How Second Life and everything else internet has failed us –
or we have failed it.
Those of us old enough, wise enough or, essentially,
unhinged enough to have seen between the cracks of this big brick wall we call
‘society’ will likely long ago have worked out that there’s no such thing as
the new product that will make everything better; nor will there ever be. The next new iPhone, we’ve realised, will not
cure the world of ill and it won’t do a single thing for an individual that
even the most ardent of Apple fanbois would select to look back upon fondly in
his very last moment of life. Likewise
the next Xbox and the next PlayStation and whatever it is that Nintendo does
next. Likewise, in all probability, the
Oculus Rift. Likewise Second Life 2.
All of these next-big-thing bandwagons, we’ve realised, are
essentially just the dressed-up treadmill of capitalism, the soap opera
gift-wrap to the requirement that we endlessly buy things in order to keep
everything (and everyone) working. This
is no big revelation anymore. Even the
machinery of capitalism itself no longer tries to conceal it from us; there is
no need. It turns out that most of us
are no more turned off from buying things when the inner guts of consumerism are
exposed than we are from eating bacon when we learn it comes from pigs.
How we love looking forward to our next big tech, just the
same. The rumours. The anticipation. The debates.
The reviews. That we know (in the
same way that know the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way round) that
this is all just an endless loop and that this time next year it’ll be
something else we’re looking forward to diminishes our enjoyment of it not one
jot. I’m not being cynical here: I enjoy
it all as much as the next moderately IT-informed human being. And I’m not saying either that no things
created are transformational, just that they’re not really transformational enough.
The computer, for example, has been transformational; I
still marvel at word processing. The
Internet has been transformational and I still marvel at email and the speed
with which I can pull information from the web on just about any topic in a
matter of seconds. Perhaps the most
transformational thing of all about the Internet, however, is the communication
it opens up with other people. It was inconceivable when I was growing up in
the seventies and eighties that we would in the not-to-distant future be able
to speak with people all over the world for as long as we wanted and for free –
let alone video chat with them. Even
throughout most of the nineties this seemed unlikely. Today, it is more-or-less taken for granted.
Second Life, in its admittedly rather clunky fashion –
although I have no doubt this will be improved upon in its next incarnation –
takes this one step further: In SL, we can actually do things alongside people who are hundreds or even thousands of
miles away from us. We can create
together. We can perform together. We can watch things together. We can shop together. We can just sit together if we want to in a
café or a living room or a town square or an open field and talk. It is astonishing
the boundaries that the metaverse enables us to transcend.
In theory.
If I could travel back in time to make a visit to my
teenaged self and describe to him the world’s technology today, I wonder what
he would say? Let’s suppose I arrived in
early November 1983 when, unbeknownst to most of us at the time, the world came
within a button’s press of World War III.
Nuclear annihilation was something I thought about a great deal in those
days and it sobers me to think that there are in all likelihood a great many
parallel universes in which Soviet nerve did not hold out and the world really
did end that week. On 7 November 1983, Uptown Girl by Billy Joel was at number
one in the UK music charts (incidentally, the first seven inch single I ever
bought) and Islands in the stream by
Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton topped the US Billboard Hot 100. In the news, a bomb was exploded by a
terrorist group at the United States Senate (no-one was killed). It was a Monday. I would likely have spent the evening playing
on my ZX Spectrum computer. Can you remember what you were doing that
day?
In truth, right then I was only just becoming aware of the
nuclear threat and the likelihood is I was far more preoccupied with what was happening
in Doctor Who than I was with world
affairs (after all, the twentieth anniversary special, The Five Doctors, was just a couple of weeks away). If the button had been pushed, I would likely
not have understood what was going on (not that I would have had all that much
time to digest it), which is probably how it should be for a twelve year old
boy. Even so, if a forty-something me
from the future had turned up to talk about the internet and things like Second
Life, I like to think that I would have worked out pretty quickly that a
consequence of all that incredible communication potential had to be that people were finally managing to get along
together. Well, wouldn’t it?
But, in 2014, despite all these transformational advances
well beyond the scope of what most of us who were around 30 years ago could
have dreamed of, we’re still about as far away from that dream, it seems, as
perhaps we’ve ever been. As nationalism
sweeps across Europe (the rise of the UK
Independence Party in the UK is only one example of this), as Russia takes
what many feel to be the first of many calculated steps to come in rebuilding
the former Soviet Union, as the US is slowly torn in two by increasing
political polarisation, as Islamic State
– arguably the love-child of the Blair-Bush legacy – bring unspeakable
brutality to the middle east, I’m waiting for the moment when people on big
stages start asking the question, Why? How has it come to this? How have we not yet moved on from here? Why have we not made some sort of progress
when we have all this incredible technology?
