The Telegraphed Man was inspired by developments in biogenics and cybernetics. As early as 1950, mathematician Norbert Wiener claimed that "the idea that one might conceivably travel by telegraph ... is not intrinsically absurd." While he acknowledged the technical difficulties of such transit -- "Any scanning of the human organism must be a probe going through all of its parts," which would certainly make it difficult to "hold an organism stable while part of it is being destroyed" -- Wiener foresaw the day when new advances in technology would make translating the genetic code into a sort of Morse code as easy as erasing software.

Today [in early 1987], scientists at Berkeley are bidding for the rights to map the human genome, and though skeptics see the project as mere trading in "chromosome junk mail," AT&T and the USPS are busy fixing the rates for transmission of human data ("Should we go with kilowatt hours, or bulk rate?"). As Jean Baudrillard stated, "Space is no longer even linear or one-dimensional: cellular space, indefinite generation of the same signals ... Such is the genetic code ... of which we are no more than cells-for-reading."