Ontological Grief

The real me has been muscling in on Patroclus's territory of late, which is causing the pair of us all kinds of ontological grief.

The real me used to have the good grace to stay off the internet, choosing instead to sit in a swanky office writing brochures about software packages that do boring, menial things that humans don't like doing.

But the real me was envious of the fun Patroclus was having, with her blog and her wonderful online friends. Perhaps inevitably, the real me bred an army of emergent nanobots, who generated a software package that generates brochures about software packages that do boring, menial things humans don't like doing.

With nanobots now safely in charge of client service, the real me escaped on to the internet to play havoc with my own sense of a single, unified self.

The real me now has her own blog, and her own profile on Twitter. And just as Patroclus fears that one day her 'real' identity will be revealed, the real me fears that one day she will be unmasked as Patroclus.

In some places, the safety curtain between us is already looking distinctly threadbare. Lots of people know at least one of Patroclus's real names. Patroclus and the real me write on similar topics. The real me occasionally accidentally comments as Patroclus, and vice versa. Lexical fingerprinting experts could link us in seconds, probably using this very post.

I'm just hoping we stay separate for long enough to run into each other online. In theory it could be a beautiful friendship - we have so much in common - but I have a suspicion that we don't actually like each other all that much. The mischievous postmodernist in me is really looking forward to finding out.


UPDATE: If anyone can shed any light on what Dante Gabriel Rossetti was trying to express with that doppelgänger painting up there, I'd be most grateful. My book about the Pre-Raphaelites is rotting away in the cellar of my French house, and the so-called 'information supernet' is annoyingly unforthcoming on the subject.

Second Coming

This is the last thing I'm going to write on this subject, I promise...


Today's Observer has a big feature about - yup, you guessed it - Second Life.

Reading it, I got an even greater sense of déjà vu than I did from last weekend's Telegraph feature about Habbo Hotel*.

Trailblazer that I am, I was in Habbo Hotel in 2002 (as briefly documented in this post), and it was as rubbish and full of teenagers going 'asl' and 'lol' as it apparently still is today. In fact, for all I know, I might *still* be in there, gathering virtual dust Miss Havisham-style in my virtual apartment. That would be cool.

But anyway. In 1996, long before I had an avatar and a room in Habbo Hotel, I had an avatar and a room in a place called WorldsAway. Here, just like in Second Life, you had an avatar that you could customise, which wandered around socialising with other people's avatars, earning in-world money, furnishing the in-world apartment that you bought for it, and buying and selling in-world items.

WorldsAway looked like this:


I'm so powerfully reminded of WorldsAway whenever I read the latest gushing article about the 'new' world of Second Life, that I went in search of old media articles to check that WorldsAway really did once exist, and to reassure myself that the current media frenzy is actually a frenzy about something that's been around for more than a decade.

So here we go:

Exhibit A is an article from Wired magazine's June 1996 issue, entitled 'Metaworlds'.

Exhibit B is the cover feature from today's Observer Review section, entitled 'Goodbye, Cruel World...'.

The Wired article makes fascinating reading. Media coverage of information technology is usually so forward-looking, and we take technological developments for granted so quickly, that it's instructive to stop for a second, look back and understand where today's technology came from rather than where it's going.

But assuming that you don't have the time or inclination to read a 13-page article from 10 years ago, here are some things that haven't changed:

1. Snow Crash as Ur-Geschichte
Science fiction often anticipates technological developments, and virtual worlds are no exception. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash vividly anticipates the dual reality created not just by Second Life, but also by its forebears like WorldsAway:

"...to keep things straight, I'm going to call [places like Worlds Away] metaworlds. This is partly in homage to Neal Stephenson, whose 1992 novel Snow Crash portrayed a metaworld that's a few technological and cultural notches above what's possible right now: the Metaverse, a virtual world so immersive and detailed it rivals the real one.

In Stephenson's Metaverse, an avatar can look any way you want: 'If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse'."

- Robert Rossney, 'Metaworlds', Wired, June 1996

"Second Life, or something like it, was first imagined by the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book Snow Crash. His prophecy was uncanny. 'Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too,' he wrote, 'and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in LA and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality ...'."

Tim Adams, 'Goodbye, Cruel World...', The Observer, 29 October 2006

2. Virtual Worlds as Consensual Hallucination
William Gibson came up with the idea of 'cyberspace' as 'a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of operators', way back in 1984 when hardly anyone outside of the Pentagon and MIT had even heard of the internet. The idea of a virtual world as a kind of dream or hallucination shared by many people at once held sway in 1996 just as it does today:

"WorldsAway's long history is a little too evident. It looks cool - the background graphics are in a hallucinatory art nouveau style, sort of Aubrey Beardsley meets William Gibson..."