It’s too easy to blame just the politicians. As an inclusive humanist, I have long been
waiting for the world leader who has the courage to explicitly make decisions
based on the world’s interests rather than “this country’s interests” (whatever
that country might be), but I’m not so naïve as to believe that such a person
wouldn’t be voted out of power at the very next chance his or her electorate
got. It’s too easy to blame the people of
the press, who sicken me on a weekly basis with their seeming quest to make us
angrier and angrier and angrier; it is us, at the end of the day, who buy their
newspapers and sustain this. It’s too
easy to blame parents. It’s too easy to
blame schools. It’s too easy to blame
capitalism. It is all of these things
together – and more – and the whole is so much greater than the sum of its
parts.
And yet, it’s really not so complicated. All we have to do – all of us – is be better
at empathising with others and exercising compassion. That’s it.
That’s all we have to do. Pretty
much every single disagreement I’ve ever been witness to has involved one or
both sides being unable to understand how the other is thinking and feeling.
In recent months, I’ve become excited in my anticipation of
yet another potentially transformational moment to be brought about by
technology. Over the last couple of
decades, our knowledge of planets beyond the solar system has exploded: as of 1
September 2014, we know of over 1,800
worlds, with new ones being discovered at an astonishing rate. We have the Keplar telescope to thank for much of this, a $500m NASA spacecraft
that enables astronomers to identify planets when they move between us and
their native star. Like so many NASA
missions, its operational life has already far exceeded its planned life
expectancy and the data being returned has enabled estimates on the number of
potentially life-supporting worlds in our galaxy (calculated from the
percentage of solar systems which have planets of a certain size orbiting their
sun at a distance which would expose them to a comparable amount of solar
radiation to Earth – it turns out this is about 20%); currently, this number is
thought to be in the billions. This analysis has become increasingly refined
and new techniques are being devised which will allow analysis of the
atmospheres of these planets. One such
technique will enable astronomers to detect the presence of chemicals known not
to exist naturally in the universe. When
the day comes that a world with these chemicals in its atmosphere is
identified, we will have discovered proof of intelligent life on another
planet. There is a growing confidence
amongst scientists that we will have this proof within the next twenty years.
Perhaps this discovery will be the catalyst that changes
human thinking from ‘me’ to ‘us’. For
many years – perhaps decades; perhaps centuries – we won’t know anything about
these civilisations other than that they exist.
We won’t be able to communicate with them (the distance will be far too
great); we won’t know what the people of these planets look like or what they eat
or how their homes are or what their art is like: we will only know that they
are there. We will only know that we are
not all that there is any more. We will
only know that all of us on this planet are one thing – human – and that there
are now other beings we know of who are not this thing. We might finally start to identify with the
people we previously hated.
And yet it’s so terribly lazy to pin all one’s hopes to a
magic solution from a far-away place; as a writer, I can’t help but feel I’m
just hoping for a deus ex machine to
pop out of thin air and rescue us all, and that I should be shamed for the very
thought by having my pencils taken away.
And even if it happens, it might in any case turn out to be no more transformational
a moment in the long term than was the release of the Nintendo Wii; humans are
incredibly wedded to their prejudices.
But something has to happen if we’re going to survive. We can’t just continue with our them-and-us
mindsets indefinitely and expect things to all work out somehow. Every single time we call someone a jerk or
take sides or add to the polarisation of a debate; every time we make it harder
for people to rethink their positions and meet us (or others) in the middle
ground, every time we collude with the idea that one side is right and the
other is wrong, we only end up digging ourselves deeper and deeper and deeper. It isn’t easy, but neither is it complicated. I don’t really know how Second Life could help
us build some of these bridges, but I still believe that it has the
potential. It’s not going to be a menu
option, however, or a HUD you can buy on the Marketplace. All SL can do is provide the
opportunity.
Whilst I’ve been writing this article, the former Northern
Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley has passed away. Dr Paisley was a big man who, for many years,
placed himself in an entrenched position over the future of Northern
Ireland. His later decision to fight for
peace and share power with his former bitter enemies was a turning point for
the Northern Ireland peace process and the key moment for which he is being
celebrated now in the media. Peace is
never without pain, and Northern Ireland remains a stark example of this. But peace is peace, and we have to fight for
it. If we don’t, the eventual
alternative will be so much worse than whatever wounds we have right now.
