Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Jan Hejral

"New Romancer”: Cyberspace and Utopia

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Doc. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D.

2008

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the printed and online sources listed in the bibliography.

__________________

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” (Oscar Wilde gtd. in Kumar 107)

Acknowledgements

Foremost, I would like to thank William Gibson for writing that highly inspiring story of John Case and Neuromancer which instantly sparked my interest in the topic of cyberspace. Having said this, I must then express my gratitude to Prof. Efterpi Mitsi who, during my intership at Kapodistrian University in Athens, sparked my lasting interest in the field of utopian studies.

I also have to thank to my friends for many invaluable insights into and consultations on topics that are still beyond my reach - Zdeněk Štangl, Jiří Dufka, Petr Vítek and Zuzka Fonioková for her background support. …And, of course, to my girlfriend Jana whose tolerance and patience with me, being lost deep in thoughts for over one month, made this work possible.

My gratitude also goes to Adam Freeland, DJ Trifid, J.J.Cale and others whose rhythm and beat,beat,beat kept my worn-out brain swinging through endless nights behind the computer.

Last but not least, I woud like to take this oportunity to express massive, sincere thanks

to my supervisor, Associate Prof. Tomáš Pospíšil, whose two-year‘s patience, mental support and invaluable feedback and guidance allowed this work to come on paper.

i

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 Part One Theoretical Background of Utopianism 5 Chapter 1 The Floating Islands of Utopia 5

1.1 Utopian versus Other Social Theory 6 1.2 Utopia as Domination 9 1.3 Utopia as Hope 10 1.4 Utopia as Escape 12

Chapter 2 Utopia in Time and Space as the ‘Emancipation of Historical Experience’ 13 Chapter 3 The Importance and Future of Utopia in 21st Cent. 18

Part Two Entering Cyberspace 24 Chapter 4 Material Dimension: The Rise of the Internet 26 Chapter 5 Social Dimension: Virtual Communities and the Lure of Virtual Reality 29

5.1 The Case of Virtual Reality, or ‘What I Do I Understand’ 30 5.1.1 The Quest of Creating a Computer-generated

Virtual Environment 31 5.1.2 Applications of Virtual Reality 37

5.1.3 Second Life as a Virtual Playground of Today 38

5.1.4 Play and Virtual Reality in the Process of Culture-making 41

5.2 ‘Reality is 80 million polygons per second’,

or the Rise of an ‘Alternate Reality’ 43

5.3 Mr. Bungle and the Question of Anonymity and Identity, 49 or ‘You Are What You Type’

5.3.1 ‘Rape in Cyberspace’ 49

5.3.2 A Chimera of the ‘Internet Addiction’ 54 Chapter 6 Spiritual Dimension: ‘Collective intelligence’ and ‘Collective Consciousness’ 55

Part Three Echoes of the Future: Promises and Fears 64 Chapter 7 Direct Democracy, or Customizing Politics for the Third Wave 65 Chapter 8 Cyberpunks & Hackers, or a New Frontier into Nowhere 75

Afterthought 80 Bibliography 84

Introduction

Mankind is living in a state of continual unrest, a plunge towards anarchy. Whatever social

order laid upon a particular society, it is always only an approximating framework erasing

individual’s needs and wishes. Long gone must be the idea of perfecting humans. From the

nineteenth century onwards, the positivists' blind trust in Science as a tool instrumental in the

journey out of the dark valley of human ignorance and misery has had its day. Much stronger

forces beyond our control springing from the inside of human psyché are – indeed, have always

been! – in operation. Our desires and our fears drive our everyday lives. In fact, it seems that

Jung and Nietzsche have done more justice to explaining away the human nature than all utopian

visionaries of the past together. The latter, however, are still at work and “dreaming”.

This work does not really aim at judging such social engineering ventures on the basis of

some ethical point of view; much rather it aims at giving prospects to the age old human

yearnings for a ‘better tomorrow’. Although many (in the light of the present events of society in

transition and seeming chaos) have argued that utopia is dead, the incomprehensible stream of

zeros and ones in the silicon wires flooding all around us echoes the very opposite. This work

celebrates utopian endeavors as a clear link to Progress on the scale of human experience. But

because this work is inspired and designed as a direct reaction to, an antithesis to the literary

cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and as such will only be briefly discussed at

the end of the work), it is not a delegate of bad news. Far from the nihilistic, dismal cyberpunk

vision of the future, it tries to provide a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the potential of human progress

in the cyberspace realm now in the making. Much rather, then, it tries to present an amalgam of

good and bad that yet uncertain future may bring in the decades to come.

Indeed, this is a piece of writing claiming utopia alive and well . . ., maybe more than ever

before!

As mentioned above, it is inspired by the hallucinogenic void of matrix permeating

William Gibson’s Neuromancer and elaborates on the seemingly endless possibilities and vitality of

utopian prospects in the cyberian twenty-first century. From his vantage point, this fictional “new

romancer” that I adjusted from Gibson’s original, imagines a society distinctly different from

those known hitherto in history – fluid and de-fragmented, its very texture getting re-fabricated.

Not better, not worse – just distinctly different from what mankind has seen so far.

The work is divided into three parts, proceeding from the very theoretical background of

utopianism in Part One toward the specific and applied in Parts Two and Three as a synergy of

utopia and cyberspace.

In Part one I will be dealing with the concept of utopianism and utopian thought. For

better clarity I will divide this part into three chapters. First I will embark on a very thin ice of

defining what utopia is, as the widespread attention it gets across critical studies makes its

boundaries blur and overlap. I will also go at some length into the distinctive elements of utopia -

i.e. what utopia revolves around and what distinguishes it from other social theory. (Chapter 1).

In the next chapter I will take you on a flashlight tour of history of literary utopian genre from

some of the first scripts until today. The last chapter, Chapter 3, of the first part is dedicated to

its importance in human culture as well as the possible, extrapolated future of utopian

endeavours in the twenty-first century.

The synoptical classical Utopian societies of writers as varied as Campanella, Plato,

Bacon, Hesod, or Belamy all possessed one very unfortunate limitation – they were (and until

recently had to be!) established in the physical world around us. And even when overseas

explorations eradicated all white places from the map of the Globe and Utopia had to move in

time, it was still made of human flesh and fertile soil. Enforced upon an individual, coercing his

idiosyncrasies in the name of humanist ideals where public good outweighed the restriction on

individual’s freedom, utopian prospects kept stifling human intellect and annoying liberal thinkers

across the Earth. Hugely, this fact is where one of the main arguments of this work draws

strength from. The thing is that Cyberspace with its non-geographical nature, knows no such limits

and boundaries. As a matter of fact, Cyberspace itself can be seen as a kind of Utopia. For me,

however, it is much rather a basic platform, a metadesk on which human intellect and the

dreaming mind can “build” the utopian shrines of tomorrow. Indeed, free to explore and put into

use the capacity of their intellect, every individual can “conquer” their own floating island, team

with other Cyberians or part with them of their own free will.

In Part 2, the part I will devote most space and attention to and which is divided into

three chapters, I will first introduce to the reader the terms “Cyberspace” and its material

dimension symbolized in the Internet (Chapter 4). Social dimension of Cyberspace as well as

“virtual reality”, “virtual communities” and the many aspects accompanying these online

phenomena are discussed at length next (Chapter 5). In the last chapter, “collective intelligence”

and “collective consciousness” are put under some scrutiny.

Having discussed this, I will move to Part 3 which I devote to discussing a likely future of

human species inhabiting cyberspace alongside our physical world, as well as how virtual reality

and Cyberspace promise to change the fiber of our society. It would, of course, be a hopeless

struggle to try to discuss in detail all that may come out of the upcoming digital era (e.g.

extropianism and the vision of merging humans with machines in cyborgs as one such likely

scenario) and definitely one very impractical for the purpose of this work. Instead, I will try to

focus on the more foreseeable future. And so in much humbler an attempt will outline a few

possible scenarios with their kaleidoscopic whirling of newly-emerging social identities bringing

alongside them a whole new series of social bonds and relationships between human species and

the physical world, as well as among human individuals themselves. The potential for the

emergence of a “direct democracy” as elaborated on by Pierre Lévy and Alvin Toffler is

discussed here (Chapter 7). In the last chapter I will eventually come to discuss cyberpunk

movement and its dismal vision of future. Although I do not a priori discard its vision of the

world of tomorrow, indeed, I believe much of what cyberpunks envision for tomorrow is quite

likely to take place. However, and as I mentioned already above, this work is a messenger of

positive ideas. After all, is optimism not the only way toward creation, rather than destruction?

We are living in times of transition and never before have we had so much to gain, so much to

lose. A time may come when there will be no such a need for utopian writers to scribble down

their wishful blueprints for utopian societies as the technology in cyberspace may be instrumental

in living our personal utopias on the Internet.

Before we start, though, let me briefly stop here to point out some differences in

transcriptions that should make for preventing any misunderstandings coming round on the

following pages. I will be using a capitalized term Utopia bearing in mind a specific utopian

society – e.g. that of Thomas More. In all other instances and for a general use I will reach for the

term utopia. So, what are these “floating islands” all about?

Part One

*

Chapter 1 The Floating Islands of Utopia

What is happening behind those human, incessantly searching eyes of ours’... and what

shapes does this dreaming take? And, even if we accept our private utopia as something almost

tangible, where does this internal need for our “floating island”, our Prospero’s land, come from?

Not less importantly, is this at all an acceptable mode of behavior? Should we not, as many would

claim, get accommodated with what is, rather than strive for what only could be? Many, as we

learn from the plentiful literary utopian canon, did not and their irresistible call from within

found its expression in this utopian literature throughout history of our civilization. All of the

above mentioned dilemmas will be discussed at some length on the following pages.

Utopia has been claiming great attention on many fronts of criticism. Generations of

philosophers, scholars, artists, political and economic theorists as well as other literary authors

with such ambitions put forward their blueprints for the ideal society, or, maybe more precisely,

‘societies’ as all grand Utopias can never satisfy idiosyncratic subtleties of every human individual.

Monks, yes, even monks, I believe – despite utopia “in most essential respects...is a distinctively

secular type of social thought” (Kumar 32) –, dreamt their Utopias. Since we all have the inbred

capacity for self-realization, it could not be any other way. It then goes without saying that

utopianism as a mental concept is looked upon from many angles in very many different ways.

For some, utopia would be “an emancipation of historical experience” (Selkej 10), and

this viewpoint is presented in Chapter 2 as well as fostered throughout the whole work, some

would see it as “a creative, self-transcending tendency” (26). For Karl Mannheim, on the other

hand, they were “situationally transcendent ideas” (Kumar 92). In Lamartine’s observation, they

are “premature truths” (92). “Utopia,” says Marcuse, “is also present in all true, liberatory art”

(Selkej 37). Also, for the early surrealists, Selkej continues, “it is present in daydreaming” (34). Yet

one point of deaprture is put forward by Theodore Olson when he says that “Utopia is the

search for the good pattern of life in ahistorical cosmos” (Kumar 44). Or let us consider the

psychoanalytic attempt: “...a desire to get back to mother’s womb” (Mumford 19). Still others

would see it as “an archetype of human social imagination fed from the mythology” (Kumar 43).

It is then justly legitimate to conclude that utopianism is a well-debated conceptual phenomenon

spanning across many disciplines of social sciences and human activity.

One of the great defenders of utopia, German philosopher Ernst Bloch, saw Hope as the

primary essence of utopia, as “the most human of all mental feelings” (Selkej 33). On the

contrary to it, Hegel would strike back hard at utopianism calling it “a neurosis, a convulsive

reaction against world and self” (10). Some hundred and fifty years later, after the fall of the

Eastern block, probably frustrated and excited about a long-desired freedom, Václav Havel gave

utopianism one more severe blow when he contemplated on utopianism as “an arrogant attempt

by human reason to plan life” (Selkej 20). It is essential to point out here, though, that for all the

above mentioned anti-utopians, any Utopian society was to be realized within the limitations and

boundaries of our physical world, here or in the future. And this in Cyberspace, which this work

builds on, could not be further from the truth. But let us come back to that in Parts Two and

Three and now go back to delineating the theoretical background of utopian floating islands in

some more detail.

1.1 Utopian versus Other Social Theory

From the above citations it is apparent that boundaries of utopia, that is the very

theoretical ones, are not clear-cut. One standing blur, for example, seems to be the difference

between utopian and other social theory, and this will be discussed now.

Apparently, a good utopian book will above all be a highly imaginative fiction, hence we

have a difference in form. All the author’s sharp wit, as one of the essences of utopia will be a

certain level of satire, and imagination as vivid so as to provide a picture of a society in as much

detail as possible (Kumar 25). A good utopian author will take us on a fantastic tour around their

Utopians’ daily events in all their complexity. And so a reader may learn more about matters

such as where the Utopians shop for Sunday dinner, what kind of haircut is in fashion at that

time of year or what color is the river running through a utopian city. Utopian realms seem,

indeed, to be written for the common man rather than for social engineers:

He [More] has wished to portray a world that ordinary people, rather than simply philosophers, can imagine themselves living in. His purpose, like Plato’s, remains didactic. His Utopia, he wrote to his friend Peter Giles, was ‘a fiction whereby the truth, as if smeared with honey, might a little more pleasantly slide into men's minds (Mumford 24).

For the lack of a better word, this ‘illuminative’ intention of an author to reach as wide a

readership as possible, may best be achieved through a popular form of writing. In his Critical

Essays, George Orwell in a remark on H. G. Wells once pointed out: “I don’t know whether

anyone who was writing books between 1900-1920, at any rate in English language, influenced

the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be

perceptibly different if Wells had never existed” (87-8).

We are living in turbulent times when it seems fashionable to call a death rattle of this or

that, but whether or not it also applies for a novel, literary utopia has been hugely lending from

this genre. One of the main distinctive features of Utopian literary genre as opposed to novel,

however, is that a utopian book is essentially designed purely for the purposes of conveying a

particular idea as Northrop Frye suggests when remarking: “any conflict which is present in

Utopia is about ideas and not between characters” (Krishnan 129). This, in fact, implies that

utopian characters are simply the medium for the author’s ideas and the aim of every discussion

or every argument between the characters is then an argument between ideas rather than an

argument to support the development of the psychological side of the characters, as is typical of

novel.

The best way, however, of distinguishing between the two, says Krishan Kumar –

arguably the eminent scholar in the field of utopian theory –, is “in their fundamental

assumptions about human nature and its possibilities” (28). Kumar here argues that “what unites

utopians, and gives to utopian theory its distinctive emphasis, is the assumption that there is

nothing in man, nature or society that cannot be so ordered as to bring about a more or less

permanent state of material plenty, social harmony and individual fulfillment” (29). Whether the

justification of such an idea – in the light of findings into human psyché of the last century – lies

at the door or is worthless even to consider, I leave up to a reader (for more see Chapters 6 and

7).

More importantly, Kumar adds, social theory tends to provide systematic analysis as

opposed to a concrete demonstration of a society in a utopian work, and “authorities do not have to

worry about Kapital but about Looking Backward” (89). To support this view, although taken

from a different point of departure, Mumford also believed in the transforming power of literary

utopias:

The Icarians who lived only in the mind of Etienne Cabet, or the Freelanders who dwelt within the imagination of a dry little Austrian economist, have had more influence upon the lives of our contemporaries than the Etruscan people who once dwelt in Italy, although the Etruscans belonged to what we call the real world, and the Freelanders and Icarians inhabited – Nowhere (Mumford 24).

In history of up to now, of course, this took masses to rise and demand a sharp change

from their ruling class, which was often blood-scattered and violent. And it is only in Cyberspace

where the above idea is truly accentuated. Only in a down-up social establishment can one

appreciate the fruits of a neatly designed utopian social blueprint.

1.2 Utopia as Domination 1. …And flowed. Flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chess-board extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach (Gibson 52). 2. And we will come to you too, my nameless readers on planets, so we will create for you life so divinely rational and perfect like ours (Zamjatin 92; my translation).

The top citation – of a rendezvous with the matrix – comes from Chapter 3 of Gibson’s

Neuromancer and quite pregnantly shows what the main criticism of utopia would be – it normally

is a closed, dominated system. Could Campanella’s society of the sun function without the

“Panopticon tower” element? Would Callenbach’s Ecotopia survive or in any way make sense any

more were it not abiding by the strict laws of a sustainable society? What would be the odds for

survival of Bacon’s New Atlantis if its social order was not granted by following omnipresent

natural laws? It goes without saying that there would not be much at stake for such communities

to hold on to. By definition, Utopia in this sense is a closed system, or partly closed if we allow

ourselves to think in terms of postmodern times. “Utopianism is a part of civilization”s project of

domination. It is closely allied to the conception of knowledge as power, thus, on the most part,

only achieving its realization through nation-state, science and technology’ (Selkej 19; my

translation). Indeed, it would be highly hypocritical to romanticize the whole concept of Utopia

as domination. For the lack of a better word, it pursues a kind of a “divine” order, despite the

fact that it is imposed by human will and reason, it is controlled and ideally blocks off any external

influence filing a possible threat to its status quo. Utopia is a true Prospero’s dominion.

This aspect, indeed, was an unforgivable drawback in the eyes of its critics. Humanists,

liberals, all shaped in one powerful fist of attack, have pointed out the evil nature of Utopias

since there - whoever does not follow or comply with the establishment is in return eliminated (

the main character, Winston, in Orwell’s 1984), or at best detached from the society by a surgical

clear cut.

Utopianism is a typically intellectual phenomenon ... an arrogant attempt by

human reason to plan life. But life is something unfathomable, ever-changing, mysterious, and every attempt to confine it within an artificial, abstract structure intended to make it function better inevitably somehow ends up homogenizing, regimenting, standardizing and destroying life, as well as curtailing everything that projects beyond, overflows, or falls outside the abstract project […] There is a distinct and logical progression from beautiful utopias to concentration camps. What is a concentration camp, after all, but an attempt by utopians to dispose of those elements which don’t fit into their utopias (Václav Havel qtd. in Selkej 19)?

From the citation above we can see that Havel’s understanding of the concept of utopian

thought is very much unfortunate since the world without utopia would be a very static and sad

place to be as will be argued for later on in the work.

On the contrary to this criticism, Saskia Poldervaart in Contemporary Utopian Struggles argues

that from the nineteenth-sixties onwards utopists do not write “blueprints for perfect societies”

(p 18) and supports this idea on the pretext of “open-endedness” of our postmodern era.

