You Are Here Page 24

  VIRTUAL DYSTOPIAS

  Though we have, perhaps, never been so close to realizing the technology to make it so, the idea that we can embed our minds into sweeping simulations of space to produce compelling illusions of reality is far from new. The earliest versions of such simulated realities, such as Morton Heilig’s Sensorama, were based on unwieldy mechanical contraptions that did a credible job of lifting the focus of a person’s embodiment from their physical place to a virtual one.14 In the 1980s, when virtual reality helmets and computer technology began to reach the minimal technical standard to have some industrial uses, there was tremendous media interest in the possibility that virtual reality would enter the mainstream as a means of entertainment and communication. Though simulation methods are now commonly used in industry and in the military, the predicted mass consumer rush to this new technology never took place. Many of the reasons for this have been technological—there is still a large gap between what can be shown on tiny screens in front of the eyes and what the real world has to offer. Virtual reality also suffered seriously from overhype. The experience in a virtual reality arcade game at an amusement park fell so far short of expectations generated by the first flush of media reports about this emerging technology that the public lost interest quickly.

  In addition to the practical limitations posed by the problem of presenting consumers with decent-quality immersive experiences in virtual worlds, certain psychological factors were at play, and continue to lurk in the popular consciousness. William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and the popular series of Matrix movies by the Wachowski brothers all present bleak visions of a future in which technology allows us to build virtual spaces that are indistinguishable from physical ones. In each of these cases, and in many others, we are given glimpses of dystopic worlds in which parallel virtual universes are used like weapons to produce mass delusions that crush the human spirit, or in which the virtual worlds we create become forums for the exercise of our basest impulses, untrammeled by the normal mores of social conduct and even freed from the operation of physical law. Optimistic visions of how virtual realities might enhance our lives are remarkably rare. In fact, even in Second Life, a low-immersion virtual space that is being marketed aggressively by mainstream media as the harbinger of a new way of using virtual embodiment to communicate, have fun, and do business, a seamy side appears to be emerging. Children must be sequestered on their own servers with stringent controls lest they be stalked. In a simulation of a Darfur refugee camp designed to raise consciousness of a real-world horror, self-styled superhero vigilantes have had to organize themselves to protect the camp from raids by apparent by racist groups intent on vandalism and hateful graffiti.15

  Though his pungent criticism of the effects of rapid information transmission transcends virtual reality and includes any form of communication that collapses space, French philosopher Paul Virilio warns us forebodingly of the impact on human relations and power politics when all space collapses to a single point and when everything happens simultaneously.16 One of the greatest consequences of such technologies, already well under way, is that the power of one group over another will come to be dominated by what we can see rather than by where we are.

  The hegemony of glimpses can be seen in the way wars are now conducted. Whenever possible, battles are conducted from the air. Occupying a territory can often mean being able to see it from overhead, by satellite or by high-altitude drone that can aim cruise missiles, or via gigantic surveillance planes such as the AWACS. Though bombs may still drop from planes, often the threat of bombs will be enough to control territory. Because our eyes can be placed anywhere in an instant, all walls have dropped and we can both possess and be possessed by sight alone.

  This might not seem like an entirely negative point of view. A vision of warfare with soldiers writhing together in mud and blood could be replaced by one composed of nothing more than dueling electronic eyes, but it must be remembered that those few who control the stares will still command the lives of the masses of people living on the planetary surface. The main difference will be that power relationships, like fleeting rainbows in the sky, can be cast and recast in an instant. The dystopic vision of our future is one in which all six billion of us are trapped huddling on a tiny, globe-sized dot of space, tangled up among the views of a mass of powerful, all-seeing eyes that control our fate remotely and instantaneously, but without ever really touching us.

  The dystopic visions of philosophers, artists, filmmakers, and writers should not necessarily be construed as dooming us to a future filled with techno-gloomy realpolitik, but there is no question that the technologies I have discussed in this chapter, along with many others that are on the way (quantum computing and nanotechnology, to name two), have the potential to produce revolutionary changes in our lives. Many of these developments are possible not just because our species has a clever mind for inventing gadgets but also because we possess a perceptual and cognitive architecture that has so far found ways to cope with the fragmentations of space that those gadgets have brought about.

  Understanding how we are affected by these transformations in how we live in space is perhaps no less urgent than the challenges presented by climate change. We know from our history that, all calls for prudent forethought notwithstanding, whatever we can make, we will make. The onus is on today’s bright thinkers in science, the humanities, and the arts to try to anticipate and influence for the better the products of our digital constructions.

  CHAPTER 11

  GREENSPACE

  HOW THE FEATURES OF OUR SPATIAL BRAIN

  INFLUENCE OUR CONNECTIONS TO, AND NEGLECT OF,

  OUR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

  I am at two with nature.

