by Geoff Olson

“You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself: how did I get here?”
David Byrne – the Talking Heads

Palm trees and blue skies; a gentle breeze drifting over rolling sand dunes. What could be better than this?
I was putzing around in Second Life, Linden Lab’s hugely popular Internet community with more than one million members worldwide. My “avatar,” an onscreen figure representing my identity online, wandered over bridges and along walkways, while other avatars around me did their own thing (including dancing and flying).
Anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can join Second Life for free. You even receive a small virtual stipend, in “Linden dollars.” Some members even put down real money by credit card, to purchase cyber-properties. Marketers have seen the writing on the digitized wall; several automakers have a presence in Second Life. Even the news-agency Reuters maintains an outpost, employing the news world’s “first virtual bureau chief,” with his own cyber-office and avatar.
The landscape rendering and architectural detail of Second Life is impressive. Yet this online world reminds me of a nineties’ cartoon of a character standing in a video arcade, wearing a virtual reality headset. Peering into a vista much like Second Life (cascading waterfalls, palm trees and buildings pleasing to the eye), he exclaims, “What a beautiful world!” Outside the arcade, the real world is a cesspool of polluted streams, belching smokestacks and crumbling buildings.
As glaciers recede and wilderness shrinks, will sunny sim-worlds, like Second Life, hold even more appeal? Before we haul our pixilated butts into electronic Shangri-las, perhaps we should heed our science-fiction visionaries, from Philip K. Dick to the Washowski brothers, who warned that virtuality can be a tricky thing.
Virtuality, in the sense intended here, isn’t just about computer simulations. It’s the science and art of making “genuine fakes.” We live in an age of virtual sex (over phone lines and the Internet), virtual bodies (injections and implants), virtual buildings (condominium complexes with superficial appeal, but little structural integrity), virtual politics (politicians driven by branding experts), virtual finance (fiscal tricks such as hedge funds and derivatives), virtual food (transfats and artificial flavouring, genetically engineered vegetables, etc.), and even virtual pop stars (off-pitch megastars corrected by music editing software). There’s obviously an embarrassment of technical riches in the First World. It’s just that these riches are beginning to feel as insubstantial as a handshake from Ken Lay’s ghost.
In his 2002 Oscar acceptance speech, filmmaker Michael Moore summed up the state of virtuality in the US: “We live in fictitious times, with a fictitious president, elected in a fictitious election, to fight a fictitious war.” Two years earlier, the US Supreme Court demanded a stop to a ballot recount in Florida, ensuring that a lexically-challenged man-child from Crawford, Texas, become the president select. By the 2004 federal race, it was déjà vu for the Democrats, as voters in the swing state of Ohio encountered electoral anomalies of their own. The myriad reported problems with electronic voting machines, which are being increasingly used across the US, has observers wondering if electoral democracy in the US is now little more than a shell (or a shell game). Not that Canadians can afford to feel smug in this department. The floor-crossing of former Liberal MP David Emerson in the Vancouver-Kingsway riding, and his subsequent contempt for his constituents’ concerns, made it plain that at least one district in Vancouver has taxation without representation. Further, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent decision to muzzle his own MPs exposes a packaged quality to our much-vaunted “freedom.”
Virtuality has dissolved the line separating news and advertising, politics and public relations, terrorism and antiterrorism, the private from the public, and entertainment with all of the above. When former Fox News anchor Tony Snow became presidential press secretary last year, no one so much as blinked. (For something resembling public shock and awe, Tony would have to show up on Oprah with a tell-all book, outlining how he and Oliver North used to ship Soylent Green through Area 51 – when they weren’t out pistol-whipping nuns with Bill O’Reilly.)
For a clue on how deeply Washington has descended into a Bizarro World virtuality of its own, consider this anecdote reported by Ron Suskind of The New York Times from his 2004 conversation with a “Top Republican aide” to Bush:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality... We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”