However, going back to, for example, Callenbach’s Ecotopia I find this argument dubious.

1.3 Utopia as Hope

Arguably the most important element of utopia is the principle of hope. This was

feverishly argued for by the twentieth-century German philosopher Ernst Bloch who generally

pleaded for “the recognition of the importance of utopia as an expression of the vital ‘principle

of hope’ in human culture” (Kumar 100). But is the the principle of hope not the very essence of

our life? A belief that we are not exposed to destiny or fate enforced on us by external influences

but much rather make our own destinies is of undisputable importance to the life of every one of

us. No matter where you travel back in the written history of mankind you find this natural

mind’s desire. Herod’s reminiscing of the Golden Age or various Cockaygnes of the medieval Europe

expressed hope for long lost or heavenly ideal societies:

In the beginning was The Golden Age, when men of their own accord, without threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right. There were no penalties to be afraid of […] no crowd of wrong-doers, anxious for mercy […] The peoples of the world, untroubled by any fears, enjoyed a peaceful and leisurely existence, and had no use for soldiers. The earth itself, without compulsion, untouched by the hoe, unfurrowed by any share, produced things spontaneously, and men were content with foods that grew without cultivation (Ovid 23).

But, undoubtedly, neither this long-lost harmonic coexistence of men in the natural-

source-abounding Golden Age, nor heavenly medieval realms of Cockaygnes not knowing

scarcity and projected into life after death are the only accounts of human social dreaming of the

day. Could not be! Along with the notion of the belief in “perfectibility of human race” stated

above, generations of utopian writers followed the suit. Be it Sir Thomas More, Rousseau, J. S.

Mill, or H.G. Wells, hope as the unequivocally positive force within human mind kept driving their

social dreaming onto rough seas of speculation on human condition. In Anarchism, Comunnity and

Utopia, Selkej and Tomek quote Bloch: “The content of the night-dream is concealed and

disguised, the content of the day-fantasy is open, fabulously inventive, anticipating, and its latency

lies ahead” (34). Is this not a direct call for activating our everyday potential to re-create ourselves

and the world around us?

As if inspired by early surrealists’ train of thought from the first half of the century, Bloch

here pleaded for the reinstatement of an innovative stimulus in the form of daylight dreaming.

Taking place in our consciousness, unthreatened by deeper layers of subconsciousness, this is a

plea for pushing our capabilities to the limits of everyday possibilities, the disconsolate soul

always at the head of our social dreaming.

1.4 Utopia as Escape

Another attack on utopia was given by those who saw it as an escape from reality – the

inability to cope with what is. Hegel, for example, saw it in the following way: “These escapist

utopians…are unable to cope with the ugliness and ambiguity of the world, and therefore cling to

the bloodless Ideal” (Selkej 26). Dozens of partisan utopian communities that sprang across land

in Scotland, England and mainly in the new settlements of the United States during the

“enlightened centuries” were doomed to failure. In a certain way, though, Hegel deserves some

credit for his point as explained by Lewis Mumford remarking on partisan utopias of the early

industrial era:

The great misfortune of the partisan utopias of the 18th (mainly devoted to politics and criminal law) and the 19th (mainly to economic reform), and in that case of the industrial revolution, was that they all treated activities in which men engage as taking place in separate worlds…for in using these words we tend to believe that each action takes place in a separate compartment. Instead of beginning with a whole man interacting in a whole community, we are likely to consider only a partial man in a partial community, and by a mental slight of hand, before we know it, we have let the part stand for the whole. It is this sort of abstraction, I believe, that has been responsible for a good deal of fallacious thinking with regard to the place of industry in the community (Mumford 238-9).

“Unlike classical utopias of Renaissance which all seem to be dealing with a society as a

whole and are authoritarian,” we learn from Mumford, “modern times separated utopian view

into economics, demography, politics, religion, war and education” (5). taking into consideration

all parts of social life of a society, these “partisan” utopias of those enlightened centuries filled

with steam and smokestacks focused on but a part of human condition, hence could not but fail,

or so the argument goes.

Whether or not these mushrooming local communities of “owenite and fourier” type (

across Europe as well as America ) were not just a blind, elusive attempt at solving social

dilemma of nation-states in progress, is not of any significance now. Utopia, invariably, is a kind

of escape from the current state of affairs as well as an inextinguishable pull towards a better way

of living. Nobody favours a voluntarily chosen misery unless they are pervert by nature. Utopia

hosts a strong feeling of desire – another common feature to all utopias as Ruth Levitas remarks in

The Concept of Utopia (Poldervaart 82). More importantly, what this “better way of living”

comprises of, depends hugely on a highly individualized point of view as there will literally be at

least as many “better ways of living” as there are people around the world.

Chapter 2 Utopia in Time and Space as the “Emancipation of Historical Experience”

The purpose of this chapter is to track down literary utopian thought as “the

emancipation of historical experience” in the history back to European ancient civilizations.

However, this chapter cannot, and will not, provide a detailed account of not even all canonical

literary utopian works. Much rather, my task on the following pages will be, on a few hallmark

genre works, to put forward and indicate main developmental shifts, main world view changes

which shaped utopian thought up to date. It goes without saying, though, that we are only able to

cover a period of last few millennia – the period after the emergence of script.

From the premise that I stated at the beginning of Chapter 1, it is undisputable that

utopian aspirations have been around for as long as humans, through their mental capacity, were

able to realize themselves as individual entities, able to shape their own life conditions.

I have already, though only briefly, mentioned the first literary accounts of utopian

thought in the form of Golden Age. Undoubtedly, the world view in the times of Ancient

civilizations was radically different from what we know now. Reading, from the vantage point of

our present, Plato’s Republic one can only shake their head in disbelief at the rigidly set

hierarchical blueprint with all its privileged castes initiated into their position by the Myth of

Metals, as opposed to the low castes of slaves. Either way, for Plato, I believe, it would be a

shocking encounter if he was able to become an invisible traveller “auditing” our society. Every

era of human history was governed by some overlying paradigms depending, for example, on the

means of production available at the time and who possessed them, on the level of “decision”

(for more see Chapter 7). Or else, how could “pre-colombian peoples” of Europe have lived in

such appaling negligence to their earthly existence, as described below?

Utopia first fifteen hundred years after Christ is transplanted to the sky, and called the Kingdom of Heaven [...] The world as men find it is full of sin and trouble. Nothing can be done about it except to repent of the sin and find refuge from the trouble in the life after the grave (Kumar 59). At the beginning of the fifth century A.D. St. Augustine will contribute his City of God, a

treatise to support the not yet fully-established Christian religion, and opposing the city of man.

Fifteen centuries later in his Fantastika, Utopie a Antiutopie, Kagarlickij will differentiate between

the literature of Fantastic and the myth in a way that the former is based on “speculative reason”

(12). In the meantime, the Middle Ages will strangle ‘the City of Man’ in a sense that religious

dogma of the time will not allow men to cross the boundary of their world view and put trust in

an earthly paradise – a better way of living in life before death. More importantly, it will

undoubtedly be the minimal literacy among common folk that will prevent them from fossilizing

the first accounts of the city of man on paper. However, it is highly unlikely that even these

dozens of generations of craftsmen and peasants will not dream their personal utopias; only

theirs will be projected into “the life after grave”.

An epochal shift in the world view will come only with the famous Genoan’s overseas

explorations and “discovery” of the New World. Powered by the needs for better trade routes

and growing competition between budding nation states in the Occident, the old Christian

dogma about the shape of Earth will be wrecked. The globe from now on can host many

mystical and exotic countries where sun shines more brightly, humans live more harmoniously. It

is 1516 and in England the philanthropist Sir Thomas More expresses his deep motives in a

masterpiece canonizing as well as coining the whole literary movement – his Utopia is published

in Latin (Brunel 1152). Not long after, a French scholar Boudet, undoubtedly to the amusement

of many, proposes to send missionaries to that enchanting island of Utopia (Kagarlickij 136).

What is reality, after all (more on this in 5.2)? In 1627 Francis Bacon, an unswerving adherent of

scientific method, writes his blueprint of New Atlantis. The Renaissance with its revival of Ancient

ideals and placing a human individual into the centre of interest changes the paradigm again.

Hopes and promises for a better tomorrow and salvation of human race get accentuated …and

Utopia starts to flourish.

Its [Utopias’] practitioners have often been devout Christian – Fancis Bacon no less than Thomas More – but what their utopias, whatever their case in their other speculations, they were more concerned with the City of Man than the City of God (Kumar 35). Literacy is on the rise now as the newly emerging class of merchants with their need for

administration of their businesses comes into the scene. Universities also mushroom all around

Europe. The right to read and write is no longer privileged only to aristocrats and clerical world

of monasteries, and so legions of other thinkers put forward their blueprints for ideal societies on

paper.

It will not take long before Utopia is moved into future as the rate of overseas

discoveries – when marine explorations of the Earth gradually force cartographers who, whether

wanting or not, have to erase all terra incognita from globe atlases – makes it inescapable for

utopians, too, to extrapolate their fictive “floating islands” into the more or less distant future. It

is 1771 and the French playwright Sébastien Mercier publishes his popular L’An 2440 – the first

ever Utopia pushed into future is born (Brunel 1155).

At the end of the eighteenth century, another major shift for utopia comes along with the

emergence of Socialism as a political movement. The nation states are now indulging in much

more profound legal systems (however imperfect at the time) than ever before. Economies of

many countries in the Occident are on the rise, too; As budding trade with the new overseas

domains flourishes, wealth is distributed more generously than hoi polloi of the feudal epoch

could ever dream of. While social mobility could still not be compared to the one present today,

the clogs of industry get going – Europe and America get covered in cloud of steam and stifling,

carbonated clouds. These clogs of industrial factories need to be tended to, however! And so the

Second wave starts flooding over the West (for more see Chapter 7). The Social order known for

centuries now is shaken up. Revolutions and coups sweep the land. Shantytowns embroidering

the long-established domains of capital come into being, the regressive forces of Romanticism

likewise (drawing analogies with our present day is welcome). The importance of this turbulent

shift dwells in the fact that this is when the present and the future merge in Utopia for the first

time – Utopia from the distant waters of our imagination comes on shore. Various communities

are being established across the industrialised West. Charles Fourier, a French philosopher

known for his Phalanx project, becomes a source of inspiration for many such; to no avail,

though, as their life expectancy will prove to be short.

Yet another, arguably a much more important shift in utopian thought is under way now.

In these centuries, the utopian thought digresses in two very distinctive paths. With the

succession of a systematic scientific method, the positivist paradigm that human race will be

saved from ignorance through continual accumulation of knowledge and ongoing process of

rationalisation incites many to have their say and leave path in the books of literary criticism.

H.G. Wells on the brink of the twentieth century will write a series of books that will influence

one whole generation.

But nothing is only black or just white, as we know, and at the same time a parallel stream

of utopian thought, on how technology influences humans, will be under way. Where some

cherish technology as golden dust and one-way ticket to Xanadu, others warn against the

subversive nature of human mind and its abuse of technology for counterfeit ends. Ensuing

exciting voyages of science into human psyché will bear witness to it in the decades to come. In

the first half of the twentieth century, the two most lethal military campaigns on the global scale

will sweep those premature hallelujahs away. Literary dystopia will justify its place on Earth.

Utopia and anti-utopia are mirror images to each other. Each can affect readers, even the same reader, in different ways at different times. In Morris’s own words: “the only safe way of reading a utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author (Kumar 100).

Indeed, reading Huxley’s eloquent opus magnum, a libidinal lullaby Brave New World, one

can easily get coaxed into the illusion of what may seem to be an ideal society without material

scarcity, the world of state-enhanced limitless bodily pleasure in a neo-hedonist realm. For others,

however, it will be an epitome of a dull realm where omnipresent joy is but a misery in disguise.

Jack London’s Iron Heel, Evgenyj Zamjatin’s We or George Orwell’s dystopian yardstick 1984 will

be just a few of the many luminaries to join the crusade against technology-induced lofty

yearnings of the future “just around the corner”.

Indeed, reality and memory of human race from now on do not seem to be one any

more. Linearity as if dissolves in the void of de-fragmented time and memory. As Western society

gets on speed and our understanding of the natural environment deepens, as technology

penetrates it still in newer and newer ways, old social order of the Second wave becomes uprooted

again. Society is in a fluid state. Student and ethnic group movements of the sixties mark the end

of tolerance of the old, and coming of the new. “Marginalizing the past” and the “collapse of the

future onto the present” (Slusser & Shippey 27) become more and more visible as time goes by.

Old loyalties and thresholds of industrial era quiver in their foundations. Some of us may have an

imminent feeling of disorientation, paranoia and schizophrenia. Various subgenres come to life.

In 1975 Ernst Callenbach publishes his Ecotopia to mark human involvement and anxiety about

allegedly deteriorating environment. Elsewhere and only a year before Ursula K. Le Quin

contributes with her pregnant allegory The Dispossessed. Still greater luminaries of science fiction

subgenre – Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Lem to name just a few – contemplate on human

condition in times of technological possibilities. Gibson, Sterling and Rucker work against the

clock on gloomy cyberpunk literary visions of near future. When the socialist project in the

Soviet Union and its failure soon after marks the end of big Utopias in the physical environment,

some will announce a death rattle of utopian thinking – the yearning for a better tomorrow. But

looking on the bright side of current affairs and letting the undestroyable ‘radical imagination’

within us reel on, many will put their faith in the newly-emerging invisible world of Cyberspace.

But what are the lookouts concerning this new medium of thought and communications? Are

we, in the light of today’s turbulent and seemingly disastrous present, supposed to discard our

hopes and the creative, inventive mental capability that we, humans, are endowed with?

Chapter 3 The Importance and Future of Utopianism 1. Cyberspace is becoming the main infrastructure of production and management of economy and economic transactions. Soon it will be a collective and international tool of memory, thinking and communication. In a few decades cyberspace with its virtual communities, with its image depository of interactive simulations and unstoppable whirling of text and sound will be the main medium of collective intelligence of mankind. Due to this new carrier of information and communication arise hitherto unknown types of knowledge, new criteria of evaluation and categorization, new factors in production and processing of knowledge (Lévy 2000, 150). 2. As long as the radical imagination exists, utopia will continue to exist, and human beings will seek to realise it with diverse degrees of passion and rationality (Kumar 48). 3. Utopias appear far more realizable than we had previously ever thought. And we now find ourselves faced with a question that is agonizing in a quite different way: How can we avoid their definite realization? […] Utopias are realizable. Life marches towards utopias (Nicholas Berdyaev qtd. in Kumar 93).

It seems to be high fashion in our postmodern (or whatever you wish to call it) reality to

call a death rattle of this or that. Fast-changing world around us with age-old loyalties and

alliances disappearing and technologies which, before we know it, become obsolete are all issues

which fail to attain our curiosity any longer. After all, in a consumption society where “old” is not

far from “vulgar” this, maybe, should not even astonish an informed observer. It is then no

surprise that at the end of the last century and the collapse of socialism as an ideological

“salvation” of mankind, Utopia was claimed dead too.

The many transformations under way are, however, far more radical than ever before.

The dizzying changes happening all around us at a swift pace and the rate of progress in modern,

hi-tech industry make possible what only a few decades were unthinkable and wishful hopes in

books of Heinlein, A. C. Clark and their likes. Sown together with a sizzling hot needle new ideas

and communities see the light of this world as quickly as they die and the rate of this seems to be

speeding up. Distress and feeling of anxiety - the inability to understand or find some system

behind the world of today - spread wide among our western societies. Lorenz in the light of

theory of chaos would probably just wave his hand on that and comfort us with a notion that the

seemingly chaotic world around us has its hidden order, only we can not see it through our linear

thinking. However, much more crucial to the argument of this essay is another denominator of

this age which epitomized it - a personal computer. Utopia is alive and well.

What Alvin Toffler calls The Third Wave and Alan Greenspan The Weightless World has

created a new three-dimensional space around the Earth, physically present through lines of

silicon data cables. This infosphere in its essence, though, is a whole new universe, a universe

with its unique character and values. Not any longer do Cyberians, the new age explorers on the

Internet, have to learn nautical maps by hard since cyberspace is non-geographical and its size

depends heavily on the capacity of data servers. This non-geographical character of Cyberspace,

of course, is of paramount importance to the argument of this essay. But let us come back to that

later on in Part Two.

A very sincere and I believe truthful account of the value that lies in the concept of

utopianism was provided by Anatole France: “Without the Utopians […] men would still live in

caves, miserable and naked […] Utopia is the principle of all progress” (Mumford 22). Indeed, if

we accept the fact that the power of utopian thinking has been shaping world ever since men’s

brain capability “matured” into the notion of self-realization, there is little space left to assume

that such a driving force could ever cease to operate naturally unless some “revolutionary

revolution” about which Aldous Huxley wrote took place in the human flesh. I hold it as

unquestionable that men by nature disapprove of what they have and strive for and in their lives

pursue what they could have or, in a worse case, for what they can never have. This longing for

shaping our own future is then a spring board to all progress in human culture.

Also, it does not really matter what social order, however authoritarian, a human

individual lives in. Citizens of Oceania in Orwell’s dismal 1984 were not deprived of this innate

ability either. Not even the terror and subordination to the Big Brother’s dominion could

undermine Winston’s free will to rebel and seek his own personal utopia. No amount of coercion

can extinguish sparks of human will, only prevent their external showing by holding an individual

in a state of pathologic fear and outward submission.

It is only by means of the sciences of life such as biology and chemistry that the quality of life can be radically changed. The sciences of matter can be applied in such a way that they will destroy life or make the living of it impossibly complex and uncomfortable; But unless used as instruments by the biologists and psychologists, they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and expressions of life itself. This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings (Huxley 10). The short paragraph above appeared in Aldous Huxley’s Preface to his dystopian

masterpiece Brave New World and very pregnantly highlights the final dilemma, the next,

technology-induced evolutionary leap which would replenish or merely change the matrix of

human nature irrevocably. It would be interesting to track down a humanist more noble and

principled, at any rate living in the first half of the last century, than Huxley. Sticking unshakeably

to the flag of liberalism, a dizzying intellectual brought up in the light of Christian tradition saw in

biological manipulation of human nature a distinct evil. It is true to mention that even in the neo-

hedonistic realm of Brave New World some individuals stepped out of the line and pursued their

own way, but these belonged to the privileged, non-manipulated castes.

