CYBERFICTION

Virtual Reality and Cyberspace: Concepts of fiction and reality

Essay in Cultural Convergence.

She was standing on a crossroads branching in seven directions. Library access. She walked along the narrow white road. Of course she was sitting in her chair, but the projection felt real enough. (PIERCY, M. 1991. He, She and It (or Body of Glass))

In Marge Piercy’s cyberpunk novel ‘He, She and It’ the Internet is a graphic virtual reality.

She looked at the screen. Her search was successful. She had the information to get the book; 813.54 CAV-C. She gathered all her things and walked towards the elevator to get her out of the building and into the library across the square. If she was lucky, the book would be where it was supposed to. Of course, it was raining outside.

In my life, Internet is a flat screen. Piercy’s library is in ‘Cyberspace’, a concept that first appeared in a science fiction novel by William Gibson in the 80’s. Now, the prefix 'cyber’ is used for almost anything having to do computers.

The net in both Piercy’s novel and my world are both virtual, since the internet as it is today also demands abstract thinking and a collective agreement and understanding of this abstraction for it to work, be it electronic mail, online roleplaying-games or the World Wide Web. If Virtual Reality and Telepresence would become available to us, we already are familiar with these concepts. Fiction had made us aware.

I read Piercy’s book a decade ago. She was my introduction to the cyberpunk fiction, and it was inspiring to read. It opened my mind to the exciting possibilities of a graphic virtual reality (VR) Internet. By then I was already an experienced user of the Internet, the World Wide Web, online gaming, mud and IRC-chatting. I was excited about the idea of VR technology someday being accessible.

In 1994 I tried one of the first versions of a VR game, in a cybercafe in Berlin. Using a headset and a cord to my arm that also held a weapon, I could turn my head and the picture would change, and I could see when I moved my arm. It was great fun to shoot down attacking birds, and hilarious to shoot and kill my boyfriend who was connected into the same software as I. The graphics was awful though, like an old Commodore game, there were cries of terror from the birds but no sound from my murdervictim. So the experience never felt close to real. But I can easily imagine that the experience will increase immensely when you add sound, smell, touch, wind, motion and great visual environments. All the inputs we are so used to in the every day real life experience. But will it be as good as actual meeting a person in real life, IRL? And if it becomes that good, or nearly as good, would I have killed my boyfriend so light-heartedly?

I can only imagine. But in science fiction and cyberpunk novels, cyberspace and virtual reality is be a normal, second nature environment where people communicate, work, fight and so on. Authors have already started to imagine. My argument is that science fiction, with its many different perspectives from vastly different authors, give valuable and creative ideas to the development of the Internet, but more importantly, can help us understand how different possible technological cyberfutures may change our lives, may change the very way we communicate with each other. It also plays a part in forming our expectations for the future. I do not argue that any of the fictional novels can depict the future as it will be, although sometimes they may be accurate in the extreme. But the fiction can help us see possibilities, help us understand this new virtual abstraction, as well as perhaps help us avoid certain negative consequences of this new “information age”.

Nothing is negative about how we envision how perfect it will be to enter Virtual Reality. It is the utopian vision of how to interact with the Internet, the Matrix – the Cyberspace.

‘Immersion is the apotheosis of virtual culture.’ (TOFTS, D. & M. McKEICH. 1998. Total Recall. In: Memory Trade. A Prehistory of Cyberculture)

