Cyberpunkish Musing: Utopia? Or Dys?

Location: RL Desk, Fixing Class Web Site

Over at New World Notes, I have followed the discussion of Neal Stephenson’s response to the erroneous claim in an NPR story. The reporter misused a quotation by the author about Google Earth to claim that Second Life is what Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash. Can we map the template for a cautionary tale over this novel and (to my mind) the better crafted The Diamond Age? That has been my reading of both books.

I’ve been troubled by years about the craving others manifest for that future and, indeed, any future with a transhumanist immersion in consensual hallucinations. It worried William Gibson a lot, too, because, like Stephenson, he set out in part to warn about the power of media. I've lost the citation where he acknowledges the irony of what happened after the book appeared. But as he noted in the now quaintly dated documentary Cyberpunk, his fanboys and girls viewed the Neuromancer trilogy as a sort of utopian roadmap for the digerati in their leathers, high-end computers, and industrial-space housing (at least until they can join the exodus of mind to cyberspace). For Snow Crash, though Hiro Protagonist is just what Stephenson names him to be, my sympathies lie with Raven, Mr. “Poor Impulse Control.” I suspect that Stephenson made him an admirable villain to remind us of who gets left behind, and may fight back, in the sort of libertarian nightmare depicted in the novel.

Raven’s glass knives are the ultimate reminder that Meat is greater than Mind, if I may mix my cyberpunk tropes a bit.

So, here's a different future from Neo-Luddite, Peak-Oiler me. Not as darkly sexy as Snow Crash or Neuromancer...but reality is always drearier and scarier than SF. As Gibson noted in a recent post, "The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian." Read the rest of this post at Gibson's blog to see why he's not simply, to use his words, one of those "aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing."

I'm not sure that my vision of the future will be so good for many who use virtual worlds and crave better ones. It will be both quotidian, in Gibson's terms, and very difficult.

We'll run out of cheap resources before we build consumer-grade immersive fantasy-lands online. Our efforts will be more mundane, to marshal our technical powers for survival in a time when not only highways but power grids enter a period of permanently cascading failure. There will be no fusion reactors, Mars missions, everyday nanotech, or Singularity. We'll be spinning windmills, stripping mountains (unless we Greens can stop it) for coal, and going to war for the last oil fields. We'll be growing our own food and patching our own roads to maintain local commerce as we rip apart vacant big-box stores for building materials or repurpose them as village markets as suburbia unravels.

"Good enough" technology like Protosphere will be used to avoid travel for those left-standing in business, as a permanent energy crisis sets in. The masses, in a dilapidated society, will play games and not create anything. That's not too different from what many social SLers do now. The games these futurians, looking for a bit of escapist fun, will be good enough. Virtual worlds will remain a niche for a few creators and academics.

Utopians and technophiles hate my saying this, but the future is going to look more like a more advanced version of James Howard Kunstler's dystopia in World Made By Hand, not the high-tech dystopias of Cyberpunk.

If I'm wrong, the smart-drinks are on me in The Black Sun, when we build some immersive and compelling virtual world far better than SL. If I'm right, I'll give lessons in splitting and stacking wood and fixing old-timey tractors on my farm. We'll make a run to get some bio-diesel from the local co-op and drink some Shine on my porch.

We’ll know the direction of futurity in a decade or so. It will be quite a ride.

August Roadtrip: Breakdown

Location: Side of the Road

Is this my final road trip in SL?

It's getting nigh impossible to travel by vehicle in SL. I say that while using a brand-spanking-new laptop with 8 GB of RAM, SL client 1.23 (no Viewer 2 for me), and my work connection, far faster than my zippy FIOS connection at home.

I may have to reconsider these monthly adventures. SL is having trouble and Philip Rosedale's window of opportunity for fixing it is limited. SL users will keep leaving. I don't think there's much of a driving community, anyhow. Perhaps the racers stay on low-lag sims they own, on special tracks. That's hardly the free-wheeling adventures I imagined when I saw the road-grid on the continents.

I realize that driving will never match the experience of a console game, but unless lag is reduced and sim-crossings made easier, the Lindens simply need to stop with their road-building plans.

Or maybe we can walk on them. Anyhow, here's what happened. Mind you, until my crash, I was moving rather slowly through empty sims.