It may seem, with respect to what cyberspace and its promise of collective thinking, that in the future, and maybe one very near to ours, scientists will have higher capacity for synthetic thinking covering all the human activity and fields of human and natural sciences, it is, however, very unlikely that even their blueprints will anyhow substantially have the effect on human nature in practice (Mumford 239).

It is then right to assume that only as long as human nature stays unmolested by blueprints

of social engineers fiddling with biotechnological scythes and scares of the future, human mind

will be free to pursue its immediate potentialities here or elsewhere and the radical imagination

will not cease to flourish.

Another point speaking for the practicality and widespread of utopian thought in human

societies of tomorrow is the very development of cyberspace. The physical world day after day is

being harnessed by the ever-growing web of the Internet nods as the advantages that spring from

this latest media are manifold. The Internet as a vast bank of information, a radically new type of

economic and political ambitions, has taken the lead in communication. Its most radical

innovation dwells, however, in its interactive nature. Cohorts of new information servers and

explorative users contribute in this meta-communicational “organism”, every next day making it a

space impossible to map down. It seems that life is slowly but surely moving on the Net. Allan

Greenspan, the ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, once called it poignantly that we have

entered the Weightless World1. The world without gravity, the world without smells and flavours

(for now, at any rate).

Future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of the manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyles, travel, sexual roles and identities can be satisfied instantly (Slusser & Shippey 28).

1 For more see Diane Coyle’s very interesting analysis The Weightless World accessible online at http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/weightlessworld.pdf

This today, of course, is far from being a false observation. The discrepancy between

future and the present has dramatically shortened due to the conveniences and material wealth of

Western society which have made it possible for us to live our personal utopias now. Considering

the predictions of the prominent visionaries, the new potentials of Cyberspace at the moment

still lying in wait will, quite likely, take this fact one step further and the radical imagination inbred

to all of us may find its fertile ground in the land of matrix in the decades to come. Paraphrasing

Karl Mannheim, Kumar in his comprehensive work Utopianism notes that

although he considers the possibility of the reemergence of Utopianism, [Karl Mannheim] sees the modern period as an epoch of rationalisation in which Utopian thought must in the long run decline (Kumar 45). I doubt that the ongoing process of rationalization has much to do with radical

imagination. The twentieth century showed us quite clearly that much stronger forces than

rationality are still in operation within people’s minds and these fears and hopes that dominate

our would-be rational behavior from the depths of our subconscious will do so unless this

Huxlian “revolutionary revolution”, which that liberal philanthropist feared and foresaw more

than 50 years ago, takes place. Without radical imagination, then, our world may well be more

rational, but substantially poorer and duller place to be. As Kumar remarks, “its complete

elimination from our world would mean that […] man would lose his will to shape history and

therewith his ability to understand it” (45).

Here we are on the brink of the twenty-first century, and maybe without even realizing it,

in times that are promising to revolutionize our society down to its very fiber. As in every time of

big social transition the struggle will be one between the old and the new – in this case between

the forces of industrial age and those of the weightless, digital one. And as always before, the

future of our species will largely depend on how flexibly we will be able to navigate across the

new spans and sprawls of this exciting, yet unexplored land, as well as our moral self. Pushed to

its immediate, everyday potentialities the utopian ambitions within us will unmistakably find these

times a very fertile soil. Some to positive ends, some to less cherishing ones. But then, what is

“ideal” for some may be “hell” for others – there cannot be, I believe, one heaven for all. The

potential of Cyberspace domain seems to be well-equipped for satisfying such demand of utopian

dreaming. Cyberspace promises to become a fully-evolved, open playground for future utopists,

as opposed to the old, geographically-limited literary utopia of “pre-cyberian period”.

The massive corporate and state funding of the R&D centers which have been budding

for some 25 years all across hi-tech countries is a clear sign that in a more or less distant future

we may be witnessing the relocation of a substantial part of human activity on the Net. The ever

speeding up pace of innovation and the rate of changes under way in societies across the globe

make it difficult to tell when, but it may be justifiable to believe that something is coming out of

this sooner or later and human individuals (in the foreseeable future) may be able to “live” their

personal utopias in real time – in the now – with the help of and within Cyberspace. This is the

promise of computer-generated virtual reality now in the making.

Without a mistake, techno nerds and other programmers building and adding to

Cyberspace every day may then truly become the “new age utopian literature writers”, keying in

the blueprints for realms that have been in our imagination ever since, only not being able to

achieve their realization so far. Utopia in the world until roughly the end of the twentieth century

was one determined by geographical dimension of the globe. Cyberspace, however, is non-

geographical, limited only by the size and capacity of hard-drives and so ready to easily

accommodate at least another galaxy of manifold worlds. But would such worlds be real at all?

Would that not lead mankind to the abandonment and neglect of our physical space of the

Earth? And what would that do to the social cohesion and texture of our present social order? So

while these technocratic and social master minders are working against the clock, let us take a

closer look at and discuss some of these issues concerning the newly-emerging world(s)

promising to revolutionize our “monoreality” to the very bottom. In the next part I will

introduce the domain of Cyberspace as a budding platform for future full-grown utopian

societies and some of its elements.

Part Two

*

1. Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding (Gibson 51). 2. The laws of linearity have ceased to be valid. Moreover, as proved by quantum physics and mathematics of chaos, numbers and particles reject to abide by the predictability of linear equations. Instead, they jump around as they please, disappear, reappear, gather energy and then lose it. Our reality, according to scientists, can no longer be explained by simple rules and laws irrelevant of mass and time. All relates to everything else, but not in the way that we had previously thought. There is another, larger, less obvious, invisible dimension and our world is only one of its aspects (Ruskoff 12).

3. The computer is the LSD of the 80s (Timothy Leary gtd. in Tschorn & Sterling 12). 4. By its nature, a computer has ideas built in because it has a program, which is, basically, ideas that have been frozen into it […] Computers are the first medium to have ideas built in (Jaron Lanier qtd. in Mc Kenna).

“So this is Cyberspace.”…“Cyber what?” may still come back the response from many

people. The term coined by William Gibson (William Gibson; Home) – although only

extrapolating on the ideas of Bruce Bethke, noted for inventing the whole ‘cyberpunk’ movement

(see Chapter 8) which appeared in his short story of the same name as early as 1980 – has yet to

wait for its general awareness among common men. Old generation just shake head in

puzzlement, the youth, on the other hand, go groovy while clipping their headsets on and getting

hold of computer keyboards.

John P. Barlow from Grateful Dead2 once observed that “our culture is built on the

human ability to have everything under control. As soon as you accept the chaos as a way of life,

hand in hand with it goes the understanding that in fact you have nothing under control”

(Ruskoff 10). The old paradigms of linearity along with the modernist notion of knowledge and

progress have been lending from this for centuries now, where power and knowledge serve as the

foundation blocks of hierarchical, pyramidal structures of domination. But

cyberspace disassembles the communication pragmatics which has been connecting totality and universality since the introduction of script. And by so doing it is bringing us back, though on a different scale and in a different sphere, into a situation before the existence of script. The interconnectivity and dynamism of online available memories provide the participants of the real time communication with the same context, the same alive and enormous hypertext. No matter what the message is, it gets interconnected with other messages, commentaries, to the glosses endlessly changing, to the persons who are interested in them, to the forum which discusses them “here and now” (Lévy 2000, 97; my translation).

And so let me now take you on a lengthy and hopefully somehow comprehensive tour

where we will explore these popular communication tools being exercised and enjoyed by

hundreds of millions of people every day around the globe, as well as touch on more subtle,

underlying aspects of Cyberspace. All that follows (with the exception of subchapter 5.3 which I

am including to provide some of the significant drawbacks Cyberspace carries along) is treated in

a strict relation to the concept of utopian thought and should be instructive in understanding the

potential in which Cyberspace, and virtual reality in particular, can furnish these age-old yearnings

of human soul.

The following discussion will, for better clarity, be divided into three chapters, following

the systematization that Lévy proposed in Kyber kultura to summarise the stimuli which called for

2 The Grateful Dead were an American rock band formed in 1965 in San Francisco, California. The band was

known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, jazz, psychedelia, space music and gospel—and for live performances of long musical improvisation. Their music," Lenny Kaye wrote, "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists and nicknamed "the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world" (Grateful Dead).

the development of Cyberspace: 1. Material dimension: Interconnectivity – here and now across

geographical distance (Chapter 4); 2. Social dimension: The creation of virtual communities

(Chapter 5); 3. Spiritual dimension: Collective intelligence (Chapter 6) (113-4). I will address each

of these by providing both a theoretical background as well as some real life cyberspace

applications or social phenomena, representing each of these dimensions, to help me better to

explain away my argument.

Chapter 4 Material Dimension: The Rise of the Internet

1. The Internet is the Wild West of technology. Yet nobody has managed to set valid rules (Donald Gooding qtd. in Freyermuth 34; my translation). 2. In Cyberspace the interconnectivity always has priority to isolation [...] as was aptly expressed by Christian Huitema, the technical promise of cyber culture is global communication: every computer, every machine and every appliance from a car to toaster must have an internet address. That is a categorical imperative of cyberspace (Lévy 2000, 113; my translation). 3. Cyberspace is to become global, transparent market of goods and services. This project draws on “true liberalism”, in the way that the founders of political economy had imagined it, since it technologically allows the abolishment of trade middle-men and it is close-to-perfectly capable of informing all participants in trade, makers and consumers likewise, about products and prices (Bill Gates qtd. in Lévy 2000, 183; my translation). 4. The greatest functional anarchy that has ever emerged on the Earth (John Perry Barlow qtd. in Freyermuth 34; my translation).

Everybody has most probably sent an email at one time or another. It is quick, it is easy,

and it costs nothing. The communications revolution that came about with the launch of the

World Wide Web in the early nineties revised thoroughly the relationships in business as well as

interpersonal communication. This silicon-cable web that has now harnessed the globe, although

once it was available only to the military and academic subjects in the Western world, redefines

what freedom in time and space is. In 1997 in his enthusiastic work, mysteriously titled Cyberland,

Freyermuth compares the current situation to that in the Wild West of the nineteenth century

and observes that “it is an equally large, endless, culturally and legally open space [. . .] a perfectly

fertile soil for outlaws as well as new conceptions of what freedom is” (34; my translation). The

Net, as it has come to be called, is an open space and literally anybody with a functional IP

address can connect to it, browse the vast open spaces of websites, set up their own blog or a

web page, take part in manifold forum discussions, enter creative MOOs and MUDs3 (see

Chapter 5 for more), etc. But where did all this communications and social revolution begin?

Paul Baran and Ted Nelson. Two men whose visions revolutionized the world of

communications for ever – in every day life the Internet and Hypertext, arguably the two most

visible elements and proclamations of the still rising medium of the Internet. In the early sixties

Paul Baran, as an employee at RAND Corporation4, contributed to the world with a blueprint

system that much later became known as the Internet. Already near the beginning of 1960, the

United States Air Force commissioned Paul Baran of RAND Corporation to study the possibility

of creating a decentralized network which could survive a nuclear attack (Vyuk). In times of a

nuclear war looming over the ideologically polarized world, his was a vision of a non-hierarchical

communications network where no computer serves as central and where there are thousands of

different routes between two nodes (i.e. computers). Following this the Advanced Research

Project Agency (ARPA) at Pentagon set up an experimental network in 1964 (Ruskoff 33). A

different scenario is proposed by Radana Divínova in Cybersex – forma internetové komunikace where

she proposes that this experimental network was set up as late as 1969 under the name ARPANet

and the original think tank behind it was Larry Roberts (at the time director of ARPA) who, as

she suggests, invented it as early as 1963 (11). This, however, is not a scenario that Brian Vyuk

suggests in his above mentioned web article. The Wikipedia entry on this issue supports Vuyk’s

3 A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain or Dimension) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements

of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games and social chat rooms. Typically running on an Internet server or bulletin board system, the game is usually text-driven, where players read descriptions of rooms, objects, events, other characters, and computer-controlled creatures or non-player characters (NPCs) in a virtual world (MUD; Home page).

4 The RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. It is known for rigorous, often-quantitative, and non-partisan analysis and policy recommendations.

standpoint, concluding that the actual implementation of the network was based on co-shared

ideas of Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock (Paul Baran).

Unlike for example a human brain serving as a decision-making centre of a human body,

their vision of a communications network the full operability of which would sustain a nuclear

attack on one of its nods, and where all other nods are still equally capable of decision-making

processes, was unprecedented. More importantly, let me only briefly point out here that this

element of equality and open-endedness is crucial to the potential prospects of “real-time

democracy” and “universality without totality” that Pierre Lévy sees in Cyberspace (for more see

Chapter 7).

The second great invention of the second half of the twentieth century that

revolutionized data-sharing and memory enhancing processes is Ted Nelson’s Hypertext.

Divínova here suggests Tim Berners-Lee as its inventor (14). As a matter of fact, Berners-Lee is

credited mainly with “writing” the World Wide Web protocol and some other protocols that the

web supports. But back to Hypertext.

Multiple layers of data connecting interactive entries have made “interlinked” information

truly accessible at the blink of an eye. One good example in point could be Wikipedia - the first

open, interactive encyclopedia the world has seen, accessible online on the Internet. After a while

spent browsing through a hyper-textualized data, I always start wondering what the first entry I

keyed into the search engine was. A click after click I plunge my brain into the depthless

labyrinthine of chambers inhabited by hyper-textualized entries providing commentaries on all-

round spectrum of human experience. Under normal conditions, putting ideas on a given topic

into context within one text article is, of course, beyond our power. Hypertext made this possible

to a great degree. Contextualized and interconnected, multiple information sources lie in wait

ready at your hand. Accessible from every computer with a workable IP address, no matter if in a

seafront internet café in Bali or a heated mountain refuge high in a glacier ski resort of Austrian

Dachstein, one can easily reach for this enormous bank of data at any time of a day, any day in a

year – hence that noble utopian project of Diderot’s upgraded to another level. But let me now

skip such seemingly trivial applications of Cyberspace and instead penetrate the very texture and

nature of this communications phenomenon on the rise because:

Cyberspace refers less to the new media of information transmission than to original modes of creation and navigation within knowledge, and the social relations they bring about. These would include, in no particular order: hypertext, the World Wide Web, interactive multimedia, video games, simulations, virtual reality, telepresence, augmented reality (whereby our physical environment is enhanced with networks of sensors and intelligent modules), groupware (for collaborative activities), neuro-mimetic programs , artificial life, expert systems, etc (Lévy 1997, 109).

Dealing with each of these cybernetic “applications” in depth would inevitably result in a

work substantially longer than this one. Hence in a much humbler attempt serving the purpose

of this work I will, in the rest of Part Two and in Part Three, touch only on some of those which

I find relevant to utopianism. This will not be a random selection, however. I will introduce

cyberian phenomena that I consider essential as well as promising to and fulfilling the nature of

utopian thought which serves as a springboard to this work.

Chapter 5 Social Dimension: Virtual Communities and the Lure of Virtual Reality

Second Life Community Standards Welcome to Second Life. We hope you will have a richly rewarding experience, filled with creativity, self expression, and fun. The goals of the Community Standards are simple: treat each other with respect and without harassment, adhere to local standards as indicated by simulator ratings, and refrain from any hate activity which slurs a real-world individual or real-world community…5

You may have heard of them, or maybe, who knows, are an active user of one such

yourself: Active 3D worlds – computer-generated and interactive worlds where one, hidden under a

chosen identity of his/her “avatar”, immerses into a virtual world in all its complexity. Complete

towns with seafronts and cafés, exquisite parks, shopping malls and roadworks; even virtual

money. Nonetheless, quite often you can hear objections that Active 3D worlds are, in fact, but a

computer game. Partly true…, at best. The technology used in implementing this relatively new

social phenomenon is only in its infancy, to say the least. For now, the human-VR interface is

created by the keyboard in front of your personal computer at home. The true promise of virtual

reality livable worlds, as dreamt about by its forefathers, is still limited by insufficient technology.

So, is this slow process some (post)modern-age exodus on the Net? And what about our societies

– how will they be affected? Will this movement from the physical to the virtual world not lead to

a neglect of our physical world? And is it “real” at all? And even if we accept it as some kind of

an “alternate reality”, what merits can we anticipate from our involvement in it? All of these as

well as more aspects will be discussed on the following pages. I will first introduce the concept of

“virtual reality”, summarize its history, present and a possible future. I will then follow with

extrapolations on it by putting forward some examples of how humans interact in virtual

communities of today (Subchapter 5.1). The “reality” aspect of virtual reality will be discussed

next (Subchapter 5.2) as well as the question of identity and anonymity in Cyberspace

(Subchapter 5.3). Moreover, in the above stated Second Life Community Standards extract, I

have italicized some of the key aspects of virtual reality dimension as they will be my primary

focus here and there throughout the rest of Part Two and Three.

5.1 The Case of Virtual Reality, or “What I Do I Understand”

1. Virtual Reality is a path towards mass transmission of a direct experience. You put on the goggle and the world is around you. At the beginning there were only animals which had nothing but their experiences. Then human came who understands the reality through metaphors. We use symbols. One thing represents another. Verbal sounds represent an experience and by exchanging these experiences we share experience. Then Gutenberg invented a press which, for the first time, was an opportunity to transmit symbols; that was a real change. And virtual reality is also a real historical milestone because for the first time we can transmit a direct experience. The cycle is complete (Marc de Groot qtd. in Ruskoff 43; my translation).

2. I hate computers. I personally derive pleasure from destroying computers…I think a lot of people make the mistake of getting lost in the world of the computer. It’s very easy to get caught in the nerd trap, and then life loses all its color (Jaron Lanier qtd. In Mc Kenna).

In this subchapter I will first introduce you into the concept of “virtual reality”. We will

go on a brief tour concerning the history and pivotal events in the creation of this “alternate

reality”. Then, some more emphasis will be given to its structural elements, as well as conceptual

and technological problems it is still facing. A short catalogue of usage to which it is already put

will be provided and commented on briefly. Not less importantly, as a next focal point I will

address the vitality of virtual reality in the process of culture-making. Towards the end, some

space will also be dedicated to the real-life phenomenon of Second Life and some examples of

creative human activity in it..