- Wired, June 1996

"In his forthcoming book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner...traces the ways that the Californian non-conformism of the Sixties helped to create the revolution of the personal computer [...] the individual self, trapped in the human body, 'would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion'. In this reading, computers [...] took over where LSD left off."

- The Observer, October 2006

3. The Value of Virtual Real Estate
It seems that the old 'location, location, location' mantra has always been as true of virtual worlds as it is of the real one:

"There's nothing to do in AlphaWorld [another 1996-era virtual world] but build, and the buildings themselves have no purpose. Nonetheless, the place is crowded with structures - so much so that new users have a hard time finding any space of their own to build. All the land near the metaworld's entry point has already been taken...Worlds Inc. is adding teleporters to outlying undeveloped areas so that new users won't give up before they find a patch of open ground."

- Wired, June 1996

"Each new resident of Second Life is offered a plot of land. Kenny [the journalist's avatar] chooses one on Blacktail Ridge. It is, I have to say, a disappointment: a dark and icy wasteland with a few scattered shacks...Good land has become so rare in Second Life that people are prepared to pay hundreds of real dollars for it."

- The Observer, October 2006

4. Virtual Living as 'The Future'
The technology industry and its media are obsessed with the future, always presenting whatever's happening now as a crude and primitive version of how things will be in some shiny future age. Frothy-mouthed futurologists are forever predicting the day when machines will become sentient (the so-called 'Singularity'), and humans will evolve into World of Warcraft characters.

I think it's terribly sad as it tends to dismiss the past, thus preventing people from properly understanding the history of technology, and it makes us take for granted all the wonderful, bizarre and fascinating things that are actually happening now. But anyway, both of these articles fall into this futurology trap, thus:

"The technology needed to support something like Stephenson's Metaverse is not really that far off. What if we find the combination of avatars, gestures, and persistence compelling enough to make them the standard? What if we all move into these metaworlds, conducting large portions of our lives online? [...] We shouldn't be expecting metaworlds to supplant the real world or fix it. They won't. What they will do, though, is give people something they are ceaselessly searching for: new ways to connect with each other."

- Wired, June 1996

This has actually happened now, but we're still looking to the future:

"A brave-ish new world has recently been created. You can access it on your PC with a password and your credit card. And as soon as you arrive in it, you can easily convince yourself that you are seeing the future - or at least one future - of entertainment and interaction and business."

- The Observer, October 2006

Rah. So, next time the media starts going all gushy about Second Life, remember to roll your eyes sweetly and say 'gosh, how terribly 1996'. But as established virtual citizens of the blogosphere, you would do that anyway, wouldn't you?


* Which isn't available online; I checked.

Avatar Of The Week!

We interrupt this edition of The Late Raymond Williams Show to bring you exciting news from the world of, errr, I dunno, the carnivalesque production of the self in disembodied space or something, otherwise known as my new Avatar Of The Week award!

This week's award goes to last.fm user and Swamptrash fan hdickins, who may or may not look a bit like this:


Who knew the chance articulation of fruit and lego could be so entertaining?

Blogging: Kind Of Like Tron, But Not Really

Great post and comments on Tim's blog about blogging culture vs 'established' culture. Which got me to thinking that even though I've just written 17,000 words on that very subject, I still feel like I'm no nearer to understanding what blogging 'is'.

Of course it would be wrong to think that blogging is simply one thing; it's clearly lots of things all at once. It's a new form of communication, a new way of socialising, a new form of media, a new way of establishing and controlling one's own identity.

But the more I think about it, the more I get a nebulous sense that all of these different aspects of blogging have an overarching characteristic: the fact that all this new stuff takes place inside the machine*. The 'machine' being, obviously, the internet. You might think that is stating the bleeding obvious, but I'm not sure that many people have properly grasped the implications of this.

For a start, inside the machine is very different from the physical world. An individual person can be many different people, with many different names and personalities. People socialise with people whom they would never have met in the physical world. People who are nothing but avatars and pseudonyms hold earnest, frank, funny, confessional discussions with each other without knowing, or even wanting to know, 'who' the other people are**. In a way, one's physical-world identity and attributes cease to matter, which I think is nice, but also fairly fucking revolutionary when you think about it.

But I think that what blogging *really* is is representations of people in virtual space. To my mind, my blog isn't something I write and publish, but it's essentially me, or at least my representative in cyberspace. Me, in a different dimension, but definitely me, rather than just something that was created by me. So Patroclus doesn't just write stuff, but also has conversations with people, visits people, entertains people, and so on.

And what's different about that is that not only am I lots of different people inside the machine (Patroclus being one of several), but that everything that I do in here is theoretically visible to everyone. Whereas in the physical world you can have a conversation with someone in private, and those words disappear into the ether and no one knows afterwards what you said, inside the machine those words and conversations are stuck there forever unless you delete them or ask the other person to delete them. As if we're characters in a comic and everything we say is fixed in a speech bubble forever. So I suppose the thing that freaks people like Janet Street-Porter out is that she can *see* us now, whereas before she couldn't. We're in the room with her. Like monsters. Or zombies. And there are millions of us.

