From: david@c-cat.UUCP (Dave)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: John P. Barlow Article in Microtimes Magazine pt. 4 of 5
Date: 24 Jan 93 23:34:48 GMT
Organization: Intergalactic Rest Area For Weary Travellers


                        Jerry Garcia

Knowing that Garcia is a sucker for anything which might make a 
person question all he knows, I gave him a call not long after my first 
cyberspace demo.  Hell yes, he was interested.  When?  If I'd told him 
6:00 AM, I think he'd have been there on time.

He adapted to it quicker than anyone I'd watched other than my 4 year 
old daughter Anna (who came home and told her sisters matter-of-
factly that she been to a neat "place" that afternoon.)  

By the time he crossed back over to our side of Reality Horizon, he was 
pretty kid-like himself.  "Well," he finally said, "they outlawed LSD.  
It'll be interesting to see what they do with this."

Which brings me to a point which makes Jaron Lanier very 
uncomfortable.  The closest analog to Virtual Reality in my experience 
is psychedelic, and, in fact, cyberspace is already crawling with 
delighted acid heads.

The reason Jaron resents the comparison is that it is both inflammatory 
(now that all drugs are evil) and misleading.  The Cyberdelic 
Experience isn't like tripping, but it is as challenging to describe to the 
uninitiated and it does force some of the same questions, most of them 
having to do with the fixity of reality itself.  

While you can hardly expect people to lay down $15,000 for something 
just because it shakes their basic tenets, that's enough to make it worth 
the trip for me.  I think the effort to create convincing artificial realities 
will teach us the same humbling lesson about reality which artificial 
intelligence has taught us about intelligence...namely, that we don't 
know a damned thing about it.    

I've never been of the cut-and-dried school on your Reality Question.  I 
have a feeling VR will further expose the conceit that "reality" is a fact.  
It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between 
the world outside and the world within delivering another major hit to 
the old fraud of objectivity.  RTReal'," as Kevin Kelly put it, "is going to 
be one of the most relative words we'll have." 

And that's just fine with me, since so much of what's wrong in 
America is based on the pathological need for certainty and the idiotic 
delusion that such a condition can even exist.

Another reason for relating this to acid is the overwhelming sense of its 
cultural scale.  It carries with it a cosmic titillation I haven't 
experienced since 1966.  There is also the same dense shower of 
synchronicities surrounding it.  (I must have run into William and 
Meredith Bricken ten times, always unexpectedly and sometimes in the 
strangest of places.  Today, as I was typing his name, Jaron called me 
for the first time in three weeks.  Then I felt strangely moved to call 
Eric Gullichson after a couple of months of silence.  He told me that 
yesterday had been his last day at Autodesk.  Etc. Etc. Etc.)  
     
Finally, Timothy Leary is all excited again.  Now I don't endow every 
one of his pronouncements with oracular qualities...I remember the 
Comet Starseed... but I have always thought that Uncle Tim is kind of 
like a reverse of the canary in the coal mine.  Whenever the culture is 
about to make a big move, he's the first canary to start jumping up and 
down.  

He's also, like Zelig, a kind of Zeitgeist chameleon.  He spent the 40's in 
the Army.  In the 50's, he was a tweedy young college professor, a 
Jules Feiffer cartoon.  In the 60's, he was, well, Timothy Leary.  In the 
70's, he became, along with H. R. Haldeman, a political prisoner.  He 
lived up the material 80's in Beverly Hills.  Whatever America is about 
to do, Tim starts doing it first.  

When I visited him recently, he was already as cyberpunk as he had 
been psychedelic when I last saw at Millbrook 22 years ago.  Still, his 
current persona seems reasonable, even seraphic.  He calmly scored a 
long list of persuasive points, the most resonant of which is that most 
Americans have been living in Virtual Reality since the proliferation of 
television.  All cyberspace will do is make the experience interactive 
instead of passive. 

"Our brains are learning how to exhale as well as inhale in the data-
sphere." he said.  Like our finny ancestors crawling up on land, we are 
about to be come amphibians again, equally at home in visceral and 
virtual frames. 

The latest bus is pulling out of the station.  As usual, Leary has been on 
it for a while, waiting patiently for it to depart.

      

Then there is the...uhhhm...sexual thing.  I have been through eight or 
ten Q. & A. sessions on Virtual Reality and I don't remember one 
where sex didn't come up.  As though the best thing about all this will 
be the infinite abundance of shaded polygonal party dolls.  As though 
we are devising here some fabulously expensive form of Accu-jac.  

This is strange.  I don't what to make of it, since, as things stand right 
now, nothing could be more disembodied or insensate than the 
experience of cyberspace.  It's like having had your everything 
amputated.  You're left mighty under-endowed and any partner 
would be so insubstantial you could walk right through her without 
either of you feeling a thing.  (In fact, when people play tag in Jaron's 
Reality Built for Two, one strategy is to hide inside the other person's 
head.)

And I did overhear the word "DataCondom" at one point...  Maybe the 
nerds who always ask this question will get a chance to make it with 
their computers at long last.  (I prefer not to think too much of how 
anyone who would want to make it with a machine might treat the 
women in their lives...if any there be.)

Fortunately, I think these dreams of cybersex will be thwarted by their 
own realization.  Yes, it will work for that purpose and it will be easy.  
But the real point of Virtual Reality, as with life itself, is contact.  
Contact with oneself alone is certainly a laudable enough goal, but the 
presence of half a million dollars worth of equipment between that 
subject and object is neither necessary nor desirable.

Even if Virtual Reality turns out to provide the format for the ultimate 
pornographic film...a "feelie" with a perfect body...it will serve us 
better as the ultimate telephone.     



Life in the DataCloud
Scratching Your Eyes Back In

There was a man who lived in town
And he was wondrous wise.
He jumped into a bramble bush
And scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done,
With all his might and main,
He jumped back in the bramble bush
And scratched them in again.

                                Old English Nursery Rhyme 
Information is alienated experience.