5.1.1 The Quest of Creating a Computer-generated Virtual Environment

In our discussion on the background of it, we could start in nineteen-sixties and seventies

with Myron Krueger and Ivan Sutherland and the undisputable impact they have had on what

“virtual reality” has become to be, but I will happily leave this task to other researchers heading in

that direction. Instead, and as a point of departure, let us start in the eighties. Citation 1 from

above is only one in many that started sprouting to media attention with the onset of virtual

reality (or VR) technology and public interest in it. VPL Research Inc. – the pioneer company in

the field of virtual reality and founded by Jaron Lanier who himself coined the term virtual

reality (Brief Biography of Jaron Lanier), of whom Marvin Minsky once said that “he is one of

the few computer scientists who looks at a larger picture” (Rheingold 156), and whose company

in the summer of 1989 sparked popular interest in the technology at that “Texpo” exhibition by

presenting a virtual reality RB2 system demonstration. This event set the clogs of wide interest of

R&D centers around the world in VR technology in motion (Rheingold 167). At the onset of VR

technology there were not many – Autodesk, Sense8 or Fake Space Labs, to name just a few –,

after “Texpo” they rose in numbers considerably. All united in a race after technologies for 3D

graphics as well as cyber hardware and their successful implementation of virtual reality as the

latest human-computer interface5. Let us now contemplate the two following basic definitions of

virtual reality:

1. Virtual reality is a way of presentation of complex information, the manipulation and interaction of a human with it through a computer (Aukstakalnis & Blatner 7; my translation). 2. Virtual reality is a computer-supported way of creating the illusion of

being in an alternative world with other people. It’s a sort of dreaming you do consciously that other people can be a part of. It can be used practically for such things as surgical planning or to design a car, or as an art form, to experience the joy of expression, the pain of expression (Jaron Lanier gtd. in Mc Kenna).

Whereas the top citation presents a rather sterile, technologically oriented definition of

what we can understand by this hitherto invisible dimension – a mosaic of “alternate reality (-

ies)” –, Lanier’s is loaded with quite an expressive charge. To understand the term even clearer,

let me depart into the land of metaphors. We can look upon it as a kind of a magnifying glass, an

interface connecting a human individual with an endless texture of all data available in the

physical world around us, a kind of metaverse. “Virtual” in the name itself then could symbolise its

illusionary nature. Mere unplugging the computer from the electricity mains…and the fascinating

world only a moment before so plausible and “real” is gone. However, and let me stress here that

this metaverse as it has come to be referred to, is still somewhere there, only latent and invisible

(see Subchapter 5.2 for more)! By this I mean that although we can not perceive these

microscosmos through our senses, they still exist – as a kind of texture of data that virtual reality

5 ”An ‘interface’ can be seen as a way of dialogue between human and computer” (Aukstakalnis & Blatner 7; my translation).

simulations can enable us to explore and understand better. It is a generous invitation to parallel

worlds written in gold letters.

This illusionary world, where physical laws cease to exist, then provides us with a splendid

and truly revolutionary array of possibilities how to interact with it (or the data inserted in the

computer program running the whole show), explore and boggle at the potential this interactive

media allows us to understand, grasp the sense of the physical world around us. In one way or

another, any virtual reality, I suggest, is only a mirror to it. Most probably a mirror image to it

that we will have an intensive feeling we have never seen before, but as a matter of fact, that is

the truly revolutionary aspect of it: the fact that from now onwards, humans, ridden of natural

laws and limitations their body presents them with, reign the ability to regard the nature of things

somehow from “within”. To better understand the utopian potential of VR, allow yourself to

imagine a following scenario with me:

At an indefinite time in the future, after a pleasant breakfast in the comfort of their

homes, a class of college students of neural medicine swan into their DataSuits™, put on a Head-

mounted display and a pair of DataGloves™, and at a concerted time connect to the Internet –

an online virtual “lecture” on neural functions and processes in the left lobe has just started: a

short catch-up and chit-chat (because even the people of future will seek to satisfy that need to

socialise, innate not only to humans) is disturbed by an automatically activated of a computer-

generated “wizard” – a kind of virtual guide. After a short summary of the goals and procedure

of this “lecture” (indeed, this one is exclusively interactive, serving to the individual needs of each

participant in this “tour de force”) students scatter or explore in groups the internal system of the

lobe, move among neurons, indeed, penetrate neurons to its very nucleus, on their own accord,

check on the interaction among the brain cells, as well as run subprograms simulating their

function under the influence of virtually-induced drugs used in conventional and experimental

medicine. All this time, through their senses their cyber wear has been mediating direct, real-life

physical impulses and stimuli to their own brain: the fluctuation of blood pressure through

vessels after virtually injected doses of the above mentioned drugs, tension in dentrides and

axons, etc. On request, the “wizard” supplies supplementary data, such as interactive stats, and

3D graphs, or further highlights, and points out issues of particular interest. Students can move in

space and perspectives, spontaneously interact with the environment. Supposing that even at this

future moment computer-machines will not bear signs of intelligence and intuition (both

exquisitely human abilities), the human-professor who is now sitting online in his office or in the

familiarity of his home study, and is either working on his projects and at times “peeping in” or

even running the whole show, can give tips, “lecture” and coordinate when requested, the ideal

of apprenticeship (see Chapter 6 for more) thus accomplished. The class finishes with a group

briefing on the newly acquired knowledge and is automatically stored in the memory of the

campus communication system networks for further analysis, systematization and use. In the

fashion of that well-known Confucius’s maxim “what I hear I forget, what I see I remember,

what I do I understand”, the future possibilities of schooling, among other areas, are more than

promising… (for more see 5.1.4).

Such a scenario, of course, is now but a distant dream. The technological capabilities are

lagging behind human imagination which in turn drives them towards their eventual realization.

It seems that we have accumulated enough data to describe processes in many natural

environments in a great detail. This data could instantly be inserted in the complex matrix of

computer programs which would eventually generate a particular virtual environment. However,

experts come to a conclusion that what exactly is missing is a sufficient computing capability as

well as more advanced programs (Barras).

As a matter of fact, every virtual environment – even the physical world – is perceived

through our senses. Our retina, hearing and sense of touch – body-integrated interfaces between

our brain and the outside world – through which outer world “enters” our mind, our brain,

through which, in turn, we make sense of the outside world at some delivered quality. Indeed,

our senses are a very exquisite interface and “fooling” them to give the brain an impression of

being in a real-like environment is not easy.

Late in 1992, Steve Aukstakalnis and David Blatner put down on paper a very

comprehensive and legible analysis on virtual reality industry and most of the issues concerning it.

They suggest that irrelevant of the technology required, the key to creating credible virtual

environments is deep understanding of how we perceive reality through our senses. The other

thing is a precise manipulation of our senses with the help of cyber clothes in order to send our

brain the impulses that will create the illusion of being in a real-like environment (Aukstakalnis &

Blatner Part Two; my translation). Rheingold in Virtual Reality suggests two key elements of

such “credibility” criteria:

The idea of immersion – using stereoscopy, gaze-tracking, and other technologies to create illusion of being inside a computer-generated scene – is one of the two foundations of VR technology. The idea of navigation – creating a computer model of a molecule or a city and enabling the user to move around, as if inside it – is the other fundamental element (112).

Every day, without even realizing it, we are immersed into our physical world.

Surrounded by 3D objects and interacting with them through our limbs, receiving stereometric

sound though our hearing apparatus, perceiving the tone of reflecting light and colours through

our retina – all that and much more is to be taken into account when aiming at creation of a real-

like virtual environment. From the technological point of view, stimulating our senses in the right

way is quite a significant part of the problem. Another, and there is a good reason to believe that

resolving this is only a matter of time, is the computing capability. As a matter of fact, the

creation of a virtual environment which provides a smooth, uninterrupted sequence of images to

give a real-like impression, is still beyond today’s standard computer power. In order to generate

an interrupted sequence of images in real time and simulating credibly all the changes in

perspective and reflection of light, a computer must host a huge computing power. In a recent

article published in the New Scientist Michael Mc Guigan expressed his belief that creating credible

virtual environments may be a question of only a few years:

Although existing computers can produce artificial scenes and textures detailed enough to fool the human eye, such scenes typically take several hours to render. The key to passing the Graphics Turing Test is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in real-time – defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second (Barras).

And so it may be quite plausible that such virtual realm will be possible sooner or later

and virtual reality applications stored on hard drives in our desktops or a remote server will start

equipping our “monoreality” with another, unmistakably more fascinating alternate realities, but

as Aukstakalnis and Blatner echo in the following citation, the final obstacle – creating a perfect,

unpredictable and fortuitous world – may never be achieved. When asked whether they equal

passing the Turing Test6 to creating a real-world duplicate, they answered boldly:

We are convinced that the answer is no. Even if we one day computers are capable of generating fotorealistic images in real time, it will never be a construct as complex, as thorough and as organic as our world. Chaos theory is beginning to provide evidence that the universe is dominated with such a degree of complexity, fortuity and indefiniteness, that is impossible to predict or duplicate (22; my translation).

But then, in the book they make no consideration of quantum computing the

development of which is now starting to gain momentum. And similarly to the basic idea behind

Chaos theory, quantum computing also works with the concept of nonlinearity. In other words,

we will yet have to let the full impact of quantum computing be felt in the coming years. After all,

6 More on the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Test#Variations_of_the_Turing_test

in this time of turbulent change and exponential rate of innovation, who can tell what mysteries

lie in wait in front of us?

5.1.5 Applications of Virtual Reality

It would be fascinating to do an extensive research on the latest updates in VR

applications already in use, and report on them in a lengthy series of chapters, but I believe that

the following short and only a very schematic summary published eight years back must do and

will provide at least some insight on the practicality and merits of virtual reality across many fields

of human activity:

� Design: architecture – the possibility to walk through as yet non-existent building, assessing the acoustics, but also, for example, designing Boeing company aircrafts – examining controllability, maintenance and production cost-efficiency

� Entertainment: various games but also a virtual fitness (a spinning bicycle, a vessel), a virtual theatre, a gallery

� Medicine: radiation therapy, surgical simulations, relief to seriously afflicted people � Education

� Technical fields and natural sciences: aerodynamics, astronomy � Data projection: finance, air traffic � Telepresence: remote-controlled robot operation (Škrob; my translation).

What new possibilities does virtual reality design have as opposed to conventional 3D

graphics CAD systems currently still in use in architecture and engineering labs, we will see in a

little while discussing the thriving new dominion of Second Life. Already primitive video game

arcade galleries of the eighties managed to generate a widespread popular attention and lasting

interest. What new level of frenzy fully-operational virtual game environments will spark is not

far to seek. The implementation of virtual simulations in training professionals for highly

specialised surgical operations as well as their manifold practicability as a powerful therapy tool in

fields of psychology and psychiatry, are not far to seek either. Does anybody want to fly through

Milky Way? And what about getting a direct experience in examining variations in gravity in pre-

programmed simulations? Just how impossible was it for you at school to imagine complex

molecules in organic chemistry and make some sense of them? Would brokers from Wall Street

benefit in any way from projecting often complex financial data graphs operating with many

variables – interactive and easy to navigate in order to get from them the desired outcome? And

what about safety precautions on work sites classified as highly dangerous – what utility does a

robotic, remotely man-controlled arm have there? Without any doubt, a new, profoundly

revolutionary technology is approaching our door and it is only upon us what use we will make of

it. Indeed, the world is not ideal and human condition even less and so it can be anticipated that

some will use it as a way of relaxation and stress breaker, some will sink lower and fall into its

trap and forsake creative, self-transcending today for pleasant tomorrow, but still some other

human individuals will use it as a tool to better themselves and maybe, who can tell, will deepen

our understanding of the mysteries of our natural habitat. Some of us have already started and

this will be a focal point of the next paragraphs.

5.1.6 Second Life as a Virtual Playground of Today

In 2003 when Second Life went online it might have been just one more of those virtual games

sooner or later bound to be marginalized by the neglect and low popular attention, but the last

years have been proving something strikingly different. But let us not advance too quickly. As

Wikipedia entry on this exponentially growing virtual realm tells us “Second Life is one of several

virtual worlds that have been inspired by the cyberpunk literary movement, and particularly by

Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The stated goal of Linden Lab,” its creator and

administrator, “is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined

world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate” (Second

Life). “Today,” Martin wrote early in 2007, “it is inhabited by more than twelve million people

from around the globe who spend more than CZK 30 million a day” (Martin; my translation).

A graph illustrating a rocket growth of Second Life from Jan 2006 to Mar 2007

(Second Life; Technical information).

Here real-life humans called “residents” interact through an “avatar” – a virtual reality

identity character – of their choice. Under the entry Second life, Wikipedia provides startlingly

kaleidoscopic information on seemingly all aspects of it and human activity within it: apart from

socializing, going shopping or to the concerts and other cultural events, people can opt for a

more active approach and get involved in constructing virtual buildings, shops, cars or clothes of

their choice. A truly alternate economy has emerged in this virtual environment and grows

stronger and stronger day by day. But SL has also impacted popular culture: for example, at the

beginning of 2007 a rock-band called Beyond the void gave a series of virtual concerts across this

new playground of human imagination. “A well known British comedian Jimmy Carr performed

a virtual show on Second Life on February 3, 2007” (Second life; Second life in pop culture). It

may sound ridiculous to many, but I believe the media attention it thus receives hand in hand

with more and more businesses announcing to establish their branches in SL quite clearly point

in the direction as to how powerful an alternate reality world may be in the making here in the

long term.

It is very likely that SL’s population will keep rocketing in the years to come, importing to

it all the vices and insanity of our physical world – thefts and frauds, harassment, paranoia,

xenophobia and calculation – but there are also signs that it will provide a fantastic playground

for those who strive to use it towards positive ends. And to this utopian element of it I will

dedicate the following short section.

Last year, Matthew Tram, a Contributing Editor to the Design News, posted there a very

instructive article called Second Life: A Virtual Universe for Real Engineering in which he summarized

some interesting developments and shifts in public usage of this online virtual world. He

introduces us to the standard proceedings in SL in the following way:

In SL, virtual objects are created from scratch in-world using a library of primitive, basic shapes such as cubes and spheres. By manipulating these elemental objects, adding uploaded image textures and combining components, anything that can be imagined can be constructed: anvils, automobiles, airplanes and more. Completed objects are bequeathed additional layers of sophistication by adding software scripts, making them intelligent, responsive and interactive (Tram).

The idea of designing your own, private world, your utopian dominion, must be as old as

humankind itself. Here it comes to its full realization. It is not so important that it takes place

only in, let us face it, a virtual, as if non-existent world. But, interestingly enough, this does not

make it any less attractive to its residents. On the contrary, SL is apparently boasting more and

more real-world people signing up. After all, it is ‚ “the second life“ they are creating here for

themselves - a second identity to host their deepmost incentives, needs and desires. Escape from

their often humdrum bitter lives, ventilation of anxieties and frustration they have to face in this

competitive world. Later on in the article Tram quotes Pam Broviak on her very own utility of SL:

When I show engineers Second Life, their initial reaction is “it is just a game“ because it looks like a game. They have to get beyond that. . . .I was working with the homeowner and I was trying to convey the layout of the new system with 2-D drawings. It occurred to me that it would be easier to use Second Life to make virtual copies of the plumbing system before and after the proposed upgrade so (the client) could actually walk through the piping with me and understand the differences. Unlike real world piping, my plumbing system now exists in cyber space, where it can be used as a kind of 3-D wiki. Engineers, plumbers and homeowners can use my design as a template, modifying it for their own applications. I imagine that eventually an entire 3-D library of plumbing solutions could be accessible to engineers visiting Second Life (Ibid.).

Just how fascinating does this sound! For every nine petty and fruitless visits that

residents of SL may perform, if there is one such Broviak, then this virtual world is a place worth

enhancing. What benefits could this or any similar virtual agora, open to spontaneous human

creativity, present people of this planet with? The concept of “collective intelligence” will be

discussed later in Chapter 6 but for now let me conclude that such cyber tools – as this fabulous

playground of human imagination which SL seems to be – show a great deal of potential to

enable creative, innovative individuals to accomplish deeds until now impossible.

5.1.4 Play and Virtual Reality in the Process of Culture-making

In the last chapter of his Virtual Reality Rheingold suggests that any discussion on how

humans create culture, their relationship to one another and their natural environment, or what

sense we make of this environment, should start at discussing children and the way they learn. In

this highly illuminative section he synthesizes findings of developmental psychologist Seymour

Papert, Claude Lévi-Strauss or John Pfeiffer, Laura Brandell and Huzinga. Drawing on

Huizinga’s famous Homo Ludens, Rheingold highlights that “play, particularly symbolic play, is

where cognition and culture meet. It’s a mental can-opener for liberating new ideas. It is also the

first thing most people do when they find themselves immersed in a virtual world” (373). For the

purpose of the argument in this section, however, let us consider “virtual world” as something

separated from the computer-generated realms of tomorrow. Much rather, let us view it here as a

symbolic interplay of cognitive concepts within our mind, an interplay taking place every day

when we experiment with hypotheses and build mental constructs about our “alienated”

environment. By “alienated” I am suggesting that a child’s primary role in allocating themselves

in this world is to delineate “I” from “you”. After all, summarising the findings of these and

other psychologists who had something to contribute to the theory, Rheingold continues to say

that “these psychologists discovered that play is a way of organizing our models of the world and

models of ourselves, of testing hypotheses about ourselves and the world, and of discerning new

relationships or patterns in the jumble of our perceptions. Play, like the scenarios that Peter

Schwarz and his colleagues use to prepare themselves for an uncertain future, is a way of thinking

ahead, of running a mental simulation” (374). In this sense what we understand under the

children’s play, this virtual simulation of things to be, is in fact an invaluable tool in the process

of learning. “R.L. Gregory,” Rheingold continues, “once observed that it is fascinating to watch

children and adults in this play-experiment situation of individual discovery” and also that

“although research is needed to be sure, they certainly give every indication of thinking and

learning by doing” (376).

Not far to seek, then, is a question how could we, in the best way possible, help our

offspring make the best use of this play in the process of building their world view, in building

their mental concepts and relationships towards and about the world that surrounds them?

Rheingold concludes, drawing on Douglas Engelbart’s call for a “conceptual framework” to fully

utilize the function and possibilities of computer-generated VR in a society, that “one way to

begin building such a framework is to look for a foundation in the past, to examine history in

search of long-term patterns that might help make sense of tomorrow’s complex mix of

possibilities as this might prove helpful when it comes to discussing where it is all going and

why” (377).

