WE will flood our lives with that which is already drowning us we will embrace a technology with the power to erode what little individualism "we have left solitude will become "down time" to be filled in with gadgets. Thus argues Mark Slouka in this deeply felt diatribe against the dawning of the new age of Virtual Reality (VR). Slouka quotes Camus dictum that the best critiques are also often the most passionate affirmations his book is certainly passionate, but it is also a critique grounded solidly in Slouka's extensive reading of the out pourings of the digerati, or cyberspace experts.
There are two kinds of VR. The first we've all heard about it allows us to "boot up" our beloved PC and immerse ourselves in a cosy computer generated world. It's little more than a souped up version of the violent and extremely addictive simulation game Doom we can explore the virtual labyrinth, making friends instead of zapping enemies and playing our own lead role in a virtual soap opera. From Slouka's humanist perspective, it is of great concern that so many of us are psychologically dependent on the escapist world of the machine.
The second kind of VR is more insidious, surrounding us with a web of synthetic objects, a "forest of machines" that can recognise individuals, know and sense our moods and filter our experience of the real, physical world. Distinctions between the actual and artificial are beginning to blur Japanese workers have begun greeting robots on the production line (don't laugh, many of us talk to our Apple Macs). Mountains band beaches have been mechanised and moved indoors and the much hyped electronic shopping malls are almost upon us why bother leaving the armchair at all?
Slouka sees our modern obsessions with television and the car as part of the same drift away from physical reality and toward an abstract virtual world we drive along the motorway or along the information superhighway and miss all the challenging, non wired byways along the route. The human imagination requires room to explore and doesn't find any in the "claustrophobic, over determined world of a television show or a computer program (no matter how sophisticated)". To Slouka, the ability to dive in your own, imaginary computer universe for hours at a time is just the culmination of this century's Orwellian drift towards divorce from real life (downgraded to "RL" as distinct from "VR" in the cyberists' terminology).
The book does have its lighter moments, usually in relation to the ludicrously named teledildonics (telephone sex without the voice), cyberspace's grossly inferior version Of Woody Allen's hilarious "orgasmatron" in the film Sleeper. It's not funny, however, when the digerati provoke the author into comparisons with Pol Pot or the Third Reich due to their contemptuous attitude to the individual.
These seemingly far fetched analogies are well supported by quotations from the more extreme practitioners, who do sound dangerously loopy for example, Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired magazine, says that "the millions of buzzing dim witted personal computers will combine into one grand organism/machine immeasurably greater than the sum of its parts". The heart of the true cyberists' vision is this concept of the "digital hive" in which our individual identities will be subsumed into the great wired collective, the global mind of the Internet. No prizes for guessing who will be the drones and who the queen bees.
Predictably, when Slouka looks behind this advanced new technology, he sees the hand of the US military and the multinational computer giants in their unholy alliance with the research scientists. Will we, the pawns in their game, embrace this new technology as wholeheartedly as we have embraced every other recent technological advance (suitably translated into consumer goods), or will we, like Slouka, try to construct a few speedtraps on the superhighway?