  WOODY ALLEN

  As we crossed a parking lot, my wife and I watched the driver of a parked car roll down his window, toss the wrappers from his fast-food lunch onto the pavement, and then close his window again. Karen, in the kind of gesture that I have come to know very well and to love without limit (in spite of the constant risk that she will cause me to have my head broken), picked up the pile of trash and rapped on his window. When he lowered it, she passed the bag back to him and asked him to take it with him or to find a garbage bin to put it in. He was knocked off balance, which may be what saved me from a broken nose. He took back the bag without comment and drove away. I’m not sure how much time he spent thinking about this episode, or whether he tossed his garbage out the window again as soon as he had turned the corner. But I do know that this simple transaction preoccupied Karen and me for quite some time. I still think about it and tell people the story, because I think the man’s actions have a larger meaning. It would be easy to write him off as an asocial ignoramus, but there is much evidence that what we saw was not an isolated or unprecedented incident.

  We’ve all seen garbage strewn along the edges of highways and in the gutters of city streets. Although we might like to think that some of this mess is accidental—papers blow out of doors and windows of vehicles, garbage cans are upset by wind or animals—we know that at least some of it appears because people deliberately throw it on the ground. Where do they think this garbage goes? It may be that they just don’t think about it at all. Such behavior is a small sign of the way that we mentally divide spaces into inside spaces and outside spaces, treating the boundaries between the two as though they are absolute and impossible to breach. How different is my own behavior when I toss a bag of trash by the side of the curb without a second thought? We have a broad expectation that such things will be “taken care of,” where as far as we’re concerned, this “care” is more a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.”

  Modern Western houses, with their steel, dead-bolted doors and thermal windows, may be a recent invention beyond the reach of most of the world’s population, but efforts to build dwellings that enclose, separate, and protect us are as old as any human fossilized remains that we have ever found. Though the walls
of our houses are intended to protect us from harsh climates and to afford some privacy, they also have the consequence of erecting an impermeable mental barrier between the interior and the exterior spaces of our world.

  As the planet careens toward environmental catastrophe, we are bombarded daily with messages designed to wake us up to the imminent risk that we may exterminate ourselves, along with most other life on the planet. Yet when we hear the word environment, we are overwhelmingly likely to think of a natural setting—a forest, a meadow, a range of mountains. In our minds, there is such a cleft between these exterior spaces and the interiors of our homes, offices, and factories that it interferes with our ability to appreciate the urgency of our situation for what it is. Just as the fellow in the parking lot was able to toss his trash out of his car window and excise the problem from his own mind, we behave as though the “problem” of the environment affects only those pristine outdoor settings and has no bearing on the interiors in which we spend most of our lives. Because spaces are completely separated by enclosures, we have difficulty connecting the warm security of our living rooms with the toxic foam floating down a river in the parkland just outside our doors.

  I believe that our inability to make connections between different types of space—the indoors and the outdoors, the urban and the rural—has a basis in the makeup of the human mind and the way that we engage with space. We handle the immediately visible spaces before us very well, but our mental understanding of how those spaces are connected to the larger realms beyond our purview is fuzzy at best.

  Concerns about the state of the environment have been with us for a long time. When I was growing up in the 1960s, I well remember the alarming descriptions of air pollution and the devastation of the waters of the Great Lakes in North America. It seemed as though every newscast brought messages of doom and gloom sufficiently urgent that I wondered whether I would survive to adulthood or be choked on exhaust fumes and then washed away in a sea of oily lake water. Organizations such as Pollution Probe gave shrill warnings that unless we started to fix things now, the planet would soon be uninhabitable. At the same time, and just as vividly, I remember the soothing reassurances of many of the adults in my life, who told me that “science” would find answers to these problems and that, ultimately, we would all be living underneath giant glass domes, hermetically sealed from the “outside” no matter what devastations might have been wrought there by the errors of the past. In other words, the ultimate solution to environmental destruction would be to shift the lines between inside and outside so that the ambit of our thermostatically controlled living rooms would be extended outward to encompass the nice parks that we would need to play soccer and to have picnics. The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but moving the walls essentially redefines the world for us and so allows us to maintain our current habits and way of life, regardless of what might be happening outside our safe domes.

  WALLING OFF NATURE USING SPACE AND TIME

  It isn’t just the enclosing walls of the built environment that make us feel separated from the natural world. Distortions in the natural relationships between human movement and the scale and aspect of space can also rend the connections between our mind and biological space. When Bruce Chatwin sat in a fast-moving car beside his Australian Aboriginal friend and listened to him try to warble a speeded-up version of a songline that had evolved over thousands of years to match landscape to a man walking through the wilderness, he was hearing a remarkable illustration of the breakdown of the integral relationship between our own movements and our conceptions of space.1 Though our large cities and fast-paced way of life may make them necessary, modern methods of rapid transportation have completely changed the meaning of space. Now, rather than being the main way that we get from one place to another, walking has become a sporadic event, a small punctuation used mostly to convey us from one moving machine to another. We can cope well with these staccato transitions from place to place only because the structure of our mind makes it easy for us to relinquish our grasp on the metric of space, but the distortions that result from such quick movements serve to increase the fragility of our understanding of spatial connections between different parts of the world.