In this subchapter we have followed the utopian trails witnessing to the arrival and

development of computer-generated virtual reality in our world on the brink of the twenty-first

century. We have been introduced to the current technology-related issues that this budding

commercial (and highly utopian) industry sector is still facing and we have outlined the possible

future of it. Next we have looked at some commercial and scientific application where virtual

reality is implemented already today. A significant part of the argument in this subchapter has

been dedicated to the discussion of the potential and merits of virtual reality in the learning

process. In this sense, I have implied that virtual reality – a kind of play-experiment within our

mind when making sense of and building relationships towards the world around us – has been

our mental tool put up to that task time immemorial. Moreover, some indications as to what ends

a virtual reality simulation can be put has been suggested discussing a creative human activity in

Second Life. Although some, as we have seen, use it as a mere escape from their reality, a kind of

social ventilation of their frustration and anxieties, some utilize it toward more self-transcending

ends. Indeed, computer-generated virtual reality, this powerful and truly utopian, dream-weaving

tool at the doorstep of humanity, should always be considered a means… and never just the end.

5.2 “Reality is 80 million polygons per second”, or the Rise of an “Alternate Reality”

1. Soon we may come to the realisation that the most important legacy of the 60s and psychedelic era in pop-culture is the notion that we have chosen our reality consciously…Many believe that the age which we are going through right now could become a period of transmission of all categories of human experience into an unmapped, hyperdimensional reality (Ruskoff 15; my translation).

2. Maybe it will be better if we don’t ask ourselves a question whether reality exists outside of us, and instead we’ll be after what gives us the impression of reality. Then we can ask what is relevant for us in an alternate reality (Aukstakalnis & Blatner 19; my translation)? One of the most frequent standing criticisms of virtual reality and human involvement in

it in Cyberspace, apart from patently absurd yet understandable paranoia, is probably its “reality”

aspect. Is all the human involvement in it sound at all? Are we not talking here just advanced

computer games? And if so, then what merits could it possibly bear? In other words, what use

does it have in our lives in the physical world? For many people the idea of any “alternate

reality”, apart from that to which we have been exposed time immemorial in our physical world,

is out of question. Xenophobia, this innate and very vital element of our thinking on which I

commented in my previous work (see my 2004: Brave New World Revisited – Fabricating an Ideal

Society), is still looming high. This idea that only the world of blood and flesh is the only reality

worth living, is a maxim to which they cling unswervingly. In this subchapter, then, I will first put

forward a short theoretical discourse on the “reality” aspect of virtual reality, which at the end

will be followed by a short notion on its possible future appeal to the masses and a possible, yet

slow change of paradigm of the perception of a “reality” worth living.

In Poldervaarts’s Contemporary Utopian Struggles I found an interesting point of view

presented by Marianne van den Boomen concerning the notion of “virtual” in our times. Here in

her essay on the topic, Van den Boomen draws a parallel between the “open exit” nature of

virtual communities on the Net and the postmodern world around us. Forget the age old

allegiance to a social class, religion, scientific discipline, etc. of the past. In times where the

multiple, plural and diverse are widely accepted and integrated daily bread, in times where people

can meet other people across time and distance in ways hitherto unimagined, and all that on the

twitch of an eye, “loosely” interconnected individuals from many different social, religious, or

ethnic backgrounds, open-endedness is an indispensable necessity (41). On the other hand, the

psychological aspect and influence on an individual should be considered here and is a call for

social researchers to carry out appropriate investigations into the matter in the years to come. For

now, let us then start our exploration from a different point of departure. What social cohesion,

for example, does such a virtual community have?

Non-spatial communities, where members share a certain belief or interest, but not a priori certain space, they do not share all their time within the community, and they do not necessarily know each other. Nevertheless, these communities also have their own continuity and their social and sometimes political rules [. . .] They are also identity-shaping – sometimes totally, but mostly only partially. You may even be a member of more of these communities at the same time (e.g. a moslem scientist or a gay biker). However, beliefs and interests are liable to change and you can more or less easily slip in and out of these communities (33).

Van den Boomen here develops ideas of Benedict Anderson presented in his famous

work Imagined Communities. “Anderson’s ‘imagined’,” she notes, “means represented by media and

constructed by institutionalization. ‘Virtual’ means both represented by media and constructed by

media. Social and political interaction in imagined communities is facilitated and mediated

through medium, and in virtual communities takes place within the medium”. And although

“virtual creates social freedom, space for manipulation and imagination,” she concludes that “a

group on the Net deserves the name ‘community’ when it has some kind of continuity and

collective moments” (38). In other words, a community on the Internet is an entity of its own

and needs no external institutionalization in the material world outside. Having arrived only at

this conclusion, however, does not answer the basic question stated above. Why should we then

consider such “imagined” communities “real”? Maybe the following argument provides a hint in

the right direction: In Anderson’s view “we should never ask whether a community is real or not,

but only to what extent it is imagined” (38).

Also, solving the dilemma has to do with changing the paradigm of what we understand,

or have understood under the term “reality” up to date. In his masterly Impérium, a beautifully

written as well as hauntingly gloomy essay on the Soviet communist experiment, Ryszard

Capuściński brought me to my own negotiations on the concept of “reality”. The whole essay is

one sweeping account on the role of “boundaries” in human society. “How many casualties,

blood and pain,” asks Capuściński, “is related to the concept of boundaries? [ . .] We say to

ourselves for example: ‘Be careful not to go too far’ or ‘Up to here I can concede to it, but not

any further’ ” (25; my translation). What if, in the light of latest findings in science and the theory

of parallel universe, we have only been lacking enough open-mindedness to accept there is more

to it all? What if our “reality” of the physical world is just one aspect in a wider picture as Ruskoff

suggests in the citation at the beginning of this subchapter?

Medieval Age was undoubtedly a harsh reality not only because of its poor well-being of

drastic majority but also because it was harnessed by the underlying religious dogma about the

shape of the world. It had to take a few brave men to bring about a leap in what the reality was

before and after the discovery of the New World. Americas were “real” even before 1492.

“Reality” was to be revised in the wake of it. Suppose you had a chance to address common men

at the time before the discovery of the New World and ask them about their idea on the shape of

the Earth. Their idea of it as a flat desk does sound ridiculous to us today as well as it must have

sounded after Fernão de Magalhães circumnavigated the globe in 1521 and banished that

notorious dogma to the wasteland of history. Believing is being! How will future generations

report on our generation in a less or more distant future? Will we be credited with a prophetic

insight as the last generation to concede to and integrate these “alternate realities” into our world

view? Or will we be ridiculed if we now fail to do so? Are we ready to stride over the

“monoreality” of the past?

Another, though very much disputed and controversial argument is something that I

came across on one of my explorations through the maze of Wikipedia. There I found a link to

the “brain-in-a-vat” hypothesis.7 The scenario (as pupularized for example in movie the Matrix

7 For further discussion on the issue see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

Trilogy based on the original book) is approximately as follows: if we could manage to detach a

brain from the skull, submerge it into a tank with a life-sustaining liquid, connect one end of

electrodes to its nerve endings and the other to a supercomputer capable of sending the brain

electrical stimuli it normally receives, thereby the brain would be fed a kind of “virtual reality”,

how could it tell what is “real” and what is not? Would the brain call it the reality with all we

understand under the term? And if someone was connected to such a computer-generated system

from their birth, how could such an individual tell whether his “reality” is the really real one (or at

least what we call it) and not “virtual”? And so while this kind of thought experiment has been

denounced by some (for more see, for example, the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History by

Hilary Putnam accessible online8), others may start reconstructing that perennial philosophical

question from “Who am I?” to “Where am I?”.

One way or another, the lure of budding virtual reality industry about which A. C. Clarke

once said that “it will not merely replace TV, but eat it alive” (Rheingold; back cover), will be an

irresistible temptation for many: This may well be the main argument against developing virtual

reality sector. Steve Aukstakalnis and David Blatner in Reálně o virtuální realitě, a very sober and

down-to-earth analysis on the state of virtual reality industry in mid-nineties, quite justifiably

conclude that “if some people are trying to escape from their arid life into the world of radiant

colours of television, there can be no doubt, that people of this kind will reach for homebrew

virtual reality in order to replace their humdrum environment with an environment completely

different” (248; my translation). But “even if we use,” they continue later on, “perfect displays

with the resolution comparable to the resolution of retina, and entirely authentic sound, the

world thus generated will not reach the endless complexity of the real world” (249; my

translation). Trying to imagine some such a super powerful computer capable of generating a

fortuity as complex as our physical world by using particular, now inconceivable algorithms, is,

8 The text is accessible online at http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/ph29a/putnam.html

indeed, a very challenging mental venture. One such promise can be anticipated in recent

developments in quantum computing but its full utility is yet to be seen. And so for the time

being let us now stand firmly on the ground conceding to this proposition about the status quo in

the VR business on the brink of the twenty-first century. “And so,” Aukstakalnis and Blatner

conclude, “the impression of watching a computer-generated world may be amazing, but people

will happily be coming back from it to reality with a feeling of better understanding of it” (249;

my translation). In other words, we are entering an era where two or more alternate realities

supplement, much rather than merely replete, one another. In the light of potential virtual reality

applications put into use for the enhancement of human understanding of nature, personal and

professional skills or building social bond of the new order (see the rest of Part Two and

Subchapter 5.1), this is, I would suggest, a scenario amiably desirable.

In this subchapter I have developed some ideas indicating a possible change in the

standing paradigm of what humans consider “real”, worth living and implementing in their lives.

It has been suggested that maybe a time is on the horizon when ungrounded anxiety and radical

technophobia give way to constructive thinking on how to internalize and accept this newly-

emerging alternate reality(-ies). After all, the stakes and potential merits are high. Throughout the

history of it, utopian societies have been scorned by many for their location exactly in the “u-

topia” – in the “no-place”. But computer-generated worlds are both nowhere and everywhere. Is

it not a time, once mankind has almost achieved the required technology to generate such fruitful

and creative alternate realms, to break the age-old boundaries and change our point of view? In

the next subchapter, apart from the “internet addiction” scarecrow, I will investigate some basic

ideas concerning the apparent dilemma related to human-human communication in Cyberspace –

the question of identity and anonymity.

5.3 Mr. Bungle and the Question of Anonymity and Identity, or “You Are What You Type”

1. Cyberspace is just that kind of frontier which the New World was for Europe of the seventeenth century. There is no reason to romanticise it. The world of Frontier is unpleasant, ugly and without rules . . . people brazenly lie and others believe them. Hidden behind the masks o their pseudonyms teenagers furiously shout at one another (James Gleick gtd. in Freyermuth 34; my translation).

There is no reason to romanticise Cyberspace, indeed. This new tool for inter-active, real-

time communication in the hands of humankind now and here, this exciting new “toy” that

presents us with no small promises as well as considerable concerns. It is still too early to tell

what its profound impact on our civilization will be and this question mark still high in the air

should be reserved to ranks of social scientists. And as with any new and truly revolutionary

social phenomenon, whether or not the human engagement in mushrooming virtual communities

is Pandora’s box open ajar is a question that should be addressed through serious, long-term

research, and much less through open and very often ungrounded hysteria. In the meantime,

cyberspace will go on living its vibrant attention, and as a relatively new, exponentially-growing

social playground it will go on shaping the world of tomorrow. This subchapter is designed to

discuss the dark face of dream-like virtual worlds of today. In this subchapter I will first dedicate

some space to the question of identity and anonymity in cyberspace and follow briefly with

addressing the scarecrow of so called “internet addiction”.

5.3.1 “Rape in Cyberspace”

The notoriously-known incident that I describe bellow will serve us as a springboard to

some implicit issues concerning the argument of this subchapter. It came to be known as a case

of “cyberspace rape” and took place in early nineties in LambdaMOO, one of the early MUDs on

the Net. The incident happened in a LambdaMOO’s virtual “living room” at that time

frequented, as usual, with online users indulging in their usual social interaction with one another.

This is how Julian Dibell, an eye witness to the incident, described it:

The time was a Monday night in March, and the place, as I’ve said, was the living room -- which, due to the inviting warmth of its decor, is so invariably packed with chitchatters as to be roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers with a party […] And there was cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented to the virtual world -- he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription “KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH!” But whether cruelty motivated his choice of crime scene is not among the established facts of the case…He commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That he began by using his voodoo doll to force one of the room’s occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or less conventional ways. That this victim was legba, a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses. That legba heaped vicious imprecations on him all the while and that he was soon ejected bodily from the room. That he hid himself away then in his private chambers somewhere on the mansion grounds and continued the attacks without interruption, since the voodoo doll worked just as well at a distance as in proximity…He could not be stopped until at last someone summoned Zippy, a wise and trusted old-timer who brought with him a gun of near wizardly powers, a gun that didn’t kill but enveloped its targets in a cage impermeable even to a voodoo doll's powers. That Zippy fired this gun at Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at last and silencing the evil, distant laughter (Dibell).

To make things clearer, here is how Wikipedia explains the incident: “The user behind this

avatar ran a ‘voodoo doll’ subprogram that allowed him to make actions that were falsely

attributed to other characters in the virtual community” (A Rape in Cyberspace). The incident

caused an outrage among the community users, especially those who were directly involved.

Legba, in her civil life a female resident from Seattle, was prompt posting her reaction on the

community discussion board the next day: “…And mostly I tend to think that restrictive

measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was

being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile.

I’m not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I’m not sure what I’m calling for. Virtual

castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn’t happen here. Mostly, perhaps

I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some

veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass” (Dibell).

The full account of the incident with all that followed is a very interesting story from a few points

of view. It is no surprise that it spurred a wider discussion in many fields of science and attracted

many researchers’ attention (A Rape in Cyberspace).

More than the incident itself, though, and definitely more relevantly to the trails of

creating functional and “safe” utopian realms of tomorrow, we should be concerned with the

very implications that came from it: if an assault in a virtual environment can cause a

psychologically harmful and traumatic experience to an individual of blood and flesh in the

physical world, is it not a clear signal “to shut our ears momentarily to the techno-utopian ecstasies

of West Coast cyberhippies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building,

in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt

and concrete and capital?” Does the incident not “ask us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in

virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out

the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones” (Dibbell)?

It also inevitably presents us with unresolved questions on how tight the identity

relationship between the physical world individual and their virtual world “avatar” is. It opens up

a whole pool of issues concerning individual’s rights within virtual worlds of tomorrow. In other

words, if virtual reality sector of human experience is to flourish and keep snowballing still larger

and larger attention and human activity from the outside, physical world, it calls for issuing a

serious debate on providing a functional legal framework to prevent some such and other

ailments. The incident, also, points in another direction: namely the issue of power over one’s

identity in a virtual environment and inter-related aspects, which I will address now.

I have had a few shockingly unpleasant encounters of an electronic kind. Only a few days ago some enraged young man, whom I had never met before, left me an open message where he expressed his wish that some bomb blew off my hands (James Gleick gtd. in Freyerrmuth 35; my translation).

Above I am using another of James Gleick’s quotations but I could as well search

randomly any web forum discussion and find such examples proliferating. As if ridden of any

accountability for their acts of free expression in Cyberspace some individuals, indeed, do incline

to extremities. Just how many forum discussions following a web article have you found shut by

the administrators for reasons of “inappropriate” contributions?

For the lack of sufficient legal framework within it, anybody hidden behind their virtual

environment anonymity can say anything without being liable to facing the consequences of

persecution and public scorn. The truth is that virtual identity indeed provides humans with an

opportunity to voice unpopular ideas – gender-biased animosity, racial hatred, homophobic

“wisdoms” to name just a few. Without the threat of facing prosecution, which would inevitably

follow in the physical world around us, people openly voice their deepmost (or shallowest) of

anxieties, inner callings, or patently unfortunate stupidity. “ ‘Self-disclosure’ on the Internet,” says

Divínová, “comes about much quicker than in real life; the need for ‘self-presentation’ is

reduced” (14; my translation.) Is this apect of virtual interaction a purifying antidote to the social

and economic insecurities that our society in transition presents us with, or is it something innate

to all of us? In a way, then, cyberspace communication interaction among its users is a crystal-

clear mirror of the human condition and the mood in a society as such, but appropriate legal

measures may have to be introduced sooner or later.

“Gender swapping” as well as other bending of one’s identity in the virtual world are,

of course, virtual identity-related issues not far to seek, but for more information on the topic I

will refer you to Divínová’s much more competent work Cybersex – forma internetove komunikace.

Instead, let me now only briefly touch on another frequent criticism of the virtual – the chimera

of the “Internet addiction”.

5.3.2 A Chimera of the “Internet Addiciton”

In 2005, Eurogamer magazine “reported that a child had died due to neglect by her World

of Warcraft-addicted parents in Korea” (World of Warcraft). Very recently, “Dr Jerald Block,

author of an editorial for the respected American Journal of Psychiatry, argued that the disorder

is now so common that it merits inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders” (Smith). The concern, indeed, can seem justifiable as the media keep feeding us with

apocalyptic statistics on the rise of mainly teenage addiction to online net games, virtual

community chat rooms and so on and so forth. The root cause, however, may well lie somewhere

else. Contemplate with me the following pregnant argument by an anonymous author:

For example, here are the components that the author, psychiatrist Jerald Block, cites as evidence that someone can become addicted to the internet:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.

Apart from the fact that these and most other supposed criteria make no distinction between using the internet and what the person is using the internet for, it‘s easy to see that they don‘t describe anything unique to the Net.

For example, here are my criteria for “sports team addiction“:

1) Excessive time following games, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when team news or matches are inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better match viewing equipment, more news, or more hours of team-related activity, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.

(Internet addiction nonsense hits the AJP).

In late autumn of 2007 Cory Doctorow published an online article where he suggests that

“ ‘addictions’ to activities like using the Internet presumably have their origins in problems with

your life or outlook” (Doctorow). More often than not, we seem to be brisk at healing symptoms

instead of causes; through restrictions, of course. Nobody, however, is apt to address some of the

more invisible, and very often much less popular generic causes.

Robert Freedman, editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, said expressions of the addiction could be diverse. “In Korea, it seems to be primarily gaming sites. In America, it seems to be Facebook. It’s porn, it’s games, it’s gambling, it’s chatting with friends. All these things existed before, but now they’re a lot easier” (Addiction to internet is an illness).

In another interview with a researcher focused on the issue in South Korea, Smith

reports that “Dr Ahn has just completed a three-year survey of the problem, [and] blames the

highly competitive Korean education system. He believes excessive homework and extra classes

after school may cause some children to retreat to a cyber world where they feel more secure”9.

