Nature and Cyber space

In March 1993 at the SCI-ARC School of Architecture in Los Angeles, a student posed a question to Jaron Lanier, the famous entrepreneur or Virtual Reality. “How,” the student asked, “will VR enhance architecture.” The stocky genius smiled, ran a hand through dangling dreadlocks, and responded enthusiastically: “VR allows us to embellish computer-generated buildings with wonderful enhancements. Users can decorate electronic environments with dazzling colors and sign them with fun designs.” Lanier went on to say that the physical dwellings of the future would probably be cheap, dull, unadorned shelters generated by robot factories to put no-frills roofs over the heads of an overpopulated humanity. To compensate for the squalid physical surroundings, VR would provide habitations for interactive personal expression and aesthetic enjoyment. Lanier described a future in which cyberspace offers solace for the loss of natural, livable, environmental space. Lanier’s provocative mix of enthusiasm and pessimism supports many critics who attack cyberspace as a fatal form of escape. Chapter 2 showed us some of the critics who stand on the ground of naive realism. For them, virtual identities diminish physical identities. If we look, in fact, more closely at the naïve realists, we find an anxiety about the physical ground on which they stand. The firm ground the critics feel themselves standing on actually covers an underlying sinkhole. The nature to which the critics appeal has in recent years been threatened. A large cavity gapes in the human attachment to nature. Naïve realists want to protect reality from cyberspace, but they are not so sure about how deeply we are still attached to nature. Virtual reality seems to wean us from spontaneous affection toward mother nature where our birthright seems to shrink more every day. Is VR a consolation for the lost charms of natural things? Isn’t such a cyberspace a grand delusion, an electronic Tower of Babel? Is virtual reality an escapist opium for blocking the pain of planetary loss? Many of the metaphors we use today for computers suggest escapism. The “net” and the “web” are metaphors. We can be caught by these metaphors if we’re not careful.