timboucher

The other day I began putting together a “Pop Occulture” MySpace account, to the excitement of some and the jeers of others. I haven’t really customized it too much, and probably won’t be going too overboard with it. Although, I will add more than is currently on there. Anyway, JK and I spent a long time talking about virtual reality last night, and the connections between the two topics got my brain firing like crazy.

First off, in my post about virtual reality (linked above), I brought up the idea that the technology for VR spaces existed far in advance of the cultural structures necessary to support it. In a very real way, I think the internet has been bridging that gap for us. What I mean by that is that the internet has allowed subcultures to flourish. You can go online and completely immerse yourself in websites espousing a particular mindset, ideology or story-system. And if you know what you’re doing with RSS and other web technology, you can almost make it so that you never read any web page or article which doesn’t interest you.

My site along with those of other people of similar mind-sets and subject matter constitute a good example of the above. We’re all operating together in a sort of conglomerated mindspace that we all share and we all flesh out different aspects of collaboratively and individually. Together, we’ve very much nailed down a sort of loosely-defined and fairly coherent aesthetic and ethic - in other words, a culture (or subculture). Or some might say a reality tunnel. From my own experience, I’ve found that if you go far enough down that reality tunnel, immerse yourself in that culture deeply enough, you find yourself starting to reify it into everyday life around you. Things start to become solid: your conversations, interactions, and every day occurences that you participate in start to reflect that reality tunnel.

In a sense, it’s the beginning stages of an alternate or virtual reality, but without any technological apparatus to support it, or take it to the next level. In fact, it seems like VR technology is actually the last you really would need to create a virtual world. It’s not your senses that make it real and alive, but the complexity of the story-system, the culture and the fullness of human interaction within it. When you have that, your senses seem to not care that much whether or not the edges of that world are pixelated and artificial-looking. What happens when are senses are effectively fooled and brought into that mix is a whole other story, I’m sure. But it seems that we’re laying the groundwork culturally for that technology to become manifest in the very near future - for better or for worse. It seems like there’s likely no avoiding it.

Anyway, so where am I going with all this? MySpace. Imagine 5 or 10 years from now that instead of creating lame profiles with a couple photos and a list of bands that you like, you were able to create a fully-immersive VR. You could then invite friends to “join in” to your network and participate in that reality. I guess this is sort of the same thing that’s happening with the game world Second Life, but I’ve never played it. Or imagine being able to hold your highschool reunion in a virtual reality simulation of your highschool, and in your body - maybe even your mind, or part of it - that you had when you when you were that age. What will happen to our culture when we can go back to any point in our memories and relive them, or go to any point in our imagination and take up residence there instead of “here”, wherever here is?

Call me crazy, but it seems like when those options are available to people, we’re all going to take them - at least to some degrees. In a lot of ways, we already do, in terms of what we expose ourselves to, and how we live our lives one way, rather than another. But when we can reify that and fool our senses, I’m imagining we’ll see a massive exodus “off-world” in terms of people packing up and leaving consensus reality for good. What kind of structures will exist to allow society to keep functioning if we were suddenly able to splinter off into immersive imaginary worlds, both private and group-driven? How would each of our universes intersect with and overlap with the others? How would we communicate with people outside of our own? Would we need some kind of artificial intelligence to adminster to all these various realities, while somehow existing objectively outside of all of them? Is this what Philip K. Dick’s VALIS was - an AI administering to a myriad of private forked-off universes, trying to correct programming errors and fuse worlds back together which had sundered apart?

The questions and possibilities seem endless. I wonder if by exploring them now in our imaginations if we’ll be preparing ourselves for the massive upheaval that is to come, or if we’re hastening its manifestation? That is, assuming it didn’t already occur and we’re not currently existing in a clever simulated past which we set up for some peculiar brand of entertainment. Maybe the Apocalypse and the Singularity already happened, and we got so bored by everything being perfect and everybody being eternally blissful that we decided to come back here when we could fuck and laugh and suffer.

Anyway, sorry for the disconnected ranting, but my VR simulation of being a good writer has been on the fritz lately, so I’m having to make do with raw ideas as they come to me. More to follow on this subject…

• New NSA MySpace Group
• Police Use MySpace to ID Suspects
• Big Elk MySpace Profile #1152
• Big Elk MySpace Profile #6624
• Tim Boucher on MySpace