Also recently, CNS Spectrums, a renowned International Journal of Neuropsychiatric Medicine,

published results of a research carried out on a group of Taiwanese college students concluding

that “whether it is a primary addictive disorder or a secondary disorder or other psychiatric

disorder” among those classified as internet addicts, “has remained controversial” (Psychiatric

Comorbidity).

In 2005 Johnathan Bishop, a British psychologist and promoter of e-learning and virtual

communities, observed that “Saying that people can be addicted to the Internet is like saying

people can be addicted to the real world. The Internet, or Web is an environment, so people can

only be addicted to aspects of the environment” (Bishop).

9 http://thegrandnarrative.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/internet-addiction-in-korea-an-alternate-route-to-korean-

acceptance-of-psychotherapy/

In a nutshell, a longer-term and more systematic research into the issue, and preferably

one with more objective research criteria, will be needed to verify either of the two standpoints.

In my humble opinion, though, this whole hysteria about human individuals increasingly getting

addicted to the Internet will prove wrong. As with TV, mobile phones and other related

histrionic outcries of the past, the root cause behind such anti-social, self-destructive patterns of

behaviour may lie, more often than not, in some other, primary mental disorders. Disorders that

our competitive society triggers. After all, was it a bad day for humankind when a wheel was

invented on the pretext that today an indefinite number of people die under the wheels of cars on

the road?

Chapter 6 Spiritual Dimension: “Collective Intelligence” and “Collective Consciousness”

1. Collective intelligence is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. Its basis and goal is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities (Levy 1997, 13; my translation). 2. Co-intelligence is the capacity to engage the diverse gifts of all involved to enhance understanding or the quality of life (More Definitions of Co-Intelligence ). 3. Co-intelligence, like many other things, could be described as having innumerable qualities. But here we'll focus on ten of its most significant qualities: Co-intelligence is multi-dimensional, inclusive, wise, responsive, grounded in interconnectedness, synergistic, collaborative, self-aware, holistic and systemic, manifesting at many levels of human activity (Ten Qualities of Co-intelligence).

In this chapter I will first and in short address the stimuli that brought about the

accentuated focus on the study of “collective intelligence”. I will follow with a brief comment on

“collective consciousness” – a phenomenon loosely related to “collective intelligence”. Having

suggested, above, some of its various definitions I will now put forward approaches to it as well

as tools for establishing truly intelligent communities; future prospects and the potential of such

communities. To meet this objective, I will draw on a yardstick work in the field carried out by

Pierre Lévy as well as results of recent research into the matter.

I have already argued in favor of the necessity for advanced and more flexible

communications systems in an increasingly globalized world (see Chapter 4). Without them, the

capitalist system would have been bound for collapse by now – something that occurred to that

rigid, top-down politico-economic establishment of the Soviet Union. New strategies for

problem-solving, effective decision-making, new ways of data sharing and data processing hand

in hand with minimizing the time input were the undisputable stimuli in the process.

The rising complexity of the world requires an informed decision-making, effective steps and quick results. But in itself the amount and complexity of possibilities, which have to be taken into account, seem to be getting beyond our abilities for analysis and decision-making. The number of people connected into the decision-making process is on the rise too, adding to the complexity (Stav budocnosti 30; my translation).

In our highly competitive society driven by the need for ever-higher efficiency, in the

society where the weak and unprofitable as well as uncooperative and thus marginalized go to the

wall, it is then no surprise that smarter (or more “intelligent” if you want) strategies – that would

give individuals, but much rather communities, whole nations or even supranational alliances a

competitive edge over others – are sought fiercely. However:

Today’s decision-making and evaluation procedures were established in a world that was relatively stable and had a simple communications ecology. Information today, however, is torrential, oceanic […] Information technology is used only to rationalize and accelerate bureaucratic performance (Lévy 1997, 60; my translation).

Rigid structures of the past that allowed political and economic structures of the industrial era to

survive are, indeed, as if lagging behind the required capacity for effective management. “In a

system that excessively accentuates centralization up to the level that new information channels

clog decision-making centers […] we need to redistribute the ‘decision’ load and shift its

substantial part downward” (Toffler & Tofflerová 101; my translation). This is a call for as wide-

spread participation on the decision-making processes as possible. Since already today’s

technology makes such vision technically possible, this is a clear call for generating still wider and

wider base of active participants in civic affairs. And after all,

The fact that the boundary between our professional life and personal development is beginning to blur signifies the death of a form of economic activity. Economic goals and technology can no longer operate within a closed circuit. As soon as genuine commitment is required of individuals, economic needs must give way to politics in the broadest sense of the word, that is to ethics and civic responsibility (Lévy 1997, 4; my translation).

The full impact of the changes necessary to be accomplished in the near future will yet

have to be felt. In the meantime, this ever-growing, active participation of citizens in the

processes outlined above, exploiting user-friendly cyberspace “tools” can not but result in a more

or less genuine involvement of all affected social strata in recreating our world at a crossroads.

More will be said on the topic of the promise of direct democracy in Chapter 7 and so for now

let us go back to exploring the nature of collective intelligence.

Ruskoff in his popular book Kyberie echoes that “Cyberians interpret the evolution of the

datasphere as a communication coupling of the global brain. It is the final stage of the evolution

of ‘Gaia’ – a living creature, the planet Earth, where people serve as individual neurons. At the

moment when computer programmers and psychedelic warriors are consensually coming to an

agreement that ‘all is One’, a universal awareness is being formed that the evolution of human

species has been a conscious progression towards the realization of Cyberia – the Home of

human consciousness in our dimension” (14; my translation). Although the theory of Gaia10 in

itself as elaborated on by James Lovelock still raises serious controversy in ranks of many

scientists – since its hypothesis does not, and in its essence can not be put to any empirical test –

the whole proposition is quite interesting. Were it so, humans, by developing this new

revolutionary multidimensional medium, might well have found the missing link to reconnecting

with the cosmological order, with the “wholeness” here and now. Elsewhere, Ruskoff adds that

“Cyberia is a place mentioned in mystical doctrines of all religions; a theoretical tangent of all

sciences and a place of the wildest human fantasies” (13; my translation). Separately from the

concept of Gaia, similar ideas were developed by Teilhard de Chardin, only he named this

“collective consciousness” of humankind the noosphere11. In this sense, the evolution of human

species is a self-aware process leading towards interconnection of all individual human

experiences in one point - in what de Chardin called the “Omega point”. Of course, these

hypotheses are quite metaphysical arguments and their chance for verification hence suffers. We

will yet have to see how human experience will evolve and what the promises of Cyberspace

experience will do to our mind and consciousness. Concerning collective consciousness, however,

Tom Atlee, a self-taught enthusiast in the field, stays on a more sober side of things when he

makes a clear distinction between the two main phenomena put under magnifying glass in this

chapter:

I want to suggest that this capacity we call intelligence isn’t confined to individuals. Every human collective -- every group, organization and society -- exhibits at least some capacity to learn, to solve problems, to plan its future, and to make sense of conditions in and around it. If it didn’t, it would not survive. [. . .] Although the idea [of collective intelligence] may be new to you, I want to assure you that there really isn’t anything very esoteric about it. I am not, after all, speaking of collective consciousness, which may or may not exist. I am merely speaking of collective intelligence, which is an observable, demonstrable, perhaps even measurable capacity. From the neighbourhood sports club to the United Nations, groups of people engage in solving their problems, planning new

10 For deeper insight into the discussion on Gaia see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis or

http://www.mountainman.com.au/gaia.html 11 For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

activities, and formulating stories about what’s happening around them -- in other words, using their intelligence, just like individuals do. And, just like individuals, some groups and societies are smarter than others -- and all of them are smarter at some times than at other times (Noosphere).

The technology springing to life alongside every era in human history inevitably changed

that particular society to the root. The Neolithic agricultural revolution with its hitherto unseen

tools and methods of production transformed profoundly the way of life as did the dawn of script

later on, or a press still some millennia later. Now the Computer has been changing our society

profoundly again. Last year New Scientist published an interesting article, calling for revision of the

rejection of group-selection evolutionary theory in the nineteen-sixties, and concluded with a

catchphrase: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

Everything else is a commentary” (Survival of the Selfless 46). To make things clearer, let me

now provide one of examples of collective intelligence at work as suggested by Tom Atlee:

What would community intelligence look like? Perhaps we see an example of it in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which, in the early 1980s, was reeling from local recession, deteriorating schools and rising racial tensions. Several dozen citizens formed Chattanooga Venture, an on-going cross-class, multi-racial organization that, over the next decade involved hundreds of people in an inclusive effort to set and achieve community goals. Of 34 specific city-wide goals set in 1984, 29 were completed by 1992, at which point Chattanooga Venture again convened hundreds of citizens to create new community goals. Among the goals realized through this process was the creation of Chattanooga’s Neighbourhood Network, which organized and linked up dozens of neighbourhood associations to help people co-create a shared future right where they lived, enhancing their community intelligence even further. Chattanooga Venture provides a glimpse of the sort of ongoing collective intelligence we could build to brilliantly solve problems, to learn together, and to generate a better life right at home (A copact vision of co-intelligence ).

New computer-related possibilities that we are facing here and now as well as an ongoing

pull for efficiency and management in our highly competitive society, the increasing need for

enhanced problem-solving strategies, are calling for researchers in the field to sit behind their

desks. How could computing help us enhance our learning abilities in times when required

information can be obtained at a very little cost?

Not long ago, MIT Institute established MIT Center for Collective Intelligence which in

turn launched a vast research project aiming at exploring “How people and computers can be

connected so that – collectively – they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or

computers have ever done before” (Research overview). Their database at www.cci.mit.edu/research/

provides a systematised description of the objectives of this vast and potentially ground-breaking

project. Another research group’s website is accessible online at www.co-intelligence.org and provides

a vast array of exciting topic-related articles. But let me now swing back to Europe at the end of

the last century and Pierre Lévy – the bard and “world-leading thinker on cyber culture” (Pierre

Levy; Wikipedia) and its philosophical and political aspects.

Apart from being given a notable credit for his involvement in the promotion of cyber

culture at large, he is currently working at the development of revolutional IEML (or Information

Economy Meta Language) (Ibid.) In the nineties, he published several books, each of them being

a lucid account on the state of cyberspace domain. With the help of bookfinder.com I managed to

get my hands on the English translation of one of them called Collective Intelligence – Mankind’s

Emerging World in Cyberspace. Here Lévy provides an interesting analysis of human history where

what he calls “knowledge space“ is the latest of the four anthropological spaces in human history

that he determines – our society of today. “Although to each anthropological space there

corresponds a specific mode of knowledge […] There are at least three aspects to this newness:

the rate of evolution of knowledge, the number of people who will be asked to learn and produce

new forms of knowledge, and finally, the appearance of new tools (cyberspatial tools) capable of

bringing forth, within the cloud of information around is, unknown and distinct landscapes,

singular identities characteristic of this space, new sociohistoric figures” (Lévy 1997, 8). Many

struggles will yet have to be accomplished – in and outside human flesh. That is the today’s

world in transition at yet another crossroads.

The possibility of cyberspace allows us to envisage forms of economic and social organization of based on collective intelligence and the enhancement of humanity in all its variety. Yet we continue to focus our attention on such things as capturing the multimedia market. We have attained an unprecedented degree of precision and accuracy, are capable of great economy in processing signs and objects, yet show little concern for systematizing and extending equitable methods of interaction and relation where human beings are involved. Do new social conventions exist that would prevent us from wasting our skills, from wasting any human quality in general (51)?

One of the ideas on which Lévy develops his argument is a premise that “no one knows

everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity“ (20) and that through

spontaneous, “cooperative apprenticeship and the reconstruction of the social bond achievable

with modern communication tools…our societies can experiment with such tools to develop a

collective inteligence“ (59). One does not have to be a laureate of Nobel Prize in Physics to grasp

that this is a highly venturesome idea. After all, history has already given us many lessons on the

incorrigibility of human. Human condition driven from within the depths of dark corners of

human mind is still in operation.

It does not surprise that such premature, techno-utopian hallelujahs polarize both general

public as well as experts. After all, Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., who wrote foreword to the book,

comments on it with reserve saying that “it will be interesting to see if its reality is as positive as a

vision as he [Lévy] hopes” (xi). Elsewhere moreover, although addressing “liberal communists”

alone, in his article of 2006 Slavoj Žižek launched an open assault on the new pragmatics bearing,

interestingly, many similarities with Lévy’s point of departure:

The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised

bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy (Žižek).

Whatever point this lacanian bard was trying to make, it is undisputable that the current

state of affairs in a society seemingly advanced yet with all its ills and strains, crumbling on many

fronts, needs a new stimuli, new point of departure, perhaps. What Toffler calls The Third Wave is

breaking over the western world of today. How visionary do we allow ourselves to be? How

limiting are the boundaries which we allow ourselves to dismantle in our engineering effort for a

prosperous and positive future?

Barbara M. Hubbard may well be right with her concept of Conscious Evolution12. We are a

generation of choice, indeed. Through our increasing expertise and accumulation of knowledge

about life systems, the level of expertise in harnessing nuclear energy, rising standards in general

well-being, it seems we have come to a point where we can re-create – not replete all old! – our

world and push ourselves into a new phase of human existence. We, humans, through our mental

capacity and intelligence do have a choice to reinvent our lives in this or any later moment. Only

this time due to the level of know-how - the access to close-to-all essential information – we may

well be provided with the luxury of reinventing ourselves collectively and en masse since in our

globalized world, that is to say, every major ethical or moral question will inevitably address all.

We have never been so successful, we have never been so wealthy, we have never been so knowledgeable, nor so able to convert our immense knowledge into wondrous new technologies, yet we are failing to make progress towards a more just and inclusive world, or to extend economic security and the freedoms it brings to greater numbers (The Possibility of Progress; synopsis).

12 More about Conscious Evolution at http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com/?q=node/8

Frankly, I believe there is nothing like Heaven for all. The classical Utopia legacy has lost

its credibility with the onset of scientific journeys into the depths of human psyché. Suggesting

that everything above family, let alone a nation or a large community, is not in an individual’s

genuine interest may well be a hit on the head of a nail. But we have also learnt that working

together towards a common goal is well in our individualised interest. And so I suggest –

following Lévy’s maxim “no one knows everything, everyone knows something“ from above –

that at a time when the multiple and the diversity are promoted, at a time when enhancing one’s

well-being through an advanced, multi-level, cyberian collaborattion with other individuals or

communities, is a fruit-bearing scenario of social bond in the “Knowledge space“ that could be

favoured in the future. We would first, however, have to change our point of view, our

paradigmas on which our relationship towards each other and the outside world stands.

We have again become nomads. By this I am not referring to pleasure cruises, exotic vacations, or tourism […] Neither do the portable device of mobile computing bring us any closer to an understanding of today‘s nomadism [...] The final obstacle to the voyage may be the endless race within existing commodity networks. Movement no longer means traveling from point to point on the surface of the globe, But crossing universes of problems, lived worlds, landscapes of meaning (Lévy 1997, xxi).

In this chapter we have looked at signs of truly utopian possibilities of a positive future in

today’s world at a crossroads. Although the possibility of “collective consciousness“ – a kind of

global coupling between the spiritual and the material – is something that still lacks wider

consensus, we have seen that “collective intelligence“ is, indeed, has always been an omnipresent

tool for achieving common goals and an enhancement of (primarily) individual’s well-being. The

current systems of management are apparently suffocated and ineffective. New sytems of

evaluation and processes in decision-making are needed. With enough required knowledge,

arguably soon to be attained, we may soon have the power to change the direction of history in a

way that no other generation before us did. The battle over this change may well be decisive.

What the outcome will be and what shape our (or any successive civilization will take) is yet to be

anticipated. In the last part of this work I will be looking at just this.

Part Three

* 1.. It is true that the net strengthens current centres of scientific, military and financial power and that in future years spreading of cyberbusiness will escalate […] But Cybercpace can also serve a personal or regional development, promote the emancipation and the process of collective intelligence. Both perspectives, moreover, do not exclude each other. In still a more interconnected and self-dependent world one can even support the other […] All dynamism of cyber culture depends on the development and confirmation of real dialectic of utopia and business (Lévy 2000, 201; my translation). 2. Cyberians attack the very foundation of reality on which ideas of control and manipulation are based. As the technology of computer networks finds its way into hands of rising number of cyberians the hypnotic magic of years spent within the reach of TV and its political influence on the public is being broken. The result is that a big part of population gains freedom and again can form attitudes towards hitherto accepted set of political rules and prejudices. Using media “viruses”, cyberians release, at the speed of light, into the infosphere strong ideas which openly attack hypocritical and illogical societal structures and rid them of power (Ruskoff 15; my translation). 3. Genetic engineering--the engineering of life in general--is going to be huge in the next ten years. The general picture is going to emerge sometime soon of what we can and can’t do to a person. By all indications, it looks like we can do a lot: We can extend our life spans, compose our children, even recompose ourselves as adults to a degree. I think it’s going to be the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. More challenging than nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons, the only question is, can we survive them or not. With biotechnology it’s not an either/or situation, it’s a design question: Who do we want to be as a species. It’s a profoundly difficult question. Nobody who understands it is going to have a clear unconflicted point of view--unless they’re a moron (Jaron Lanier qtd. in McKenna). At the onset of the new millennium, it seems as though humanity was close to something

big just around the corner. No one is able to tell for sure what next decades will show us. The

rate of technological innovation, accumulation of scientific knowledge about our physical

environment is staggering. This, of course, brings to the forefront of our attention possibilities

that may come to their realization in a less or more distant future.

The last part of this work, as promised in the Introduction, takes as a focal point some of

the applied and possible extrapolations on the hitherto discussed material. All the issues from the

above mentioned citations – that I find essential in relation to Cyberspace and utopia, and are

part of the Neuromancer novel – will be discussed here. However, for the immense amount of

material and discourse that could be written on these, I will only go as far as delineating some of

them and providing some potential direction these could evolve into in the years to come.

First, however, we will look at the slow but powerful promise of a shift in political order

in the new century. It may not be far from now when the age-old dream of all anarchists of a

direct democracy might come true. I will address this topic first. Furthermore, closely linked to a

successful implementation of real-time politics and direct democracy is, I believe, the concept of

knowledge engines that are in the making and will be discussed briefly at the end (Chapter 7). In

Chapter 8 I will then address the cyberpunk literary and cultural movement and hacking with all that

it takes. This last chapter is structured as a brief antithesis to what we have discussed so far in this

work.

