Chapter Six: The Power Principle


Previous chapters concentrated on encouraging applications, but also hinted at more disturbing implications, of which there are many...

NASA and the military played an important role in VR's emergence.....defence budgets encouraged the early research. VR has significant military applications, in at least two ways. Firstly, in simulation. Training soldiers in physical wargames, using physical war machines: The price of computing power is constantly dropping, whilst items such as fighter jets and tanks become ever more costly; hence riskier to let trainees loose on. As VR offers ever more sophisticated simulation, soldiers now 'play' against each other in cyberspace without ever meeting.

"SIMNET is a project funded by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency that includes over 200 tank simulators, geographically dispersed around the planet, but telecommunication-linked to interact with the same virtual battlefield in real time." (1)

Secondly, in battle - telepresence - tanks could be driven into battle and missiles piloted toward targets, with no literal human presence - the operator might be in a bunker far from the war zone; perhaps even satellite linked from the other side of the planet.....in effect robots battling against each other, remote controlled by soldiers who run no risk of being killed in action.....Howard Rheingold:

"The question is not whether such research can be prevented, but whether there will be controls on the military development of telepresence, the way there is at least some attempt at controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons, R&D of chemical weapons, and other technologies that should not be turned against human beings" (2)

Nanotechnology - the science of 'micromachinery', offers the world's spying and surveillance industries new methods of plying their trade. Engineering is reaching the point where machine parts may shrink almost to molecular level.... the 1966 movie 'Fantastic Voyage' does not seem so fantastic any more. If Video/audio equipment invisible to the naked eye can be manufactured, privacy might not merely be invaded, but lose its place in dictionaries......a statesman might be walking around bugged, unaware, by a particle fired into his skin (Fig. 33)

He loved Big Brother

In recent years, British Telecom has become a corporate giant currently turning over a profit of £102/second = £3,216,672,000/year. (3) Notable that communication equals growth even in a recession. BT is, with this income, and its expertise/experience in communications technology, in a superb position to make a quantum leap into VR; with an eviable R&D budget, there is no reason why they, or counterparts, could not hold in the palm of their hand a future mechanism of control.

Virtual Religion: Over the last couple of years, the Church has bemoaned the drop in attendance figures...perhaps Christianity just needs spicing up a little.....American TV evangelism could become most disturbing, translated into the interactive media scenario. The very architecture of religious spaces....churches, cathedrals, offers a transcendentalism which could readily be duplicated in cyberspace, as could the ecstasy of mystical experience....the laying on of hands. Perhaps man will use VR to create a new, medium-dedicated God in his own image.

Considering what happened with TV and the phenomena of its Woganisation, the Hollywood saturation of cinema with bland, homogenised product; people will want to interact with this stuff, they will get immersed in it with the added realism. The 3D films of the 1950s were diverting, but characterised by a poor message conveyed by a powerful medium. Certainly if media history is any yardstick, VR will experience similar usage. Banality is one thing. In the fiction of William Gibson, VR sensory soap opera actors are worshipped as global stars, and a huge audience plugs daily into a glamorous, exciting lifestyle in the ultimate synthetic stimulation.

Darker still is the phenomena of pus like the Church of Scientology. Once squeezed into cyberspace, L.Ron Hubbard's sinister creation which preys and feeds on the minds of the young and vulnerable, could deploy vastly more effective versions of their video induction and brainwashing techniques, openly referred to as 'processing', to instill in their recruits the necessary psychological dependence and allegiance to the cause. Were I an operative in this self-styled religion, I would certainly consider investing in interactive VR gear and installing induction/initiation programs for all the naiive fresh meat.

The Feelies

It is tempting to think that Teledildonics, or Cybersexuality, as one feels compelled to call it, could offer an ideal solution to the problems of a burgeoning population, AIDS, contraception, and the emotional minefield of the human relationship. As VR becomes viable, one of the most powerful human drives will channel research into one of the most bizzarre conceptual aspects of cyberspace; funded, one surmises, by a powerful sex industry. So - pornographic video becomes software that actuates the user's datasuit to reproduce the recorded experience of another's body.....Pornographic software of a disturbing realism is currently available already (Fig. 34) Telephone sex becomes the ultimate telecommunications rendezvous, where one interacts, in real time, with other living, consenting individuals, whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears via the computer link, and the only limiting factors are the imagination and the cost of rented time in the system. An electronic condom, with sexual encounter attached. A sophisticated pornography or any combination of logical extensions is only one route, as witnessed by the following:

"Objects, as well as the shape of my associates in the laboratory, appeared to undergo optical change....fantastic pictures of extraordinary plasticity and intensive colour seemed to surge towards me."(4)

 A virtual reality researcher describing a typical day's work? Swiss biochemist Albert Hoffmann in 1943, having synthesised d-LSD-25, accidentally inhaling a few grains of his problem creation and unwittingly discovering chemical cyberspace. Might cyberspace offer the properties of a drug - intellectual, hedonistic, addictive, damaging?

