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.
Why You Can Be an Augmented Immersionist
Recently, Rheta Shan grouped me in with the augmentationists, and I confess I felt hurt, not because I don’t believe that augmentation is a valid pursuit in SL, and not because I feel a need to establish my street cred as an immersionist, but because I realize how unclear I’ve been. And yet…and yet I’ve struggled to find the words, returning to the same topics again and again.
First, to make it clear, and Rheta picked this up: to me, Second Life is not a separate world. The world is filled with many separate locations. There may in fact be many realities within the world. And within that world of separate locations and realities there is Second Life. Because it exists in that one wider world, you can not just escape to it, because I can guarantee you that no matter how hard you try, you can not just leave your avatar there, its aspirations and hopes, its friends and loves, its experiences and dreams….you can’t just log off and shut all that down. You can delete your account, you can try to forget, but even if you leave, and even if you forget, you will have left traces of yourself behind.
This becomes most evident when there is death in a virtual world. I posted on the death of Dummie Beck months ago, and yet the page is often still visited, and there have been posts long after his passing. In thinking about this, I found unexpected meaning in his death, and in the response of the community, writing:
I believe that one of the powers of virtual worlds is that it gives us a new toolkit of creative expression. Through this toolkit we might find new strength, community, and archetypes. The fluidity of identity, the shuttling of meaning back-and-forth between our real and virtual selves, and the ways we learn and communicate all create a fertile ground for new discoveries.
But it still leaves the question, and maybe it’s at the root of what the new CEO of Linden will need to answer: when we come to Second Life, why do we stay? Because Rheta’s right: as a social platform it’s left wanting, the ability to create really great content is limited (though not impossible), and although you can create environments that are ‘game-like’ it’s hard to create real games.
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.
I’m not interested, frankly, in ‘killer apps’. The killer app has already arrived, and it slipped in when we weren’t looking, hidden in digital cameras, and mash-ups of music, and mySpace, and then finally given its purest expression in Second Life. And the killer app is the awakening drum beat of a new community of tales, and perhaps more profoundly, what those tales will be about.
So I like to think about how Second Life is the purest expression of this, and then think about how our tools for storytelling can be improved, whether it’s in the awe-inspiring efforts tirelessly highlighted by Bettina Tizzy, the latest device for controlling our avatars, or the extrapolation of story-telling tools such as photographs into environments like Photosynth.
Forgotten Magic
“….to lend a purer sense to the words of the tribe…” (Stephane Mallarme, “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe”)
I arrived at Philip Dick’s speech by way of Kevin Kelly, who wrote:
A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?
We get to play with answers to these questions online. In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, even our species. Technologies gives us the means to switch genders, inhabit new forms, modify our own bodies.
At the same moment, we have the rise of hyper-realities. These are simulations so complex, convincing, and coherent that they have their own reality force. A fake so good, it is sold and bought as a fabulous fake. A Disneyland so enticing, that it spawns its own “fakes.” There must be something there to fake. Or Photoshopped images so obviously unreal that they have their own reality. Synthetic materials more desirable than natural ones. Originals inferior to their reproductions. Who cares what is real and what is memorex?
These hyper-realities launch questions such as whether a assault in virtual space counts as an actual violent assault or mere virtual assault. How much of our real lives is mental? How much of reality is a consensual hallucination? Where do our minds end and outside begin? What if it — everything outside of us — is all mind?
The faster and greater our lives become mediated — the more time we spend communicating through technology — the more urgent this question of “what is real” becomes. How do we tell the difference, if any, between realities and simulations? How do these redefine humans?
These are the emerging and profound questions of our time. They arise because issues of trust spur the question of who is it we are trusting. Avatar or machine? Code or the code Gods themselves? They arise because issues of identity emerge when we fall in love with an avatar and discover that the person behind the persona is of a different gender. They bubble up from the strange loop – the delegating of some holograph of ourselves into a virtual, persistent space, which is really a shard of a larger image, the real and virtual in a recursive cycle, taking place in what will become recursive environments holding our recursive selves, with mirrored worlds and mixed realities and our own world overlaid with the virtual.
But what strikes me is that these questions really aren’t so new – that in our rush to question the technology and its implications, we forget that we’ve been gathered around the camp fire before, and that we used to believe in magic, and we used to know what it was like to wonder whether we were appeasing or angering the ancient spirits, and that it was only through stories that we could craft our feeble response on those dark nights.
In his Massey Lecture, Alberto Manguel reminds us that in Anglo-Saxon the word for poet was maker,and that:
Makers shape things into being, granting them their intrinsic identity. Still in a corner of their workshops and yet drifting with the currents of the rest of humanity, makers reflect back the world in its constant ruptures and changes, and mirror themselves in the unstable shapes of our societies, becoming what the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario called “celestial lightning rods” by asking over and over again “Who are we?” and by offering the ghosts of an answer in the words of the question itself.
The Spinning Prim and the Homestead
In these new stories there is room for the spinning prim, and there’s room for the house on the beach.
There’s room for the quiet steady pace of Caledon and its genteel citizens, and there’s room for the dark urban shadows of Midian City or the City of Lost Angels. The communities of shop keepers, the people saving up from camping to rent their first little plot of land…all of these are important stories. Because when we gather round to talk to each other, first we need to sort out what happened in the day, and that’s what people are doing….imagining variations of their real lives, or ones that they’d like to have…talking and chatting, mingling and copulating, driving the car they’ll never be able to afford otherwise or getting a makeover that catapults them to movie star good looks.