I began at Starting Point: Gun Club Bar & Vehicle Rezz Area. My soundtrack: T.Rex and Iggy Pop

I found good cliffside views on road through Duck Sim. I can ignore all the "for sale" signs and continued evidence of crappy builds that focus on games of chance. If anything, the best casinos in SL before the ban were well made: today's parlors full of Zyngo and other games look like a loser's arcade at some ready-to-close amusement park.

If only the metaverse would fall into ruin, it would be more stately than this slow and continual slide in the tawdry and soiled version of what it might have been. Many ruins have a certain grandeur.

Driving past the Isabel infohub was fatal.; I crashed like the Hindenberg. When I returned, my car was at the Infohub with some noob named Pepe in a passenger seat. I planned to just roar off with him in my clutches and then use the ejector-seat option at the right moment by that cliff and sheer drop to the see, but Pepe got a good look at me, then ran for it before I could get the car to even move.

When it works, traveling in SL reminds me very much of Iggy Pop's song "The Passenger," because as fake as it all is, I do like it that we made this crazy world on the Lindens' infrastructure.


He sees the stars and hollow sky
He see the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine.

Well, it does not belong to us, since Linden Lab changed their motto. And we may have to walk under that hollow sky. Fix the physics, Linden Lab.

DMCA Notice: A Colleague's Project on Brave New World

Location: First-Day-of-Class Blahs

Classes began today, and with them came a warning from Attorney Jonathan Kirsch that Miranda, a project that my colleague Beeble Baxter (in SL) had used with several classes violated copyrights held by the Huxley Estate. A DMCA notice would soon follow. With some regret I pulled down many dozens of hours of work by my colleague and his student assistants.

Our understanding, when Miranda went live, was that Huxley's survivors had permitted copyright for the novel to expire. We were wrong, and now a great educational project has vanished. In time we hope to negotiate with the holders under the Fair-Use provisions of the law, so a portion of Huxley's text will again appear as a hypertext. I expect other sites with full-text copies of Brave New World to be forced to take down their copies as well.

Personally, I tend to make derivative works of what is clearly in the public domain, such as Poe's fiction. But given the state of copyright now, and given the limited resources of educators and their employees, it's easy to see how fuzzy the rules can seem for older works. It's also a bit sad to see how easily cowed educators can be by a professional with good letterhead, an insistent message delivered in an amiable way, and excellent communications skills.

DMCA warnings have gone into virtual worlds, such as the Estate of Frank Herbert forcing Second Life roleplayers to remove all references to the Dune novels from their simulations.

Pity, really, but there's not a thing to be done except obey. The Alphas, after all, wrote the laws and gentlemen like Mr. Kirsch are there to protect their interests. One wonders what Huxley would have made of all this.

Counterpoint: Why Educators Still Need Second Life (For Now)

Location: House of Usher

It's all about content, content, content. Let's suppose one needed a human brain in a jar, for the hidden examination room of a twisted family doctor in, say, 1847 and, say, in an Edgar Allan Poe story.

To make such an item myself in Third Rock or Reaction Grids, I'd have to learn to make sculpties, scripted bubbles, and the jar. The jar part would be easy for me. But the rest would take me many hours for which, as an educator, I'm not rewarded one iota in my annual evaluation.

Let's see. Does "made brain in jar for immersive simulation of the examination room of Doctor Renfield Allan" come under "Professional Development," "Teaching and Scholarship," or "Service"?

You see my quandry: I would be stuck with making a lousy 2D brain in a jar. Now what self-respecting madman would own a flat brain? In Second Life, to add such an immersive prop, I went over to Xstreetsl and searched for "brain." Even "brain in jar" turned up several possibilities. Cost: 110L. Time required, 15 minutes. Back to essential work, such as finding illustrations from morbid Victorian medical texts.

For now, Second Life offers the sort of premade content, much of which can be modified to suit an educator's needs, free or virtually so. It's the best reason to build a simulation in SL, after one factors in the higher land costs, the per-upload fees, and the failure to provide off-world backups.

Eventually, the Linden Lab product will lose this crucial edge, but I'd hope that, if the Lindens wish to make money from other grids, that the Xstreeets site could alter licensing with creators to permit delivery to multiple grids. Technically that is possible and would lead buyers to purchase Linden Dollars or pull out a credit card.

It's a win-win for Linden Lab to leverage their residents' creations and their currency in multiple worlds. Why not do it?

If anyone at Linden Lab needs a spare brain, I've told you where to look.

Brain credit: Chrom Snook. Go buy one of Chrom's brains NOW. You know you need one. Act fast and get human skull in jar, gratis.