'People are already plugged into an electronic drug that mesmerises them, it's called television.... Alcohol & tobacco are legitimate, millions of people die from them around the world, LSD, marijuana are not legitimate....people risk imprisonment to get out of their ordinary frame of consciousness for some reason. Most people think of drugs when they see this....a removal of the ordinary state of consciousness, so the answer - could it be a drug? yes it could. Is that necessarily good or bad? I don't know .'(5)

Psychedelia has embraced technology. Even Timothy Leary, once the high priest of acid, "now makes a living writing programs for computer software"(6) On the dance floors of the early 90s pulses a lifestyle fuelled by MDMA, LSD, alcohol and sex. Tripping out under the strobes in a miasma of swirling, chemically enhanced sensuality at £15 per hit plus entrance fee is the youth that stands to inherit the legacy that information technology, for the first time much more than just a series of digits on a screen, will shortly offer. Drugs work from the inside out, transforming consciousness itself and hence one's perception of reality. LSD and its 'designed' counterpart Ecstasy are crude & risky, but are unquestionably real to their users; and the effects are impossible to ignore. Virtual Reality works at present from the outside in; still one step outside the skull. As I was to discover, at its present level, VR is still to a greater or lesser extent dependent on the imagination, but could be a 'clean' trip one can instantly switch off should it become uncomfortable.

The technological achievements at the birthplace in fact, of VR, despite their significant success, would seem to command an exacting price. An individual could develop a real emotional relationship with and through a machine, (almost as the industrial machine in Silicon Valley itself seems to have had an influence on the natives) thus risking emotional dependency upon it. The umbilical cord might be difficult to cut.....witness the findings of Mick Brown's investigation....

'People spoke of Silicon Valley as 'the greatest incubator of entrepreneurial endeavours the world has ever seen'. 1500 of the 2,500 largest electronics firms in America were in Silicon Valley, I was told, along with half the leading venture capital firms in the world....the Valley still feels like the summit of the American technological and entrepreneurial dream, with all the feelings of vertigo that implies.......the valley had the highest divorce rate in America, and drug use was rife. In 1985, a local newspaper estimated Silicon Valley's illegal drug bill at $500m, and a newspaper survey reported that 35% of respondents in the computer industry 'frequently' or 'occaisionally' worked under the influence of cocaine or marijuana. (44% admitted they frequently or occasionally worked under the influence of alcohol.)'(7)

"VR may well be psychologically addictive (that is, entertaining), just like all good media experiences can be. And there is that constant tension between physical responsibility and cognitive exploration."(8)

People will always experiment on themselves in such ways, and will begin combining VR with contemporary escape mechanisms such as drugs or soap opera as soon as they are able. What distinguishes cyberspace is its potential to accelerate human interaction, precipitating a quantum leap in communications. Who can guess at what will actually happen once people interact en masse with each other on a spiritual, sensual and intellectual level on such a scale, as well as criminally, politically, subversively ? Without being misanthropic, moralising is almost pointless....doubtless, those who would profess a concern for the human condition will begin to examine VR more closely as it exerts itself increasingly in the years to come....before anyone starts to blame VR for anything; decides to become the self-appointed guardian of the Ten Cyber-Commandments, they are reminded that people may need to be protected from themselves; not their environment....it is, and doubtless will always be, the internal environment that must first be examined and questioned, if at all. Until the discussed pitfalls rear their heads in the form of tangible, observable side effects, it is impossible to censor on the basis of prediction alone.

The debate almost becomes irrelevant. Encouraging impartial, amoral education may be the best solution. The reason VR is such an exploratory and bewildering field is because of its limitless applications to the human condition, things will still be left to an individual's choice, hence it will be impossible to stop Cyberspace being adopted as a new tool for all the crass follies, stupidities and violences of the human organism. So it was with the motor car. But the internal combustion engine that mangles flesh and metal together also propels the ambulance to the hospital. Cyberspace may offer a more effective way for people to damage themselves and others, but then it will bring its own Yin with its Yang. The fragile balance will just be uploaded into a new format. Maybe the one exception is in the military case, which remains above and beyond the reach of an individual's moral influence; regrettable, in view of the ominous implications.



References

(1) Rheingold, Howard, 'Virtual Reality', Secker & Warburg, London, 1991, pp. 360 - 61
(2) Rheingold, Howard, 'Sex and Ecstasy and Very Big Money', Guardian 27/8/1991, p.28
(3) Source Independent, 18 February 1991
(4) Hollingshead, Michael, 'The Man Who Turned on The World', Blond & Briggs Ltd, London, 1973, p.7
(5) Howard Rheingold; from transcript of conversation; 28th October 1991
(6) Brown, Mick, 'The Beat goes On', in Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 31 August 1991, pp. 50-54
(7) Brown, Mick, 'The Beat goes On', in Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 31 August 1991, pp.50-54
(8) Bricken, William, 'Virtual Reality: Directions of Growth', Meckler Ltd, in 'Virtual Reality '91, Impacts and Applications', Meckler Publ., London, 1991, p.4