And then there’s the spinning prims – the path finders, the ones who construct whimsical avatars or forests that glow, and sure, the date sims…Greenies and the Carnival of Doom.
Terrabytes of new artefacts, littering the land, or cluttering up inventory, but these are the new words…language that isn’t constricted to one mother tongue and that transcends sculpture or architecture because in it there’s a wider community’s search for meaning. Much of it will get discarded along the way, some of it will just be little tests of the technology to see where it could carry us, and then somewhere on an island somewhere is a Robbie Dingo making the next Starry Night, or there’s coder sorting out openspimes…there’s a new language being created bit by bit, and through this new language expression will be found to help us grapple with the wave of change that’s evident not just in Second Life, but in the wider world:
* In a world where collaboration is easier, more accessible, and global, how does the nature of work change? If the nature of work changes, what is the nature of the company?
* When we’re able to express ourselves, interact with each other, and widen the tools for doing so (the expressive avatar, 3D cameras) through a persistent virtual environment, where will “me” begin and end? How much of “me” is defined by my individuality and how much by my tribe?
* When the trickle continues to turn into a flood and virtual property is ubiquitous and (nearly) free, what does it mean to be a craftsperson or designer? What is higher up the hierarchy of needs when it comes to what we can create? How high can we go?
The Poetry of Place
Manguel quoted Gerald Manley Hopkins:
I am soft sift
In an hourglass – at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift…
We hold fast to a social identity that we believe lends us a name and a face, but equally fast we move from one definition of a society to another, alternating again and again that presumed identity. Like characters in a story that keeps changing, we find ourselves playing roles that others appear to have invented for us, in plots whose roots and consequences escape us. .Even when declaring allegiance to one place, we seem to be always moving away from it, toward a nostalgic image of what we believe that place once was or might one day be….and yet, partly because of our nomad nature and partly due to fluctuations of history, our geography is less grounded in a physical than in a phantom landscape. Home is always an imaginary place.
He beckons us to stories which, he says “can offer consolation for suffering and words to name our experience. Stories can tell us who we are and what are these hourglasses through which we sift, and suggest ways of imagining a future that, without calling for comfortable happy endings, may offer us ways of remaining alive, together, on this much-abused earth.”
We’re here to tell stories. They don’t have to be complicated or represent a “killer app”. Sometimes a wonderful story is as simple as someone making their first picture frame from prims. Or sitting and watching the sunset over Svarga with someone we love. And we’re here to listen, and watch, and feel a bit of awe sometimes, and to keep an eye out for new ways to tell a tale.
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.
[...] 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. [...]
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
[...] 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, [...]
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?
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.
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.
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.
@ 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.”
[...] READ MORE Posted in Second Life, Virtual worlds, metaverse. Tags: ideas, metaverse, Second Life, storytelling. [...]
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Tools + amateurs = story for virtual worlds…
Even though Dusan Writer’s post on the explosion of small worlds and how they’ve sold out the promise of virtual worlds was a rant, it clearly described the issues at hand. The virtual landscape is splintering, increasingly proprietary, and built for…
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Dusan, Are different ways of knowing being created in the bifucation of self existence? Do you think we are developing new ways of sensing in virtual worlds that replace the RL senses which are not being utilized in a life-world void of physical reality?
[...] laugh. This is an important one. Because to me, Second Life is a Story Box. As a site for creativity virtual worlds are being built prim by prim in, perhaps, the largest [...]
Philip Dick is full of shit. I’m sorry, but people like him are always grandly pronouncing on the need to change and give up and be destroyed and…it’s always *other* people, not the person who has had that grand vision. How did Philip Dick change and what did he give up and could he report back to us now that he’s destroyed? Well?
>to me, Second Life is not a separate world
Then you’re an augmentationist, not an immersionist, and a platformist. Deal with it. Why this attempt to get street cred as an immersionist?!
Second Life is a world — that is, it may be many worlds to many people, but it is a separate place for the overwhelming majority of people who spend more than an hour in it. They readily adapt to the geographical contiguity and conform to the constructs of living inside these boxes. They don’t pause every five seconds and tell them selves they are merely pushing pixels on a screen and augmenting something in real life that takes precedence. Their attention is pinned. Why is that so hard to accept? SL is an economy of attention. For the time that people are absorbed in Facebook sending links and adjusting pictures and whatnot, they are in that world, which is a lighter and flatter world, but still a place “out there” where their attention is pinned.
To be truly entertaining or captivating, stories can’t shout out constantly “look, I’m a story!
“. And that’s why you can’t get too meta- with this concept.
I said 9 years ago in an interview about the Sims offline that the incredible thing about that game was that it was revolutionary — Will Wright had made a revolutoinary machine — it took the narrative engine out of the hands of Hollywood and the TV networks and put it into the hands of ordinary people. It was like the Kodak camera. For the people treating SL as a meta, tweaking its images and scenes like Bettina, the world becomes the world of *that* (one kind of world, itself). Or *that* plus plurk. THe NPIRL gang bears the relationships to the world of SL as roughly Russian emigres or American expatriotis in Paris in the 1930s to their countries and their arts.
Kevin Kelly and his ridiculous communistic generatives-out-of-nowhere is my least favourite tekkie pundit on the Internet. We don’t *have* to have a collective identity, for one. Whose collective?!
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