  I often travel by airplane with my children. Recently, I’ve noticed an interesting thing about my toddlers’ experience of flight. As far as I can tell, they have no clear understanding of the purpose of the airplane other than that it is a machine that makes a huge amount of noise and traps them in a space that is slightly too small for their spirit of wanderlust. When they emerge from the plane, the machine has transformed everything. The climate is different, the people often look and sound different, and our home (the hotel) has been radically reorganized. I’m convinced that children at this age have little idea what has really happened to them. Because the movement, gigantic in scope compared with anything else in their experience, was disconnected from their immediate sensory experience, and because they cannot yet understand space on the geographic scale, they apply the simplest explanation: the airplane has stayed in exactly the same place but has magically changed its surroundings. It’s a bit like the famous Holodeck on Star Trek. Though we can smile and nod at their adorable confusion, the reality is that children and adults may not be as different as we think.

  Children can be famously and sometimes hilariously confused about geography, especially in matters of scale, but we adults can be too. Especially when we are transported passively over long distances, it is easy for us to lose any real sense of the scope of space. It is a cliché to say that modern transportation has made the world into a smaller place, but this is exactly what has happened. Not only has the world become smaller but the spatial arrangement of features of the world has become less intelligible to us. This loss of intelligibility has come about in part because there is no longer a reliable connection between the effort that we expend to reach different destinations and their geographic relationship to us. For many journeys that involve flight, the time taken to travel from one’s home to the airport can be greater than the time spent in the air. Intellectually, we are perfectly aware of the explanation for this— airplanes fly very quickly! But in terms of our implicit understanding of the spatial order of things, such distortions serve to loosen our shaky grip on the geometry of the world.

  It might seem that this kind of mischief making with space, making the world seem smaller, should help us to overcome our inability to see the connectedness of different locations on the planet. But exactly the opposite takes place. Because rapid transit decreases the intelligibility of space, we throw up our hands in despair at making sensible spatial connections between things. Rapid transit has made it possible for us to be able to see much more of the planet than would otherwise have been the case—if I can scrape together the cash, I can go and witness firsthand the melting polar ice caps. But I question whether my ability to connect my home with the ice caps by means of an exotic air trip helps me to appreciate the absolute connectedness of the two places. Returning from my Arctic adventure, I don’t arrive home with the feeling that the lines connecting me with the rest of the world are any more direct.

  Given the way that our mind organizes and schematizes space, it is almost inevitable that there will be a harmful and dangerous schism between our inside and our outside worlds. If the parts of our brain that deal with space have strong preferences for enclosed views, and if we patch together a mental collage of space by combining these views, then any time a builder erects a wall, he is influencing our conception of the spaces in which we live. We can’t avoid this by simply running through forests as naked nomads, basking in full-frontal contact with field and stream. But though complete integration with nature may be out of reach for most of us, it doesn’t explain our modern tendency to run in the opposite direction, shunning natural settings for the air-conditioned comfort of our homes. Although our minds may be predisposed to detach us from real space, much more than a psychological predisposition has been at w
ork in driving us from Eden to Gotham.

  Jane Jacobs blames our tendency to insulate ourselves from nature on an impulse born of the European romantic movement, perhaps transported across the Atlantic in the guise of the New England transcendental movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.2 At first, the connection between intellectual movements that cherished emotional contact with wild nature and the current difficulties in our relationship with the environment may be difficult to discern, but Jacobs’s argument was that by raising wild places onto a pedestal, we convinced ourselves that life in our cities had nothing to do with the natural world. An impulse born of the noble desire to find truth in the forest had the result of increasingly polarizing urban and wild places. Whether through televised nature documentaries, urban zoos, or, if we can afford it, air-conditioned safaris through Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, we are taught to cherish nature, but from a distance. Perhaps in part because most of us fear true wilderness, we take nature in small, digestible gulps, contained in boxes, framed by the edges of a television screen, or even rendered in plastic facsimiles like lawn ornaments or fake houseplants. One might argue that in an urban environment this is the best we can do and that it is better than nothing, but underlying this attitude is still the general notion that nature has no place in the city and that only pristine wildernesses completely out of reach of any but the hardiest and most intrepid travelers really “count” as nature. In short, we love nature provided that it keeps to its place—out of our city streets and out of our homes.