We imagine we can choose or own appearance, or that we no longer will have to be judged by our physical appearance. Our behaviour in ‘cyberspace’ will judge us. Concepts like race, beauty and of course place will have less importance. Or so we think, it might not be so easy. In my experience though, much of this is already happening in the lesser virtuality of the Internet as we know it today. We can hide behind ‘nicks’ or ‘avatars’ and pretend to be anyone. We can live out other sides of our personalities, become members of online communities we in our physical form never would dare to venture, experience friendship and even fall in love with only text and graphics, perhaps web-cameras, to help us. But how fantastic would it not be to meet others online as if we were really being there? Technology is developing the utopian dream forward. NASA is working on Telepresence (like the AMES Virtual Environment Workstation). Telepresence is to experience a fake reality like it was real, with the help of different technological devices to enable us to interact with the graphical made environment, also referred to as a virtual reality. So maybe one day we can enter the Internet in ‘person’, that is, as good as being there in person. Mitchell (MITCHELL, W. 1995. Electronic Agoras. In: City of Bits. Space, Place, and the Infobahn) says that with enough bandwidth, processing power and more sophisticated input/ output devices, the boundary that traditionally has been drawn by the edge of the computer screen will be eroded.

But can Virtual Reality really compete with ‘In Real Life’ experience, regardless of bandwidth? Are there unforeseen costs to new ways of communication? What can fiction tell me? Fisher (FISHER, S. 1990. Virtual Interface Environments. In: B. LAUREL, ed. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design) tells us that science fiction writers have described conceptual versions of virtual environments for decades, like the concept of Telepresence. In 2003 we have yet to escape our bodies and its needs of nature, but many fictional works as well as films have imagined this. It seem impossible that it can ever be as easy as in the film ‘The Lawnmower Man’ (1992) where a man ends up being a part of the network, having left his (dead) body completely. In ‘Tron’ (1982) a man becomes ‘copied’ into bits and physically (if that concept is applicable) becomes a part of the computer. In the box-office hit ‘The Matrix’ (1999) almost all humans are connected into this shared software called The Matrix, although not by their own free choice. Their bodies are floating in a tank of water, where they are fed life-necessities by tubes. One of these life necessities is a ‘life’, and the reality as they think of it (20th century) is being fed to them trough a cable immersed in the brain. Because the humans know of no other reality, they have no reason to believe that what they are experiencing is not real.

Except from ‘Tron’, who preceded even the creator of ‘cyberpunk’, these science fictional works are all linked to the famous ‘Neuromancer’ by William Gibson (1984).

‘Gibson’s cyberpunk takes virtual technologies several steps further by positing the possibility of a direct neural connection between the human brain and the computer.’ (CAVALLARO, D. 2000. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture; Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. )

I will not repeat everything countless essays and books have said about the novel that started the genre of cyberpunk , ‘Neuromancer’ . But I will ask some questions and look at some examples. How can the fictional ‘Neuromancer’, written in the early 80’s, still be relevant? It is actually more relevant now than it was then (Cyberpunk, 1990, video). One very interesting work is Dani Cavallaro and her book ‘Cyberpunk and Cyberfuture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson’ from 2000. She argues that ‘provocative forms of knowledge can be deduced from Cyberculture and, in particular, from Gibson’s dystopian narratives, and that these may help us situate ourselves both as individuals and as collectives.’ (p.xvi) In other words, help us understand how we may change as individuals and how our concepts of community may change when our methods for communication change.

Cavallaro also points out that cyberpunk forces us to rethink our understanding of time, reality, materiality, community and space. Definitions of these concepts are no longer easily written in one-sentences. How do we define ‘space’?

‘Neuromancer’ definitely formed our conception of cyberspace as we think of it today. Gibson describes it as a ‘consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation… that communicate in a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system … Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.' By defining the word ‘cyberspace’ Gibson helps us understand this new evolution of abstraction in the history of communication; the abstraction of the Internet, and the possibilities it may have. A kind of encyclopaedia that is being constantly created by net-users, is the website H2G2, derived by the fictional novels of ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams. Here cyberspace is defined as ‘everywhere’, as well as a non-space; ‘…cyberspace is a non-space, something that we accept to be true.’ (Anon , 2003). The Internet as we know it today is everywhere since we can access it from anywhere there is internet-access. It is nowhere since the Internet is not one physical place, it is many. The space we share with others online is more an illusion we agree upon in order to make it work. So even though the Internet as we know it today is not a Virtual Reality in that sense that we are immersed in it, we are still looking at the screen, it is still a ‘space’ that we imagine. In this space we see cultures coming to life. ‘Cyberpunk’ has become a culture of its own, or a movement, that has had immense impact on culture, art, music, fashion and technology. A representative for the culture is ‘The Cyberpunk Project’ , which is an online, non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote, support, research, study, and create cyberpunk subculture, cyberpunk science fiction and general cyberculture. The cyberpunks are with many others the users of cyberspace, and they play a part in how to form it, in how communication between humans as well as between humans and machines will develop.