As the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan spirals out of control, the official response is to deny reality – while programming a more entertaining one, merging virtual liberation with the gaming industry. Several years ago, the Pentagon launched an electronic division devoted to simulating Middle Eastern urban warfare. The video training exercises are then released to private gaming companies for adaptation to the market. (The head of one company recently bragged that his employees had Fallujah rendered even before the battle in the Iraqi city was over.) The question is, considering the vector of virtual war from the Pentagon to Walmart, does the programming and marketing really end at the point of purchase, or is it really only the beginning, in the minds of children?
Physicist Max Frisch once said that technology is “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” How long before the school field trip is simply a wander through a higher-bandwith Google Earth? I recall an anecdote, a few years back, about a primary school teacher in Eastern Canada, who assigned her class an essay about interacting with nature. One of her students sidled up to her desk, and confessed she found the assignment too difficult; she had never even climbed a tree before. At the point that we can convincingly simulate tree-climbing, getting back to nature will no longer be the only game in town. This is virtuality’s Faustian bargain: that we can inherit a second life while losing our sensibilities in the first one.
With traditional face-to-face community declining, we have every reason to believe virtual culture has a marked effect on our sense of self. With the explosion of hi-tech fakery, do people feel their own “real” lives to be incrementally more ghostlike?
Television was the first high-tech cradle to rock us to sleep, starting in the fifties. In his 2002 Atlantic Monthly essay The Numbing of the American Mind, Thomas de Zengotita argues that the generational conditioning by television and other media has some surprising consequences. This is why a couple of weeks in nature doesn’t quite cut it anymore for urban adults.
He asserts: “You will virtualize everything you encounter anyway, all by yourself.” Raised on a steady diet of nature shows, “you won’t see wolves, you’ll see ‘wolves’.” You’ll murmur to yourself: “Wow, look, a real wolf, not in a cage, not on TV, I can’t believe it.”
“Natural things have become their own icons,” de Zengotita writes. The author believes the end result of this process is a subtle state of anesthesia. Using Times Square in New York as an example, de Zengotita notes the entire space is “firing message modules, straight for your gonads, your taste buds, your vanities, your fears. These modules seek to penetrate, but in a passing way. A second of your attention is all they ask. Nothing is firing that rends or cuts. It’s a message, really, if you just go with it. And why not? Some of the most talented people on the planet have devoted their lives to creating this psychic sauna, just for you.”
Ersatz environments and colourful advertisements have been with us since the fifties, de Zengotita adds, but the multimedia blitz we experience now represents a whole new level of persuasion: “Saying that it’s just more of what we had before is like saying a hurricane is just more breeze.” De Zengotita argues that the psyche protects itself from these message modules by going into a hyper-ironic stance, distancing from direct feeling. The approach of the young to information overload is not resistance, but a semi-detached surrender to the 24-hour news cycle; the iPod; the chat line; the video game; the text message; the Internet and the cell phone. Their worldliness is expressed mostly as cynicism about the boomers’ decades-long fumbling of the globe. If they can be said to have a motto, it’s one of numbing and resignation, summed up by: “Whatever.”
The situation may be dire, but it’s not hopeless. “Hundreds of people descended on Liverpool Street station for the biggest ever turnout for the latest Internet craze – mobile clubbing,” reported the Daily Mail in October. “Students, business people and office workers danced in silence as they listened to their iPods, among commuters listening to announcements about late trains.” On the surface, this may sound dysfunctional, even sad, but it may offer a small ray of hope. The human impulse for shared experience is surprisingly resilient. Even Second Life is ultimately an effort to seek out community – albeit in a way that seems to deconstruct the very effort.
According to biologist J.Z. Young, “we create tools and then mould ourselves by the use of them.” The feedback loop between creators and their creations makes techno-prophecy difficult, if not impossible. Yet the central question with virtuality is the one posed by all science fiction dystopias: do machines serve human beings, or do human beings serve the machines?
There is still the chance to bend our tools to a higher purpose, to awaken from hyper-capitalism’s fever dream of endless distraction, rampant consumption, invented enemies and clashing armies. The clock is ticking, and few of us relish the idea of living through “Grand Theft Auto: The Biosphere,” without the hope of finding an escape key. As Neo discovered in The Matrix, waking up from an electronic trance, and witnessing the “desert of the real,” is not an easy task. But it may be the first step in salvaging anything remotely human for the future.

mwiseguise@yahoo.com