Chapter 7 Direct Democracy, or Customizing Politics for the Third Wave 1. The remarkable advances in communications technology of today open up, for the first time, the overwhelming scale of possibilities of potential participation of citizens in political decision-making (Lévy 2000, 98; my translation). 2. Obsolescence is nowhere as developed and dangerous as just in our political sphere (Toffler & Tofflerova 105, my translation). 3. The collapse of the processes of negotiation, decision-making under the pressure, the deepening paralysis of representative institutions, all these in a long term mean that many decisions which today are made by a small number of representatives can gradually be passed onto voters themselves. If our elected negotiators can not be of any benefit to us, we will have to act ourselves. If laws, which they prepare, are still more distant from our needs or still less considerate to them, we will have to formulate them ourselves. For all that we will need new institutions and new technologies (Toffler & Tofflerova 97; my translation).

4. That which is approaching us with an accumulating intensity of a suprastruggle […] will not be a centrally controlled overthrowing of leading elites by some “avant-garde party” which would pull masses behind; it will neither be a spontaneous and allegedly a purifying mass revolt excited by a terrorist action. The creation of new political structures for the civilization of the Third Wave will emerge as a consequence of thousands of innovations and encounters on many levels and at many places within a few decades (Toffler & Tofflerova 106; my translation).

At what seems to be the end of the world the way we know it, there is a common anxiety

about the shape of things to come. Mass media toss and turn around swarms of news articles

spreading this omnipresent uneasiness about the present and the future. Undoubtedly, our

generation is the one boasting the best fitness and well-being in history of humankind. Indeed,

the development of wealth-creation for masses that was started with the din and noise of

factories in the early industrial era has lead to an unprecedented state of well-being. Illiteracy in

the Western world is almost non-existent. The technology has been assisting us in many

previously demanding everyday tasks. This has also led to expansion of leisure time. Life

expectancy has continuously been growing, too; our advanced medical knowledge to cure ills of

our mind and body is impressive. In the times favouring knowledge and human intellect, that

former, rigidly class-stratified society seems to have given way to widespread social mobility.

But as with everything, there are two sides to the coin. Our generation is also

unprecedented in devising the means of self-destruction. The swift-changing pace of life hand in

hand with transformation of a traditional way of life, ever-increasing demands on human the

worker as well as blurring the line between personal and professional time and the requirements

going with it, the omnipresent social and economic insecurities related to ethnic diversification of

the western society and economic globalization sweeping across the globe, have all led to a

growing state of schizophrenia, paranoia and anxiety. Just how many of the passers-by who we

cross paths in the streets every day with would be classified with some kind of neurosis?

In this chapter I am borrowing hugely from the ideas of the Tofflers and their Nová

civilizace: Třetí vlna a její důsledky, and Pierre Lévy’s insightful Kyber kutura and Collective Intelligence:

Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, the books already discussed. I will spend some time

discussing possible root causes of today’s ailments permeating western cultures and then move

on to some conclusions as to what could be done to heal those wounds. This section, then, will

be dedicated to the possibility and enhancement of direct democracy in our times. At the end, I

will briefly address the issue of “knowledge engines” – a much-debated venture in today’s world

of technology.

In his recent analysis The Possibilities of Progress, Mark Braund observes that today “in a

western culture which is rapidly being exported to all corners of the world, we make great play of

the rights and freedoms enjoyed by all people, but we fail to create conditions for universal access

to economic opportunity” (235). Unlike in the rest of Braund’s work that I found, at places, very

insightful, here I could not agree less. I suggest it is primarily lack of human rights and free

enterprise society that creates lack of economic opportunity, not vise versa. Totalitarian systems

around the globe suppressing the rights of their citizens bear heavily on this. The state

propaganda and demagogy do the rest. This vicious circle of fetishized government idol, a kind of

modern-day aristocracy, a system where the wide acceptance of a belief in natural corruptibility of

man is at its prime, feed the illusion that a human society can not do without a firm-hand ruling.

Is it not a coincidence that only in Europe and Northern America which as first societies more or

less successfully got rid of autocracies or theocracies of all kinds and have established “the rule of

people”, have been witnessing to an seemingly unbound economic progress? I suggest that as

long as human individuals are treated with respect and live in an environment promoting

humanist ideals like trust in oneself and self-dependence, a society by and large is bound to

flourish. “Bronk,” Braund continues, “points out it is widely assumed today that Adam Smith

described a ‘mechanism for delivering human progress without the requirement for the moral

perfection of man as a precursor to the establishment of a better world’”(Braund 207).

“All modern revolutions,” Albert Camus once noted in Člověk revoltující, “have led to the

reinforcement of state” (179; my translation). For me, whether the argument is true or not is

beyond the point, but the current revival of academic interest in anarchism echoes that in western

societies there might be some change, if not a u-turn however latent still, under way. And so

inevitably today’s “revolution” also brings to the spotlight the concepts of “minimal state”,

“direct democracy” and “real-time politics”. Reading Lévy’s Kyber kultura in particular, one cannot

but get an insistent feeling that what he calls “universality without totality” does permeate all

aspects of Cyberspace. He goes on to observe that this is encountered with a kind of grudge on

the part of subjects hitherto in possession of power – the state and the media:

- The “media” opposition toward Cyberspace: Cyberspace limits their broadcasting monopoly and hence directly their existence. - The “state” opposition towards Cyberspace: probably main objection is concerning that Cyberspace does not respect the notion of “boundaries” on which a modern state is built above all, so that information and data can move from and into a state out of control, which means a loss of economic and informational influence (Lévy 2000, 186; my translation).

In the Industrial era, or what the Tofflers would call the Second Wave, in a strong state with

an unswerving top-down political hierarchy, the control over information channels in a mass

society producing in bulk, buying in bulk and thinking in bulk, the need for a flexible interaction

was superfluous. But for the remarkable pace in the individualization of needs in today’s ever

more multicultural and multilingual and wealth-stratified societies, it seems to be a necessity, a

question of vitality. “Representative democracy,” Lévy observes, “is not flexible enough any

more. Mass society has been replaced with an individualized one” (190; my translation). We are

witnessing to an unprecedented development in the service sector where customizing products to

a customer’s needs has become a prime tune. How could it not be reflected in a shift in political

needs of today’s citizen?

The rising complexity of the world requires an informed decision-making, effective steps and quick results. But in itself the amount and complexity of possibilities, which have to be taken into account, seem to be getting beyond our abilities for analysis and decision-making. The number of people connected into the decision-making process is on the rise too, adding to the complexity (Glenn 30; my translation).

In Nová civilizace, Alvin Toffler, one of the most famous futurologists, and his wife present

an interesting analysis of human history based on the concept of “waves”, each representing one

of the three epochal predominant ways of life – agricultural, industrial, post-industrial – and each

sweeping over the preceding one. Essential to this analysis is a level of decision-making required

in sustaining each of the “civilizations”. They come to the conclusion that “the great ‘decision’

load must eventually be distributed within larger democratic participation. If, then, the decision

load of a social system is increasing, democracy is not so much a matter of a choice, as it is a

downright evolutionary necessity” (104; my translation). Indeed, what else happened to the Soviet

Union run on a top-down mechanism than that it eventually burnt out face to face with the

requirement for flexibility and wider interconnection? Innovation is fed by opportunities,

opportunities enhancing human intellect and the creation of liberating ideas, and maybe a time

may be coming some time close (and Lévy emphasizes this throughout his work) when human

individuals will treat each other with inherent respect. This is, I suggest, a paramount challenge of

today’s education – the schooling breaking all histrionic xenophobia of the shauvinistic past. The

establishing in the youngest earthlings of today that every human being has it non-

interchangeable value, that in a globalized world of today we can enrich each other in ways until

now impossible by means of putting cyberspace tools to the best of use, by sharing ideas and

problems at a distance and working collectively towards their solutions, or as Lévy puts it simply:

“Cyberspace marches towards a civilization with a universally widespread presence at a distance”

(Lévy 2000, 113; my translation). A lot of goals, though, are yet to be accomplished along the way

towards a civilization sharing basic humanist ideals, a long way to go towards the possible, latest

Renaissance of man. Obstacles are not far to seek: Apart from relic way of thinking of the

Second Wave, or the Industrial era, there is widespread economic insecurity among formerly

prioritized working-class masses, the omnipresent insecurity about swiftly deteriorating

environment, and there is nationalism as well as there is bigotry and racial prejudice. Braund,

whose recent The Possibility of Progress, can be scorned as well as cherished, sees the fundamental

obstacles as follows:

Obstacles to progress are not cultural; they are political and economic. Cultural difference is at once the most important and the most impermanent form of differentiation. It offers progressive and inclusive aspects that make the world a richer, more diverse form of place: these can and should be preserved. It also provides obstacles to progress which can be removed once we understand their true nature. The current globalization project seems intent on replacing one set of bad values with a new set of bad values and crushing the positive aspects of traditional cultures. Unless we awake up to this very soon, it will be too late. Mankind, at least in the Western societies, regarding the failure of their society seem to have forsaken myth for other myths: 1. Only in a competitive environment a community can flourish and stay vital 2. Accept the fact that human nature is essentially corrupt 3. Cultural difference (153).

In Tvetzan Todorov’s macabre quest analysis of the inherent nature of man Facing the

Extreme: The Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, I once came across an idea I could not agree

more with. Confessing her experience from the trial with Adolph Eichmann, one of the Nazi

prominent officials, Hannah Arendt told him: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so

many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and

still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (124). Should such observations not make us start

wondering why is it that people behave differently in public than what they really are, or at least

show every indication of what they are inside? Is it the need of self-presentation so much

amplified in today’s competitive society, the need to appear “successful” and “cool”?

In my 2004: Brave New World Revisited I suggested that “human mind is a dormant flame of

genuine love and compassion” and I hold up the same today, too. I want to suggest that we are

primarily social beings, and not only when it comes to calculation. Love, the idea of deep sharing,

is an insatiable need that we in general seek to satisfy irrelevant of our outside behaviour. We can

be mean, we can be corrupt, yet we seek to share ourselves with somebody, as if to anchor our

insecure existence in someone else’s.

Neoclassical economies have mistakenly seen individuals as bundles of preference. That view can lend itself to a vision that most individuals are hungry, needing vast amounts of goods and money to be - if they can be- filled up...Instead, they require specific items pertaining to their vocations, particular visions of friendship, changing conceptions of a good life, and the like (Gilbert 192).

According to Georgie Woodstock, “anarchists believe that human is not necessarily good,

but inherently social” (Selkej & Tomek 73; my translation). Elsewhere, Jaron Lanier puts it aptly

when asked for highlighting ways to integrate technology and humanity: “The most fundamental

aspects of the human experience are that we’re separated from each other and we die”

(Mc Kenna). And so maybe this long quest of humanity towards Cyberspace has been a

conscious progress towards coming back to each other. So why has it not happened yet? The

roots might be easier to understand through Maslow’s Needs Pyramid. After all, we are just an

organism of blood and flesh alike: first of all we need to feed ourselves and provide for our well-

being in a more or less secure environment. So what is there to accomplish this and set the path

for a new order of the “people’s rule” for the new century?

Above all it means to start the process of reconstruction at once, sooner than an ongoing disintegration of current political system will drive advocates of tyranny into the streets in order to perpetrate violence and by so doing prevent a peaceful transformation into the democracy of the 21st century (Toffler & Tofflerová 109; my translation).

History has shown us many times that periods of great instability gave tyrants and fanatics

the right to march into the streets and summon crowds to change them into brainwashed mobs

committing worst of crimes against civility. As the Tofflers remark “the possibility of violence on

the road towards tomorrow can not be excluded. The transition from the civilization of the first

wave to the civilization of the second wave was one long, blood-filled drama full of wars,

revolutions, plague, enforced migrations, coups and catastrophes” (106; my translation). It is only

upon us, people of this planet here and now that must discard old paradigms that no longer apply

and give way to a creative, self-transforming process towards a new political order that will not

inherently mean the arrival of any grand Utopia, the ideal place for everyone, but could prevent

the reverse from happening – the world of growing ethnic tension, frustration from stale political

decision-making system not representing, but parasiting on populism in a multi-cultural and

multi-ethnic failing societies of tomorrow. As a matter of fact, it is a call to prevent cyberpunk

vision of the world of tomorrow from happening. According to Lévy,

the participation in this space – which connects every human being with any other – enables the communication between communities and even within themselves. It cancels the monopoly of distribution and enables everyone to broadcast for those involved or those interested – is a constituent of rights of every human and its construction is somewhat a moral imperative [...] as it keeps a deep relationship with the humanist idea. Indeed, Cyberspace does not create the universal culture because it is factually all around us, but because all human beings have the right for its form or its idea. (Lévy 2000, 105; my translation)

If we are to accept the responsibility for our well-being and get away with stiff

governments of yesterday, if are to acknowledge the value of human intellect in the “knowledge

economy”, the thing that differentiates us from other biota, and hand in hand with it going

recognition of co-intelligent processes as an effective tool to solve ever-increasing complexity of

problems in today’s globalized playground, then we must also ensure that every human

individual, every human neuron on this planet has unlimited access to it. In Stav budoucnosti, a

recent analysis of all strata of human activity and a level of well-being today, Glenn muses that

“we could include the access to the Internet in human rights” (24; my translation). After all, “this

new communication space is vast and tolerant enough to enable a parallel realization of two, at

first sight mutually contradictive projects, which can supplement each other” (Lévy 2000, 190; my

translation). To finish this discussion, let me now put forward a vision that the Tofflers presented

and which should be instrumental in what might be necessary to accomplish in order to

successfully transform today’s governments into the governments of the third Wave:

3 principles of the transformation to the governments of the Third wave: - Minority rule - The response to the diversification of a society are imaginative new structures which would adapt to it and legitimize it – in new institutions which would be sensitive to the fast-changing needs of fluctuating and multiplying minorities. - Representative elections tell us nothing at all about the quality of people’s opinion. They can tell us how many people at a time want X, but not how passionately they want it (Toffler & Tofflerová 91; my translation).

The third principle is particularly interesting. Today when the number of people more

and more financially independent rises steadily, the visions on how these people want to handle

their property and in what direction they want to head their future lives differ accordingly.

Moreover, the complex matrix of various cultures and ethnic groups in the western societies add

to the problem in a similar way. When today’s citizens, if not yet discouraged by often mediocre

results, go to the elections, their vote does not tell us how much they sacrificed to their original

intention. Mass politics of yesterday apparently do not satisfy the fluid communities of

tomorrow. And so if we are to start implementing, hopefully with the help of cyberspace tools, a

principle which can address this rising need, we are presented with one more dilemma – how can

we make for utilizing “cyberspace elections” so that every vote, every idea will be taken into

account?

Quoting Roy Ascott, who once observed that “the Internet is the second (information)

flood” (Lévy 2000, p 142; my translation), Lévy does not forget to remind us that we are living in

a time when this is a mighty challenging task. Information is a cheap commodity now. Already in

the early mid-nineteenth century, writes Neil Postman in Ubavit se k smrti, that disobedient citizen

Thorreau scorned the invention of telegraph. It was the moment, Postman continues, “when

information lost its original function and became a tradable commodity” (Postman 73; my

translation). Every day whole galaxies of information sprint toward us from the web and other

mass media. Hence only “knowledge” remains to be still valuable. But then, generating

knowledge from the vast strata of information requires mental capacity for synthesis and

common sense that only human species has developed to the required specification.

It is very exciting to follow annual reports given by Bill Gates as they are unmistakably an

open window into the near future. Bill Gates may live in the present, but listening to him gives

one an impression that he definitely lives the future. There he describes complicated machines

that would be able to generate knowledge, a synthesis of bulky load of information. Google, for

example, can generate millions of links connected to the request word you have entered in the

search engine, but how many of them are relevant to what you are looking for? Devising some

such cybertools – HAL-like knowledge engines capable of navigating data smartly and generating

knowledge from it – seems to be the first technological obstacle on the way to a plausible direct

democracy of tomorrow. This, of course, raises not only one ethical issue of the highest caliber.

Creating an artificial intelligence – that is a machine capable of hitherto exclusively human attributes

like intuition and intelligence in general. It goes without saying that it has been both a dream of

many as well as a dreaded Faust’s contract of many others.

(Ruskoff 157)

Chapter 8 Cyberpunks & Hackers, or a New Frontier into Nowhere 1. Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes. This is cyberpunk (Bruce Sterling gtd. in Cyberpunk; Style and ethos). 2. “The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the special possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes (Gibson 51). 3. This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he’d take through Sense/Net’s ice. It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly’s shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He’d go

straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days (Gibson 59).

As was stated in the Introduction, this work has been designed as an antithesis to the

implicitly dismal world imagined by Gibson’s main character Case, the main human protagonist in

the Neuromancer novel. The “zeitgeist” of nihilistic vegetation in the world clenched firmly by the

big business, in the world where a human life is just a playground for technology. On the other

hand, this work has not been designed to look upon today’s technophilic hypes of the many

without a speck of sobriety either.

Much rather, this work has been written to comment on the sparkling element of hope - the alpha

and omega of utopian thought – in the world – today or at any other time in the past – of

dizzying changes on apparently all levels of human experience. It is hard to tell where exactly we

are going and maybe, based on the fact that future seems to have arrived at the present (see

Chapter 2), we should not even muse about the future any more and simply start solving the

most pressing issues of today. Then maybe we can prevent a need for some abrupt change in

emergency in the future. Although we have nearly accumulated enough knowledge to set the

direction into the future which would redefine entirely what we humans are, we will always, I

believe, use our mental capacity to make this choice conscious. Not being coerced into our

possible future by any kind of higher authority such as “megacorps” or supra-governmental

institutions, this work has been written to celebrate that flickering, liberating spirit of human

mind. But in this chapter let us look closer at what the cyberpunk message has to say to it all.

The discussion will be limited to some underlying structural elements which revolve around the

cyberpunk vision of the future. These traditionally cyberpunk domains will be scrutinized on the

background of William Gibson’s Neuromancer the title of which itself is a very poignant word

play: I suggest that it can be read as a story of a “new romancer” - someone imposing a new

revolt against the past or status quo, imagining a new cape of civilization. It also suggst itself to

reading it as “neuro mancer” – this someone imagining the fundamental transformation taking

place in the mind, the “neural” system of a human body. In future, undoubtedly, Cyberspace will

show us ways of interconnectedness until now difficult to conceive but for now let us have a

closer look at what Cyberpunk is about.