The Cyberpunk Project states that with Neuromancer William Gibsonpresented the idea of a ‘global information network (the Matrix), in a technological dominated dystopian society where social decay is apparent everywhere and lasting interpersonal relationships are nonexistent. There is corruption everywhere and the essence of being human seems to be slipping away'. It is a description that is common for most cyberpunk novel. In Marge Piercy’s post-apocalypse world of 'He, She and It’ the power is in the hands of big corporations, not countries. The corporation is your life, it is where you live, work and die. They decide what you wear, the work you do decide what rights you have. It is not freedom. It is like the worst fears of communism come to life in a capitalist system reached its absolute height. Likewise, Fred Jameson said that Gibsonand his cyberpunk movement has initiated the ‘supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’, and Timothy Leary said Gibson ‘has produced nothing less than the underlying myth, the core legend, of the next stage of human evolution’. Cavallaro (2000) say something of the same thing; ‘Cyberpunk presents a bleak vision of a future in which people are subjected to ruthless communications networks, are totally disconnected from one another and long to leave the body behind, yet are trapped in a physical maze of junk.’

About 90% of Gibson’s fictional concepts have come to life. (Cyberpunk, 1990, video) Can we expect more of cyberpunk predictions to come true? Is the next stage of human evolution to loose our humanity, to successfully remove any need of human contact in order to communicate and be more productive and efficient? Cyberpunk helped form the question, and it forces us to come face to face with this fear.

Virtual Reality does not compete fairly; it can completely overshadow reality in doing thinks we only dream of doing. In VR we can choose what part of reality we want, or we can create our own reality. Or so we think, it may all depend upon who has the power of bits. Fiction feeds our dreams and fears for the future, and consequently forces us to come to terms with it. Some of the science fiction literature describes a utopian future and/ or technology. Others describe a dystopian future, the worst possible scenarios. In many ways we are already living many of the predictions, imaginings, dreams and fears of the science fiction literature. We are coming to terms with many of cyberpunk-concepts. We are getting to know them during daily use in both work as well as personal life. For some of us it becoming normal, like second nature.

The gap between the present and the future becomes narrower and narrower, as the futuristic fantasies of classic science fiction turn out to be integral parts of the here-and-now.’ (Cavallaro)

The future has already happened. (William Gibson, 1990)

Fiction cannot see the future, it can only guess. Fiction is completely reliant upon its author, and what knowledge he or she has of information relevant to their work. In some cases the lack of knowledge, as in William Gibsons case, being a ‘computer illiterate’ by own words, can be liberating. In some cases the fiction take something that is already happening and develop it further, to the point or beyond what is perceived as humanly possible. In some cases fiction can seem too naïve to be believed as relevant for the real world. But the positive and optimistic dreams can help us create and imagine, and the negative and pessimistic view of the future of communication may help us try to avoid such a future ever taking place. We must however remember that real life is not all black, nor white. The future will possibly not be any of the dystopian possibilities, or any of the utopians:

Think all the consequences and possibilities at once. Think of the future as a heterotopia, a mix of different kinds of space. (WARK, M. 2002. Too Real. In: DARREN TOFTS, ANNEMARIE JONSON AND ALESSIO CAVALLARO, ed. Prefiguring Cyberculture, an intellectual history. )