The new CEO of Linden Labs will have no shortage of advice, but I’ve been struck with the notion recently that in all my thinking about content theft, lag and crashes, 3D cameras and other gizmos, that I’ve found myself saying one too many times “now, practically speaking”, which is a watch word for adult talk and serious nodding and probably the writing of a memo. I owe it to a good friend, who manages to keep me honest and in touch with some deeper vibration (and to whom I owe an apology for not writing back – this blog is only a pale stand in), who sent me down a few trails I hadn’t explored before, bringing me to a speech by Philip Dick in 1978 and this quote which struck me like a thunder bolt:
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.
Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
March 22, 2008 at 9:42 am
Dear Dusan,
first and foremost let me say I am sorry, truly and deeply sorry, if anything I wrote has hurt you. It was not in my intent to ever do so, though I can see how I have brought this down on me by focusing on one of your lines of thinking instead of your thinking as a whole. Will you accept my apologies ?
I don’t know if splitting hairs will mellow the blow, but I would like to stress I did not « group [you] with the augmentationists » — I picked up on some of your recent arguments to prototype two opinions one could lump in with these pseudo-camps, but only to make my point that to me, this particular debate is as irrelevant as it is silly, and that (as far as I can tell with my modest abilities) the camps do not in fact exist as they are perceived. You cannot be a citizen of Second Life without immersing yourself into it (hence the tourist analogy for those who refuse to do so), and there would be no point whatsoever in doing so if it was not augmenting our RL somehow.
You Can Be an Augmented Immersionist indeed. We all are both, however hard some of us cling to old banners and labels.
Speaking of feelings on last time : you just took you revenge, by writing the post I wish I had been able to write next. But I’m grateful you did, because you have done it so much better than I would ever been able to. Thank you.
March 22, 2008 at 10:37 am
[...] Dusan Writer has done so tonight, and he has done even better, carrying the thought much further than I would ever have been able to : But when I look at Second Life I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, and I don’t see an e-commerce engine (although to some degree it is all of these) – I see the possibilities for stories. And in these possibilities I am attracted to how Second Life may be a new camp fire around which we weary hunters gather, scratching pictures in the sand with our primitive tools and telling each other of the days we’ve had, and the adventures ahead. [...]
March 22, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Awww Rheta hahaha. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound so tragic.
Call it a rhetorical flourish, I suppose, to make the point that in a world where we struggle for labels like immersion and augmentation to describe how we react to the experience of virtual worlds, we all come to realize that we struggle within the blurry lines between. Your post was an inspiration to me, Rheta, so no apologies required.
March 22, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Ah well, you have no idea how relieved I am to hear as much — laugh all you want
. And did I say what an utterly amazing, brilliant post this is ? If I inspired you to this, be it only a little, I am very glad.
March 22, 2008 at 3:11 pm
A lovely post (an’ thanks to Rheta for pointing at it, and for being an important part of the discussion!).
One thing that struck me while reading this is that yes SL is all about stories, and in fact storytelling may well be the killer app of SL and the other VMs worthy of the name; and that while we’re thinking that we should also think that RL is all about stories, and in fact storytelling is for many ( some / most / all?) of us the killer app for RL. We do lots of stuff just to pay tier, so to speak, but the rest of the time? We’re there sitting around the campfire…
March 22, 2008 at 7:20 pm
We live on a world that is but a tiny speck in the vast universe. So small that it couldn’t even be viewed with a microscope if you were to compare the size to that in which we live.
I believe that Second Life (and others) are in their first second of life – if that. What we see today will not be what we see tomorrow. Trying to place it in a box, trying to define it, trying to make it somehow “fit” in our lives – will never work.
The reason it will never work is because it is a work in progress. What may be today will not be tomorrow. There is room for every culture, every explorer, every creation of artwork within its limitless space. Unlike our planet, where boundaries already exist, there will be no boundaries in the worlds that you are creating.
Why do we feel the need to define something? Why do we need to have “camps” of people that somehow believe they “get it” and others don’t? Is this not what has brought our “real” world into chaos?
Perhaps some things in life don’t need to be defined but rather experienced.
This world will evolve beyond our definitions. No matter how hard we try to imagine what it will become, we will fall short.
March 23, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I really enjoyed this post, I wish more writings, more blogs were of this depth and literary on sl – beautiful to read, from the thinking to the texture of the words. I am going to keep a copy of this in my archive. Thank you.
March 23, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I really enjoyed this post, I wish more writings, more blogs were of this depth and humanly warm on sl – beautiful to read, from the thinking to the texture of the words. I am going to keep a copy of this in my archive. Thank you.
March 23, 2008 at 11:41 pm
[...] Kevin Kelly, courtesy of Dusan Writer : « In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, [...]
March 24, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Hey Dusan, I think we have only just started to turn the rich soil in the garden of thoughts that PKD provides in his speach. As I saw what aspect that you commented upon, then was also re-skimming it and mentally holding it next to our Metaverse context, I then heard an echo of some of Laurie Anderson’s spoken lyric from a cut named “Born, Never Asked”, that says, “It was a large room, full of people. All kinds, and they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free, and they were all asking themselves the same question. What is behind that curtain?”