They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumpling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass (Gibson 48).

The term “cyberpunk” was coined by Bruce Bethke in his short story of the same name,

published in 1980 (Bruce Bethke). Placing the literary genre within the larger system of science

fiction authors like Bruce Sterling concluded that “it is a new movement in science fiction; its

roots deeply sunk in the sixty-year tradition of modern popular SF” while its novelty, he claims,

lies in enlivening a genre that was “confused, self-involved and stale” (Slusser & Shippey 88).

Mass media of today like to present us with a pellmell of spectacular images and “news”.

In a way, cyberpunk literature likes to do the very same. Drawing on its precursors in the many

dystopian literary works of the past, it likes to present us with dismal images of a dehumanized

environment where technoconspiracies have taken the reign over the human existence. Human

vegetation in such an environment and a permeating sense of nihilism are then a logical outcome.

Istvan Csicsery, Jr., in his essay Deus Ex Machina, published within the already mentioned

collation of essays Fiction 2000, remarks on the essence of cyberpunk as presented in

Cronenberg’s Videodrome as follows: “existence twenty minutes into the future; nostalgia for five

minutes ago; form-determining ambivalence about cyborgization; marrow-deep malaise about the

usurpation of transcendence by information technology, and of freeedom by sinister

technoconspiracies; and a moral universe defined by sex, drugs and violence” (40). Let us see this

dissemination of widespread anxiety over the future of high technology and its influence on a

human individual as an extension of traditional punk ethics in the fashion of Johnny Rotten and

his notoriously famous music band: “No future for you and me”.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, without nothing left of you (Gibson 7).

Examples of such or similar descriptions are common in Gibbon’s dystopian fable firmly

under the ruling hand of big business. Quoting an external source Mirrorshades, a cyberpunk

anthology from which I have also been lending in this work, Slusser and Shippey observed that

“the tools of global integration – the satellite media net, the multinational corporation –

fascinate the cyberpunks and figure constantly in their work” (96). But then, all of this also, in a

sense, makes for an excuse why hackers have traditionally forsaken the physical world for the life

on the Net, the only acceptable habitat of existence. In an alienated world where human

existence is but a surrogate for anything and everything that all-devouring technology can

substitute for, the escape to the land of matrix seems to be the only outlet of strangled mind

spirit of humanity worth living. “There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City

tolerated Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving

the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain

sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t

there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself (11).

In Cyberland Freyermuth used a fitting parallel when he compared cyberpunks and cyberians in

general to the “beatnics of the 50s when Kerouac’s flight to the road is replaced today with a

flight to an ‘open info highway’” (31; my translation). Cyberspace and the matrix become integral

parts of a hacker’s identity. Commenting on Pengo’s activities13, Haffner and Markoff in

Cyberpunk noted that the idea of hacking for him “was the means and the end, the information

and its destination secondary” (144). To deepen the insight into the hacker ethics Ruskoff in

Kyberie quotes some such hacker Pete who confessed to him that hacking “is connecting to the

global intelligence. The information becomes texture [...] almost a kind of experience. You don’t

do it to find out something. You just surf the data. It’s surfing and everybody is trying to get you

out of that water. But at the same time you behave like an old scout. You leave everything as you

had found it. There must be no trace left after your visit. As if you were never there” (22; my

translation). But as always things are not that simple. Apart from today’s revival of corporate

hacking when such ill-tempted cyberians get employed by one subject to espionage on the other

penetrating their network systems, there is also another, seemingly less dangerous way of hacking.

David Troup, who in certain circles is well-known for writing Bodyguard program for hackers

noted that “most of young people are trying to do as much damage as possible. They need

nothing there, want nothing there, they don’t even know how they’d use it. Everyone has

destroyed some system at some point’ (22).

In this chapter we have briefly entered the cyberpunk vision of future – the disconsolate

realm where existence of an individual is governed by the law of the jungle; mere vegetation in a

world which has given a free hand to burgeoning technologies under the skies forever dark and

gloomy. Backfiring at it, it is a vision of a world where humans – or it may be more apt to say

humanoids as there it is not any longer possible to discern between “human” the way we know it

and whatever becomes of them in a technophilic future – utilize all available technology in the

struggle for survival while, in return, this leviathan monster out of the depths of screaming ocean

of Cyberspace keeps preying on and stifling human existence.

13 Pengo became notoriously known as a West Berlin hacker who got engaged in smuggling confidential materials to KGB (Haffner & Markoff; Part Two).

Afterthought O Brave soul! O farther, farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail! (Walt Whitman in Passage to India)

The world as we know it today will not be here tomorrow. We are fastest-changing

generation in human history and the list of superlatives could go on. Undoubtedly, we have

achieved, at least compared to any previous human generation, a dizzying lot of understanding of

the natural habitat around us. The path in front of us, however, can never come to its end.

Through our inquisitive, imaginary and self-transcending mental capacity, this most

characterizing ability of humans, we have been shaping our present and future time immemorial.

In this work I have tried to discuss utopianism and its undisputable role in what we have

become. A pervert denial of its vitality and importance is a clear sign of resignation on life as

such. Indeed, this work has not been meant to be a courier of doom messages. Although the

static times of the past in which classical Utopias envisioning ideal societies of plenty for

everyone on the expense of individual freedom emerged, time has become fluid and so have our

societies. Utopia, or better the inquisitive “radical imagination” projecting itself into the strive for

our immediate potentialities, must reflect this also. Everything in our universe seems to be in

constant motion so why should it be different with our evolution?

In Part One we saw that utopian thought has been indulging in wide, critical interest on

the part of many fields of human experience. Many scientific domains as well as artistic

movements have appropriated the underlying elements of domination, hope, escape and desire

inherent in utopianism (Chapter 1). We also discussed utopian thought as the “emanciaption of

human experience” and its driving force in relation to progress (Chapter 2). It does not surprise

then that I concluded, in Chapter 3) proclaiming utopian dreaming as vital and inherent to

human individuals.

In Part Two we went through a lengthy discussion of the today burgeoning cyberspace

domain. If the Internet as a material dimension is a kind of “scaffolding” (Chapter 4), then the

newly-emerging digital 3D worlds – as well as and the virtual reality industry sector –

mushrooming across the Net are future dwellings of ever increasing numbers of humans

(Chapter 5). On the other hand, this new, thriving domain of “radical imagination” of Cyberspace

with all it takes, is promising as well as formidable in ways until now envisioned only by Science

Fiction writer of the past centuries. It should not be issued a bianco cheque. Cyberspace, indeed,

is the latest of “playgrounds” of human imagination, a new tool as to which direction we could

push our species into. Examples of human abuse of cyberspace in the form of “escape” on the

Net (subchapter 5.3), as well as sparkling human creativity – transcending itself, seeking beyond

the self – can be found all around the Internet. In this part I also suggested the relevance of

“boundaries” or xenophopia in general to the age-old notion of what human societies consider as

“real” as well as to human imagination as such (subchapter 5.2). We also witnessed to the fact

that the concept of “collective intelligence”, so much enhanced due to the modern technologies,

is nothing “esoteric” and until today invisible in a society (Chapter 6).

In the last part we looked upon the promise of “direct democracy” and politics in real

time. At the end of industrial era, or what Alvin Toffler calls the Second Wave, the representative

political system of the masses suitably equipped for the past two centuries is no longer flexible

enough to address dramatic changes in economy as well as multi-cultural and multi-ethnic

western societies of today. It may take decades now before old paradigms on which yesteryear

societies were built and operated effectively give way to the pragmatics of the “knowledge

economy” and “economy of human skills”.

In the last chapter I presented a short survey of literary cyberpunk vision of future world

as seen through William Gibson’s Neuromancer. We were also introduced to the cultural aspect of

cyberpunk, “hacking” and in general life on the Net as seen by many cyberians. Although they

were not discussed, for this is a (dys)utopian vision that may or may not come to its realization in

rather a distant future, the vision of merging humans with machines in symbiotic supra-

organisms is one plausible, cyberian extrapolation to be realized. However, this latest frontier on

the quest into “nowhere” will have to be addressed by a wide consensus.

Maybe not so far from now, then, it is quite likely, and the present development in bio

sciences gives every indication of it, we will be faced with a fundamental, highly ethical dilemma

as to what we want us to become. It may not be the end of human species, something that

Huxley meant by the “revolutionary revolution”, but probably of humanity the way we

understand it. Maybe evolution of our species was, after all, a conscious progress towards some

higher state of being and the latest technology – the computer – will be apt to bridge this gap.

Any such irrevocable decision will ideally, however, be addressed by as many future cyberians

connected to the life on the Net as possible.

If our scientific forefathers built the foundations of scientific knowledge, we are now in

an accelerated process of engineering the construction of it, and future earthlings will inhabit the

new shrine or tomb of cyberspace. Only time will show what future brings as we have now

stepped on a radically different soil of human experience. And so maybe it should not appeal to

us what possible future brings but much rather to try focusing on the process leading towards it.

The best form of utopia is, arguably, a very private one – that is seeking our immediate potentials

now and here, be it in the physical world around us or in future “alternate realities” of computer-

generated virtual worlds. Whether this is a death rattle to literary utopian blueprints of the past

geographical space of our planet is highly plausible now as the future generations may awaken to

a world where people live their private “utopias” (that is “self-transcending” cyberian

explorations heading towards a “better way of life”) inhabiting islands in the vast ocean of

Cyberspace matrix. The future utopian writers will be the computer programmers building our

private shrines from ones and zeros.

Let me conclude, then, that maybe for many a fearful time is arriving soon. And maybe a time is

coming that many free-spirited adherents will embrace with heavenly bliss. But either way, it will

be a time when “radical imagination” within us, that freedom to choose our destiny and

consciously shape our future, will not cease to exist, but will drive us even further, towards

horizons of human experience yet unimagined.

Bibliography

Print Sources

o Aukstakalnis Steve, Blatner David. Reálně o virtuální realitě. Brno: Jota, 1994.

o Krishnan, Bharathi: Aspect of Strucutre, Technique and Quest in Aldous Huxley’s Major Novels.

Uppsala University Press, 1977.

o Braund, Mark. The Possibility of Progress. London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2005.

o Brunel, Pierre: Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes. London: Routledge, 1996.

o Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Acebooks, 1984.

o Camus, Albert. Člověk revoltující. Praha : Český spisovatel, 1995.

o Gilbert, Alan.“What then?” in Melzner A. M., Weinberger J., Zimann M. R.. History and the

Idea of Progress. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.

o Glenn, Jerome C.. Stav budoucnosti: vybrané kapitoly z let 1997-2007. Olomouc: Univerzita

Palackého, 2007.

o Hafner Katie, Markoff John. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New

York: Touchstone, 1991.

o Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Row, 1946.

o Kagarlickij, Julij. Fantastika, utopie, antiutopie. Praha: Panorama, 1982.

o Kapuściński, Ryszard: Impérium. Praha: Ivo Železný, 1995.

o Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1991.

o Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1997.

o Lévy, Pierre. Kyber kultura. Praha: Karolinum, 2000.

o Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias New York: Viking Press, 1962.

o Orwell, George. Critical Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, 1946.

o Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Vol. 1. New York: 1968.

o Poldervaart Saskia, Jansen Harrie & Kesler Beatrice (eds.). Contemporary Utopian Struggles:

Communities between modernism and postmodernism. Amsterdam: Askant Academic publishers,

2001.

o Postman, Neil: Ubavitt se k smrti. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1999.

o Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-generated Artificial

Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society. New York: Touchstone, 1991.

o Rushkoff, Douglas. Kyberie. Život v kyberprostoru. Praha: SPVČ, 1999.

o Sekelj Laslo, Tomek Václav. Anarchism, Comunnity and Utopia. Praha: Filosofický ústav AV

ČR, 1993.

o Slusser, George, Shippey Tom (eds.). Fiction 2000. Athens, Georgia: The University of

Georgia Press, 1991.

o Stephanides Stephanos, Bassnett Susan. Beyond the Floating Islands. Bologna: COTEPRA,

2002.

o Todorov, Tvetzan. Facing the Extreme: The Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. London:

Phoenix, 2000.

o Toffler Alvin, Tofflerová Heidi. Nová civilizace: Třetí vlna a její důsledky. Praha: Dokořán,

2001.

o Tschorn Robert, Sterling Bruce. Zrcadlovky: cyberpunková antologie. Plzeň: Laser, 2000.

o Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose. New York: 1950. (Path: Calamus; Passage

to India)

o Zamjatin, Jevgenij. My. Praha: Odeon, 1989.

Online Sources

o “A compact vision of co-intelligence.” The Co-intelligence Institute. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-compactCIvision.html>

o “A Rape in Cyberspace.” Wikipedia. 8 Feb 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace>

o Barras, Colin. “Matrix-style virtual worlds ‘a few years away’.” The New Scientist.

3 Apr 2008. 15 Apr 2008. <http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn13585-

matrixstyle-virtual-wolds-a-few-years-away.html>

o Bishop, Jonathan.”Does internet addiction exit?” Jonathan Bishop; Weblog. 3 Sept 2005.

17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.jonathanbishop.com/Web/Weblog/Display.asp?NoID=99&MID=1&NI

D=59&SID=&Item=75>

o “Brain in a Vat.” Wikipedia. 22 Mar 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat>

o “Brief Biography of Jaron Lanier.” Jaron Lanier; Bio. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.jaronlanier.com/general.html>

o “Bruce Bethke.” Wikipedia. 31 Mar 2008. 20 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bethke>

o “Community Standards.” Second life. 16 Apr 2008.

<http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php>

o Coyle, Diane. “The Wightless World.” 16 Apr 2008.

<http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/weightlessworld.pdf>

o Dibell, Julian. “Rape in Cyberspace.” 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html>

o Doctorow, Cory. “Korea’s Internet ‘addiction’ boot-camps.” Boinboing. 18 Nov 2007.

17 Apr 2008. <http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/18/koreas-internet-addi.html>

o “Gaia hypothesis.” Wikipedia. 15 Apr 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis>

o Glenn, Jerome C.. Stav budoucnosti: vybrané kapitoly z let 1997-2007. Olomouc:

Univerzita Palackého, 2007.

o “Grateful Dead.” Wikipedia. 17 Apr 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_dead>

o Hauner, Adam. Home page; Index. 15 Apr 2008. <http://fractals.hauner.cz/index>

o Hillary, Putnam. “Brains in a Vat.” 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/ph29a/putnam.html>

o “Internet addiction nonsense hits the AJP.” Min Hacks; Blog. 19 Mar 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/03/internet_addiction_n.html>

o Martin. “Vítejte na portále www.secondlife.cz.” Second life.cz; Home. 15 Mar 2007.

15 Apr 2008. <http://www.secondlife.cz/vitejte-na-portale-www-secondlife-cz>

o Mc Kenna, Barbara. “Talking technology: A Q&A with the inventor of virtual reality.”

10 Jan 2000. 19 Apr 2008. <http://currents.ucsc.edu/99-00/01-10/lanier.html>

o MIT Center for Collective Intelligence; Research Overview. 18 Apr 2008.

<http://cci.mit.edu/research/index.html>

o More Definitions of Co-Intelligence. The Co-intelligence Institute. 19 Apr 2008.

<http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-moreCIdefs.html>

o “MUD.” Wikipedia; Home page. 13 Apr 2008. 19 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD>

o “Noosphere.” Wikipedia. 15 Apr 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere>

o “Paul Baran.” Wikipedia. 3 Apr 2008. 16 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_baran>

o “Pierre Lévy.” Wikipedia. 16 Feb 2008. 18 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Levy>

o “Principles of Extropy.” Extropy institute. 2003. 20 Apr 2008.

<http://www.extropy.org/principles.htm>

o “Psychiatric Comorbidity of Internet Addiction in College Students: An Interview Study.”

CNS Spectrums 2008;13(2):147-153. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.cnsspectrums.com/aspx/articledetail.aspx?articleid=1447>

o “RAND.” Wikipedia. 11 Apr 2008. 19 Apr 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rand>

o “Research Overview.” MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. 17 Apr 2008.

<www.cci.mit.edu/research/>

o “Second life.” Wikipedia. 18 Apr 2008. 18 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life>

o Smith, David. “Addiction to internet ‘is an ilness’.” The Guardian online. 23 Aug 2008.

17 Apr 2008. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/23/news.internet

o Škrob, Petr. “Vznik, rozvoj a perspektivy virtuální reality.” 15 Apr 2008.

<http://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/jkucera/pv109/2000/skrob.html>

o “Ten Qualities of Co-intelligence.” The Co-intelligence Institute; Ten Qualities of Co-intelligence.

8 Apr 2008. <http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-10qualitiesofCI.html>

o “The Gaia Hypothesis.” Mountainman; Home. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://www.mountainman.com.au/gaia.html>

o ”The Possibility of Progress.” 19 Apr 2008.

<http://www.markbraund.com/mark_braund/more-about->t.html>

o Traum, M. J.. “Second Life: A virtual universe for real engineering.” Design News.

22 Oct 2007. 15 Apr 2008.

<http://www.designnews.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6490691>

o Turnbull, James. “Internet Addiction in Korea: A back door to Korean acceptance

of psychotherapy?” Posted in Korean Children and Teenagers, Korean Education,

Korean Internet and Television. 6 Jan 2008. The Grand Narrative. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://thegrandnarrative.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/internet-addiction-in-korea-an-

alternate-route-to-korean-acceptance-of-psychotherapy/>

o “Turing Test.“ Wikipedia. 13 Apr 2008. 19 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Test#Variations_of_the_Turing_test>

o Vyuk, Brian. “The Influence of Paul Baran on the Development of the Internet.”

Infohatter. 15 Apr 2008. <http://www.infohatter.com/node/4>

o “What is Conscious Evolution?” Barbara Max Hubbard; What is Conscious Evolution?. 18

Apr 2008. <http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com/?q=node/8>

o “William Gibbson.” Wikipedia. 17 Apr 2008. 19 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_gibson>

o Wilson D. S., Wilson E. O.. “Survival of the Selfless.” The New Scientist. 3 Nov 2007.

5 Apr. 2008. <http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19125691.500>

o “World of Warcraft.” Wikipedia; Controversy and Critisism. 17 Apr 2008. 17 Apr 2008.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Of_Warcraft#cite_note-66>

o Žižek, Slavoj. “Nobody Has to Be vile.” London Review of Books. 6 Apr 2006. 18 Apr 2008.

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/zize01_.html>