And the thing with, say, Tron, or Neuromancer and the other early cyberpunk stuff, is that there weren't very many people inside the machine. The ones that got inside were like pioneers, like the first people on the moon, or the first settlers in the Wild West. It was all kind of individualistic and heroic (which is why women aren't supposed to like cyberpunk), because this is the way computers were, then - they were individual, isolated things, rarely connected to a network, and that's why we still have to put up with the image of the 'internet user' as a sad, sociopathic loner.

By the time you get to, say, Snow Crash, there are more people inside the machine, but they're still kind of marginal, edgy types, and the internet (metaverse) is still a marginal, edgy sort of dangerous underground where right-thinking people fear to enter, and I suppose that's why we still have to put up with this image of the internet as being a lawless place populated by criminals.

But now...now there are millions of us inside the machine, even people who don't wear black vests and mirror shades and consider themselves to be lone outlaw fugitives from the real world. So, in a sense, virtual reality has become real reality. And all of the ground-breaking things about virtual reality - the collapse of space and time, the unimportance of the physical self, the ability to be lots of different people in lots of different places; the whole thing about being essentially a brain in a jar, plugged into a machine...that's what our lives are like every day now.

We try to make sense of blogging by applying real-world analogies (blogging is like the media, blogging is like keeping a diary, etc.) but it so clearly isn't like the real world that if you stop for a second and think about what it's *really* like, it's just totally freaky. But it's lovely to see people adapt to it so quickly and totally, and start to create new rules and mores and codes of conduct, and cultural pursuits (e.g. memes and games and ritual practices that play with - and help us to make sense of - the fabric of the blogosphere itself) in what is essentially a completely different dimension.

Ahh, humans are so great.


* I totally nicked this phrase, and most of these ideas, from this fabulous article in Wired. And this book. And this one. But I'll lay claim to the zombie analogy.

** An idea that's always tickled me is that two people who know each other under a particular name in one online domain (say the blogosphere) may also know each other under different names in a different online domain (say a chat forum), and not know that they are the same people. How Philip K. Dick is that!

Schizophrenic

Apparently you're no one these days if you don't have at least three separate identities. Or at least this appeared to be the theme of the various entertainments I attended last night, starting with Londonist's Blogging Demystified seminar at the Apple Store.

Topics ranged from the practical - "you can't predict how many comments you'll get", "you can't make a lot of money from blogging" etc. (courtesy of Annie Mole of the London Underground Blog), to the ultra-philosophical - "how does my blog identity differ from my real identity or my World of Warcraft identity?", "how can I prove that it's actually me that writes my blog?"* (courtesy of "Tom Reynolds" of Random Acts of Reality).

I don't know what the audience - which consisted almost entirely of spiky-haired young men in black glasses and stripy scarves - made of it all, but I did like the nice science girls from Inky Circus, because they giggled a lot** and have a stalker, which is what blogging is really all about.

Afterwards DG (not his real homepage), Wyndham (not his real name), Robert (who apparently has no alternative online identities) and I (the 'real' me) went to see Calexico play a secretish gig at the 100 Club to promote their new album Garden Ruin.

If any band knows about having multiple identities it's Calexico; even their name is a nod to the fact that they're half Californian indie-rock and half Mexican mariachi music, and their style swings wildly depending on what combination of instruments they're playing, what language they're singing in, and who's doing the singing.

I was slightly disappointed that they didn't play any of my favourites (apart from their top cover of Love's Alone Again Or), but this was more than made up for by the fact that the tickets were free, courtesy of pro ligger Wyndham (thanks W!), and there was a display of the most awful dancing I have ever seen, ever, by two quite inebriated gentlemen standing in front of me. If only this pair had elected to play air trumpet or air double bass, instead of air guitar, the evening would have been nothing short of monumental.

Ended up drinking in Soho afterwards with a pop star called Terri Walker, whose new album is called I Am Terri Walker. So there's at least one person left who isn't suffering a postmodern identity crisis.


* I'm still not sure why you would want/need to do this, as the Liberal Democrats phoned me up at a crucial juncture in the presentation, but I've got some lovely arcane ideas about how you would go about proving your identity, mainly involving "lexical fingerprinting", which is my new favourite phrase, along with "folksonomy".

** I've been worrying about this all day. Obviously they didn't *just* giggle (as I would have done, had I been in their place), they also made some great points about how to encourage commenters and how to project your own personality through your blog. And as well as having a stalker, they've also received THREE MARRIAGE PROPOSALS and TWO MEGA-MEDIA BUYOUT OFFERS, all of which they admirably turned down.


tags: blogging | calexico | terri walker