She may have been thinking of a different line of allegory than us finding our human-ness in virtual dimensions, but when I press it up against PKD’s one sentence definition, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” and then thread it to why we fragment ourselves out of meatspace to find ourselves again in a metaverse, our eternal braid may look less made up of strange loops when we hold it up to the right kind of light.
PKD also has a tangent saying, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.” I think it is interesting that one one part of ourselves that is literal in SL is our text chat. The mechanism is important, i think as well, and although voice chat exists, I am sure it not simply another way of doing the same thing. The way we communicate with text provides a pace and exchange that causes us to pare down our expressions to short, concise sentences, then wait for a response, then reply… things can happen in that process that don’t happen in other kinds of communication. The first time I met a SL friend in RL, I found conversation seemed way too fast for me to assimilate and respond. I was used to the cadence and parsing of chat with this person.
Of course, this is not the aspect that PKD was talking about, he was saying that with fiction, authors are basing part of their words on truth and part as fiction, but the consumer of fiction is not given that information, so we are in a dangerous situation of “fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur.”
If any of us are seeking Truth, or to find our better expression of Being, or a better way to be Human; does our explorations of ourselves in the Metaverse help or hinder the apsects of our current other pseudo-realities?
March 24, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Great post and great point about storytelling.
I’d like to try my luck answering Beau why do we need definitions, even when they turn into camps and even when we are aware that they cannot put the world into a box. We need them because we try to understand and depict the world we are in. We try to tell the story, and we need definitions (whether they are words, images, prims or even music) to do that. there is nothing wrong with that, as long as we are aware that they will change, just as the world changes. And world is changing not only by itself but with our storytelling and our definitions. There is a trap and danger, but if we are aware it is an adventure worth taking. It is not words that turned the world into chaos. Words made the world out of chaos. And they are transforming it in each turn. It0’s up to us if that’s going to be for good or for bad.
March 25, 2008 at 3:22 am
Well put Dandellion. Although I also take Beau’s point that we can spend so much time assessing and naming and trying to define that we forget to just experience.
Thanks for the wonderful comments.
March 25, 2008 at 11:28 am
I agree. If we stick in naming and defining without experiencing, we’re dead. Nothing is more dangerous to philosophy than trying to think without living.
March 25, 2008 at 1:20 pm
@ Pais – I’ve come to believe that virtuality is no different than other realities, it just uses different tools of expression, tools which, perhaps, tap into some richer vein of storytelling and experience, particularly because it IS immersive, and therefore ‘feels real’, and because in that place which feels real the rules and “words” that we have at our disposal are different. I feel somewhat like we’re at the dawn of perspective in painting – imagine how it must have felt to become suddenly aware, through the canvas, that there was a whole range within our visual language we had been blind to, and what it was like to experience that for the first time. It caused schisms in beliefs and argument, but there is no argument that it was as if we had a blind spot that was suddenly revealed.
More to your point, however, I’m not sure it’s just the pace of chat and typing that creates a little electric change in perspective. It’s the combination of it with the visual environment. As you know, there’s nothing I hate worse than sitting and talking with someone in SL (oops, better check the branding guidelines, I meant “in virtual world of Second Life (R)”) and not facing them….it’s just text chat, but that’s combined with a visual vocabulary as well. As the range of avatar expression increases (lip synching for those with voice, 3D cameras that can detect facial expression and movement, etc) it will be interesting to see how the range of language (text plus expression plus presence plus the ability to co-create using prims, embedded HTML, etc.) the range of stories, their depth or texture, might increase as well.
I’m glad that you called it ‘pseudo-realities’ however – because I’m not convinced that there’s anything *different* about the ’strange loop’ that occurs within a virtual environment…it’s more that we don’t afford ourselves as many opportunities for it to occur. How many of us are part of a writer’s workshop? Or travel to strange places that shake our sense of location or culture or belief? Or participate in meditation retreats? All things where we, in a sense, fragment part of ourselves from our habitual meat space.
Finally, while virtual worlds are powerful environments for storytelling, your quote of Laurie, a cut that I well love, reminds me of another quote:
“Sometimes I have the feeling that we’re in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He’s sure to open the door again for it’s a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.”
May 23, 2008 at 12:34 am
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January 8, 2009 at 11:52 pm
[...] Dusan Writer has done so tonight, and he has done even better, carrying the thought much further than I would ever have been able to : But when I look at Second Life You-Know-Where I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, and I don’t see an e-commerce engine (although to some degree it is all of these) – I see the possibilities for stories. And in these possibilities I am attracted to how Second Life may be a new camp fire around which we weary hunters gather, scratching pictures in the sand with our primitive tools and telling each other of the days we’ve had, and the adventures ahead. [...]
January 8, 2009 at 11:59 pm
[...] invented, and keep inventing for ourselves. Dusan Writer was right on the fact Second Life is a Story Box — maybe the greatest made yet. Where he was wrong was in thinking the storytelling experience is [...]
January 9, 2009 at 11:32 am
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