Location: Just Back From Virtual Shopping

“You mean you spent real money on something that is only ones and zeros?”

In honor of the semester about to begin, and my new class “Invented Worlds,” I cannot resist this topic and want to give an academic (but one hopes, not dreary, reply).

I get this question all the time about virtual worlds, and I expect to get it again from the new crop of students who will experience SL with me for the first time.  But I am no longer a “noob” in-world.  I’m not some SL wizard yet, but as I’ll tell the class, my year (as of Jan. 11) in Linden Lab’s metaverse and 9 months or so blogging about it here have taught me more about the real world than I may have wanted to know.

Like Neo in The Matrix, a film I’ll be teaching in my class, I have taken the red pill.  It’s rather like the real-life red pill I have begun taking to control my cholesterol (heredity, darn it!  I diet and exercise..) In either case, there’s no turning back, so here’s how I answer the question:

“Our whole way of life is ones and zeros.” SL helped confirm this suspicion.  Even in the “real world” much of what we buy is a hallucination.

Consider how much of what we do now is merely ones and zeros, from reading or writing this blog, to the arbitrary pulses in the HMO network that make my statin cost $10 and not $100, to the rest of the money in our economy, to the code that makes our cars’ regulate air temperature or prevents an accidental nuclear-weapons launch. 

And many of our purchases? When we buy, say, the latest version of MS Office, what are we getting from Microsoft?  How are we paying the company?

I’m not worried about some type of Y2K meltdown in the digital environment we inhabit. I am worried, however, that we residents of “the real world” have confused, in the very sense that the late Jean Baudrillard explored in his writing, simulation with sensuous experience. And like Cypher, the character in The Matrix who prefers illusion to reality, we do not use ones and zeros to enable experience, but to avoid or replace it.

Thus the SL addiction I encounter. I do not mean those few people making a real living, and enabling real-life experiences, by money made in-world. I also don’t mean those of us for whom SL and its kin are pastimes for a few hours, be it behind the wheel of a virtual car or at a dance-club.  I mean the millions of individuals spending a large part of their days in some sort of consensual hallucination (William Gibson’ prescient term). 

Now one might argue that the feeling one gets from an Armani suit or fine perfume enhances one’s life.  I know that my nicest wristwatch, a Swiss beauty, makes me feel better not for its snob-appeal but for the beauty of fine craftsmanship.

But how real is advantage of purchasing a Raymond Weil watch instead of a cheaper, but well made, Seiko?  Or, to be less concrete, how real is the invented safety of the mall, the cul-de-sac, and the gated community, all fueled with electronic money, shaky loans, and fly-by-night marketing? How real the billions of dollars lost or won in stock market’s fluctuations. 

Perhaps real enough to make an invented world we have made on this side of our screens fall apart?

What is real, what mere shadow?  Ask Plato…he knew something of people in a cave, watching shadows dance on the wall before them, yet unable to turn back to the light and the puppet-masters at their backs.

So, yeah, I’d still take the red pill, please.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Impressive blog.

We build our own realities - sometimes we’re aware of this process (when we log into a “game” like SL), sometimes we are not. Who makes you want that certain product? Do you really need it or did the ad create an artificial “need”? Are you really ill or did the pharmaceutical industry “invent” an illness or exaggerates symptoms to sell more pills?

Be careful who influences and maybe “creates” your reality for you. Stay critical - take a step back and analyze your choices and your view of the world from time to time.

Cecil,

I think it more likely that in a coming age of scarcity (clean water, oil, natural gas) we’ll both live harder, more physical real lives and use our broadband infrastructure to be “more than meat” online.

There will, however, be lots of RL pain. The “saline tanks” of VR are as yet a fantasy…

But I could be wrong.

Wonderful entry.  I don’t think people realize how many fantasies and lies make up their world.  From the beer commercials to the celebrity fascination to the “belief” that a terrorist can strike at “anytime”.

We’ve become poor citizens in the U.S. Allowing the news media to play to our fantasies rather than go after the truth and reality of things we need to know so we can understand where we are going.

Maybe we are destined to be a humanity whose sole purpose IS to eventually live a fantasy life?  Achieve a nirvana without pain?

Thanks for blogging on the concept.

Great stuff, Joe.  Fascinating.  I know for instance your blog was written in ones and zeroes, but it didn’t seem like it when I read it…or maybe it did.

only too true words here.

people should spend a thought on reality vs virtuality .... it can lead to breathtaking results ... and when you are done with it try comparing nature vs culture and be surprised again

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