.S. election, 9/11, the 2004 expansion of the EU....

The count-down is complete; the line has served its time. In this spirit of millennial closure, the Winter 1999/2000 issue of ebr will be the last written under the constraint of periodical publication.

Recalling that Donna Haraway's Cyborg was never meant to be a wired, blissed-out bunny, Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills recover the political dimension in socialist-feminist thought. Their five-volume edited series, "The Politics of Information," brings class back into cultural studies, considers the Web as crucial to the expanding 'informatics of domination,' and recovers the cyborg as a key figure for an entire world of labor and lifeways.