Imagine a day at the beach. Sand. Water. Sun.
Imagine a day in Minecraft. Hardware. Screen. Pixels.
Why is it that we shy away from the idea of replacing a beach with a virtual world? Why do we tell our kids to shut down and walk out? Why is the virtual worth less then the actual? Some academics take strong positions concerning these questions. Michael Benedikt (1991), Howard Rheingold (1991) and Sherry Turkle (1995) have been mostly optimistic in their writing. Turkle makes the non-
judgmental statement that “we are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real” (Turkle, 1995, p.23). Mark Slouka is rhetorically critical in his book War of the Worlds (1995), while Jaron Lanier gives a sobering account in his You are not a gadget: a manifesto (2010). Both Slouka and Lanier warn us against letting the virtual take too much precedence over the actual. Our desire is split between nature and technology. Nature developed humans, but humans developed technology. So which is our most natural environment? The screen or the beach?
No matter how alluring the virtual is, it nevertheless disappears when power drains. This illustrates a fundamental aspect of the virtual; it is sustained by technology (Lovén, 2010). The actual and natural have, compared to the virtual, completely different underlying set of causalities and underlying support structures (Irwin, 2002). So the virtual worlds might be worth less because they are our
construct; they are fleeting, and they are possible to shut down. N. Katherine Hayles (1993a) soberly reminds us that “as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced” (p.49). Our value assessment of the virtual also depends on how we see the virtual in relation to the actual. Either we can regard the virtual as a pale imitation of the actual, a faulty duplication, or we can argue that the virtual does not try to fruitlessly mimic the actual. Rather the virtual carries a potential that is ready to be actualized, ready to be a supplement to the actual (Levy, 1998; Ryan, 1999). Our ability to see the virtual as a duplicate or
supplement depends on what we actually do with virtual technology. A virtual laboratory that does not manage to faithfully mimic the tactile handling of
chemicals and equipment is a copy that lacks in comparison to the original, at least if the intention with the lab is to let students learn specifically how to handle chemicals and equipment. As a contrasting example, an educational game that simulate how virus pandemics could spread across the world and kill all of
humanity (such as the game Plague Inc. by Ndemic Creations) could be seen as an extension of the actual, since it allows you to learn by doing things that would not be allowed in the actual.
Cyberspace evangelists saw the virtual as a way to correct different flaws in the actual, a way to fulfill the broken promises of the real world. In the typically large and evocative words of Doel and Clarke, “priority is not given to the fallen first; it is withheld for the full second” (1999, p.268). They suggest there are three kinds of virtuality:
• Virtual reality 1: Simulation • Virtual reality 2: Suppletion • Virtual reality 3: S(ed)uction
Doel and Clarke give the interesting example of landscape gardening. The English garden with its idealized nature is a simulation. The French garden is an abstract extension of the actual; it does not try to be a forest, instead it makes nature into its opposite. It converts organic chaos to geometrical perfection – a suppletion.
The Zen garden might be close to their third kind of virtuality – s(ed)uction, a “final resolution of the fault-ridden world” (ibid., p.272). If s(ed)uction is a
virtuality so sublime and alluring that we choose it instead of the actual world, then we might say that one example of this s(ed)uction is sandbox game worlds such as Grand Theft Auto. Thus, the third level of virtuality is not a lesser copy, nor an enhancing add-on, but a new world into which we are seduced.
Michael Heim (1993) makes more direct connections between virtuality and sexuality, using not the term seduction, but the term erotic. He illustrates how strong our urge to enter the virtual can be, an urge similar to a sexual desire not in function but in strength. William Gibson was quite explicit in Neuromancer where he lets his protagonist Case compare the sexual orgasm together with Molly to his existence in cyberspace (Nusselder, 2009; Turkle, 1995). Heim also mentions Case’s erotically obsessive desire to return to the matrix. One intention Heim has with the term erotic is to emphasize that our desire for cyberspace is not only “utilitarian or aesthetic”, but goes further, becoming “a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a mental marriage to technology” (Heim, 1993, p.85). In other words, the virtual can be regarded a limited copy of the actual, a copy that in certain aspects extends the actual. This copy, even though limited, nevertheless seduces us effectively.
