Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BEING IN NOTHINGNESS
Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace
By John Perry Barlow
Published in Microtimes Magazine
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily
by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...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. Like city lights,
receding..."
--William Gibson, Neuromancer
Suddenly I don't have a body anymore.
All that remains of the aging shambles which usually constitutes my
corporeal self is a glowing, golden hand floating before me like
Macbeth's dagger. I point my finger and drift down its length to the
bookshelf on the office wall.
I try to grab a book but my hand passes through it.
"Make a fist inside the book and you'll have it," says my invisible
guide.
I do, and when I move my hand again, the book remains embedded in
it. I open my hand and withdraw it. The book remains suspended
above the shelf.
I look up. Above me I can see the framework of red girders which
supports the walls of the office...above them the blue-blackness of
space. The office has no ceiling, but it hardly needs one. There's never
any weather here.
I point up and begin my ascent, passing right through one of the
overhead beams on my way up. Several hundred feet above the office,
I look down. It sits in the middle of a little island in space. I
remember the home asteroid of The Little Prince with its one volcano,
it's one plant.
How very like the future this place might be: a tiny world just big
enough to support the cubicle of one Knowledge Worker. I feel a wave
of loneliness and head back down. But I'm going too fast. I plunge
right on through the office floor and into the bottomless indigo below.
Suddenly I can't remember how to stop and turn around. Do I point
behind myself? Do I have to turn around before I can point? I flip into
brain fugue.
"Just relax," says my guide in her cool clinical voice. "Point straight
up and open your hand when you get where you want to be."
Sure. But how can you get where you want to be when you're coming
from nowhere at all?
And I don't seem to have a location exactly. In this pulsating new
high.
for the first time in three weeks. Then I felt strangely moved to call
Eric Gullichson after a couple of months of silence. He told me that
yesterday had been his last day at Autodesk. Etc. Etc. Etc.)
Finally, Timothy Leary is all excited again. Now I don't endow every
one of his pronouncements with oracular qualities...I remember the
Comet Starseed... but I have always thought that Uncle Tim is kind of
like a reverse of the canary in the coal mine. Whenever the culture is
about to make a big move, he's the first canary to start jumping up and
down.
He's also, like Zelig, a kind of Zeitgeist chameleon. He spent the 40's in
the Army. In the 50's, he was a tweedy young college professor, a
Jules Feiffer cartoon. In the 60's, he was, well, Timothy Leary. In the
70's, he became, along with H. R. Haldeman, a political prisoner. He
lived up the material 80's in Beverly Hills. Whatever America is about
to do, Tim starts doing it first.
When I visited him recently, he was already as cyberpunk as he had
been psychedelic when I last saw at Millbrook 22 years ago. Still, his
current persona seems reasonable, even seraphic. He calmly scored a
long list of persuasive points, the most resonant of which is that most
Americans have been living in Virtual Reality since the proliferation of
television. All cyberspace will do is make the experience interactive
instead of passive.
"Our brains are learning how to exhale as well as inhale in the datasphere." he said. Like our finny ancestors crawling up on land, we are
about to be come amphibians again, equally at home in visceral and
virtual frames.
The latest bus is pulling out of the station. As usual, Leary has been on
it for a while, waiting patiently for it to depart.
Contact with oneself alone is certainly a laudable enough goal, but the
presence of half a million dollars worth of equipment between that
subject and object is neither necessary nor desirable.
Even if Virtual Reality turns out to provide the format for the ultimate
pornographic film...a "feelie" with a perfect body...it will serve us
better as the ultimate telephone.