Question: what do the following have in common?
|
Homer |
the poet |
|
Shakespeare |
the playwright |
|
James Cameron |
the director |
|
Quake |
the 3-d kill 'em video game |
|
StimluationWorld |
the first cyber-sense immersal tool |
Answer: they are agents that tell stories.
People love stories. Stories allow us to escape from ourselves and consider our lives in a fresh, new light. Stories (the ones that people pay attention to, anyways) are more interesting than our dull lives and make us feel connected to the larger world around us.
It is amazing that the actual content of stories seems to be fairly universal. Homer's Achilles is filled with despair and rage over the death of Petroculus, and unleashes bloody revenge on his enemies; this is repeated in countless action stims or movies three thousand years later.
But the ways we tell these stories has changed as the listener/viewer/target has insisted that the story they experinence by more and more real. The oral poem gives way to the stage, the stage gives way to the silent movie, the silent movie acquires sound and color, the movie gives way to a 3-dimensional immersal, the 3-d immersal gives way to a total immersion of the senses.
And there we have it: the Sensorium. A cube of light and energy that projects a consensual illusion.You can be anyone, anything, and forget that you are only pretending. It is pretty safe; no-one can kill you, although you can feel a pretty convincing illusion of pain. The biggest danger is the health problems that plague anyone who is sedentary for most of the day -- heart problems, obesity, etc.
The stories are amazing. I can log into Sherwood forest and become one of Robin Hood's merry thieves (complete with a pair of ridiculous and historically inaccurate tights!). I can be a fighter pilot in the Federation's last defense of Earth. I can walk among the dinosaurs. I can be a soldier in King Henry V's tiny army, listen to his Saint Crispin's Day speech, and feel my weariness give way to excitement, pride, and hope. If I were older, I could log into the adult nets and seduce any man I wanted to... The Sensorium allows us to live our fantasies and satisfies our every urge.
[ That was part of an essay I wrote when I was 13 for a Society and The Computer essay. Here's an excerpt from another essay I wrote for the same class.]
The technology to transmit digital information across the world via a network of thin cables was inevitable but revolutionary. Once a world-wide net was established, information itself became the new commodity, a substance to be created, protected, bought and sold. The instant digital connections across the world not only created new mediums of communication but also changed our ways of communicating. Electronic mail encouraged people to make their communications more blunt, brusque, and slick. This developed to a flow of abstract tokens of communication that acknowledged information exchange and cemented social bonds.
There was a second revolution when the Sensorium cube technology was assimilated into the worldwide digital network. People could project themselves into a cyber-world and form entire communities without actually going anywhere. An interesting offshoot of sensorium technology is the metaphor, a projected object that represents a complicated data construct. As computer programs and data objects become increasingly complicated, it is necessary to abstract their functionality in order to deal with them in a reasonable fashion. Us computer geeks now deal entirely with metaphors for fantastically complicated objects. Computer programmers don't sit in front of terminals, they project into infinite-space rooms and tinker with meta-objects.
In this way, the world I see via my sensorium cube looks like my comfortable world, but is more beautiful and each object has attributes of information that are just waiting to be unlocked and explored.
[ Here is a more honest essay I penned into my journal. I guess that my teachers would not be happy if I turned this in to them. ]
Some people say the sensorium and net have brought peace to the world. Every citizen has the right to a sensorium uplink unit and a personal cyber-space room. This means that all people can join in the global community, share in whatever interests or fantasies they have, or express their art and desires in their own space. The net fulfills our every visceral desire and makes sure that we never get bored with life. Violence -- real violence -- is almost unknown because people can just log into the net and kill metaphors to their heart's content. Or they can have cyber-sex 500 times a day. Or they can frolic in waterfalls, if they want.
And it's true, the sensorium and the net give us an outlet that prevents us from rioting and killing. But maybe we should have rioted and killed and fought the world we now live in.
The Earth's 23.4 teeming billions live in giant ferro-concrete cities, collections of housing cubes that contain tiny cubes, one 4-meter-square cube per citizen. Food is scare, and is grudgingly allotted to each citizen -- 1,800 calories of goo and glop a day. The planet's environment is almost dead. There is very little work to actually do, since our machines take care of everything. People are given "jobs," mostly to get them moving outside their cubes having some exercise. Life, real life, is bleak and as grey as the walls that surround us. The sensorium and net are the opium, the drug that makes it all worthwhile. Most of us wake up to a dim grey light, eat a disgusting meal, then log into the net where we experience an illusion of waking up in a giant silk 4-poster bed and eating a feast for breakfast (or whatever such illusion we programmed into our cyber-room). We can have adventures, fantasy, and happiness in the net, and ignore the fact that our real lives suck.
It is just as valid to say that the sensorium net brought peace to the world as to say that the sensorium net is a conspiracy to keep us complacent and sedated. My education consists primarily of technical training for how to use the net, and moral education about how to be a good citizen. The "Good Citizen," we are told, helps the net grow. The "Good Citizen" gets rid of all his/her nasty urges via the net. The "Good Citizen" does not complain, never speaks against the net, is afraid of riots, and is happy because the world is peaceful and good. This load of bullshit seems like a whole lotta brainwashing aimed at making sure we don't rebel against the system.
I've often asked myself,what would happen if the net were to cease to be? I'm obsessed with this question. We couldn't stand the bleakness of the city. Lots of people would kill themselves. Others would riot, and destroy the ugliness of the world. I can imagine a scenario where people riot and fight and kill until there is no-one left, and the cement cities crack and decay, and the ugly cubical cities give way to the glorious chaos of the cosmos. Or in another scenario, a small band of people realize their addiction to a world that does not exist, and create a rational society based on the real world which allows people to live out their fantasies in this world, not just in a cyber-world that never actually existed.
Both these scenarios are beautiful.