A standard trope in cyberpunk is that of the hacker who strongly rejects the body. The body is an “outer shell” that is left “behind upon entry into the immaterial realm of cyberspace” (Heuser, 2003, p.33). Hayles points out how Necromancer’s protagonist Case “regards his body as so much ‘meat’ that exists primarily to sustain his consciousness until the next time he can enter cyberspace”
(Hayles, 1999, p36). In Ready Player One, (Cline, 2012) the protagonist chooses to indulge in the computer game world of the novels narrative, and rejects actuality by covering the windows of his apartment with black paint. This is indeed a harsh rejection of the actual. The word meatspace is typical cyberpunk terminology, meaning the actual world, as opposed to cyberspace. It is telling how the word meat is used instead of body or flesh. Meat brings an association to consumption, something that exists purely to be consumed. Meat does not have any value on its own. It is non-erotic and does not evoke desire, as does body or flesh. Cyberspace evangelists saw meatspace as a prison from which you needed to escape. It is also seen as the opposition between the heavy body of meat and the ethereal body of information (Dery, 1996; Lavery, 2001; Lovén, 2010; Nusselder, 2009). Barbara Flueckiger (2008) points out the “dissonance between body cult and
disembodiment” (p.3); while the body is seen as disposable in typical cyber- evangelism, there is a likewise strong body cult in marketing and entertainment, continuously repeating imagery of perfect bodies and turning the individual body into a project to manage.
As Doyle (2009) has pointed out that the immaterial body of the avatar is the first step towards a post-physical, disembodied experience of cyberspace. But, the avatar is simply a visual representation of a body. We are far from being digital angles in an online heaven. Futurists dream of going much further, of discarding the physical body and uploading the mind, achieving technological transcendence (Csicsery-Ronay, 1992; Hayles, 1993b; Hayles, 1999; Wertheim, 1998; Wertheim, 1999). This idea of a post-physical existence belongs to posthumanism, and posthumanism asks theoretical questions about what we eventually will develop into as a species. This has been a commodity in science fiction for a few decades, but scientists such as Hans Moravec and Rudy Rucker have also seriously
considered whether our minds can be stored and executed as software on
computers (Wertheim, 1999). As early as 1950, the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener played with the idea that a pattern of a human could be
telegraphed (Hayles, 1999). This assumption requires us to see ourselves as patterns of information and not embodied creatures. It requires that we regard the body as a machine that we use, and not something we are. If our mind and consciousness is information, then we might be stored in another physical substrate than our organic brain. So far there is no evidence that it is even theoretically possible to scan the human brain in sufficient detail, nor that a simulation of such a scan would be self-conscious and have an identity comparable to that of what our biological brain exhibits. The idea of posthuman transcendence has been harshly criticized from many directions, referred to as simpleminded Gnosticism (Davis, 1998). For example, Margaret Wertheim cannot “imagine a worse fate than being downloaded into immortality in cyberspace” (Wertheim, 1999, p.265). Jaron Lanier harshly criticizes what he refers to as the new religion of post-physicality, a religion that wants us to believe that “information is real and alive” (Lanier, 2010, p.29). His argument is that information cannot be elevated to the same status as biological and physical entities, because information needs to be executed, and information is nothing without an interpreter. Hayles proposes a rather down to earth view of
posthumanism, emphasizing that our identity depends on embodiment; she rejects the utopian posthumanism that sees our bodies as exchangeable “fashion
accessories” (Hayles, 1999, p.5). Britt Farstad (2010) suggests in a similar vein that posthumanism is based on a misunderstanding of the Cartesian mind/body
dualism, the erroneous idea that mind and body can be seen as separate from each other. This dualism is also strongly contested by phenomenology, which emphasize our being in the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).