Lost in Cyberspace?

    Dateline. Sydney. 1 January 2000.

    President of Australia, Ted Mack cancels the Olympics, and instead
    Sydney becomes the information hub of the first world
    "Virtual Olympics". No extra pollution, traffic
    congestion or beer-swilling yobos! Athletes left to compete in
    their own city, make every use of the "home-town"
    advantage. With complete geographic equality through virtual
    reality, token geopolitical gestures become a thing of the
    past.

Information highways are clogged, bursting with bits, pushing the Shannon capacity to the absolute limit. Voices and images ricochet along delicate filigrees of optic fibres. Like waterfalls, plunging data steams, cascade into the sensorium of the cyberspace net, which has extended its tentacle-like arms across the continents. McLuhan's global village realised. Interacting over the cybernet, virtual communities of like-minded individuals, cluster, accrete, split and reproduce, a parody of cellular meiosis.

The mechanistic, Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm is finally shed by mainstream science, allowing a renaissance of ideas. Mathematics, physics and biology are united through a far-reaching synthesis of Sheldrake's morphic resonance, chaos theory and Bohm's `holographic' quantum mechanics. Reductionism, mechanism and vivisection are in the past. Holism and nonlinear rules, OK!

C.P. Snow's "two cultures" division of science and art dissolves. Doing science and doing art become indistinguishable activities. Computer `morphing' becomes completely analogous to investigating reality, and are published in established scientific journals. Computer simulations and experimental results rub shoulders with Chagall and Mappellthorpe in the better galleries.

No pop song is longer than ten seconds: samples, loops and digital production achieves the equivalent density of music to the traditional three-and-a-half-minute song. Max Headroom's "blipverts" are a reality, compressing advertising into microsecond bursts delicately inserted into the slipstream of the TV signal. The avant-garde of art and music are absorbed into the advertising industry, which is dedicated to searching the fringe for new ideas for Coca-Cola ads.

The popularity of interactive, customised spiritual savants (the ideal confessional device!) and designer "spiritual stratosphere" drugs leads to the disintegration of organised religion. Churches and temples are turned into industrial music clubs and theme parks.

Far-off speculation or near-future extrapolation?

Well, a bit of both, really. There is no denying the all-pervasive influence of technology on our everyday lives. Through television, radio and music, technology is fast replacing economics as Adam Smith's "invisible hand". So just how well-grounded is the rather surreal picture of the world of 2000 I have just painted?

The "plumbing" for "cyberspace" is already being laid through the Australian Academic Research Network, which is the local branch of the global "Internet". Plans are in the works to extend the existing text-only facility to a service including teleconferencing, video and voice. In the last five years the number of world-wide Internet "sites" has grown from around 10,000 to well over a million.

A conceptual re-think in many areas of science from physics to anthropology is pointing to a new understanding of nature in terms of `wholes' rather than `parts'. The fields of complexity theory and artificial life are the vanguard of this new world-view. Artists, always charting the realms of the unexplored, are also engaged in new dialogues with the world of science. The Third International Symposium on Electronic Art held in Sydney last year, proved that computer art such as fractals are of aesthetic, as well as scientific, interest. Myron W. Krueger, the keynote speaker, observed: "The intent to communicate must drive technology rather than be a prisoner of it. Now when technology has affect as well as effect, it is important that artists participate in its invention".

The relative cheapness of the technology and the ease of information dissemination makes Krueger's democratisation a real possibility. Control of the machine needs to be seized now. These issues are too far too important to be left in the hands of big institutions: federal agencies, multinationals, Telecom or Optus. Nor should they be the exclusive province of the experts: engineers, politicians or media specialists. Big decisions involving technology must come from the grass-roots level.

Whether our future becomes a nightmare out-take of Blade Runner or Videodrome or a new chapter of Neuromancer, largely depends on us. If we don't, we may not be able to chant along with Peter Finch in Hollywood's brilliant 1970s spoof of American television news, Network: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore"

$Date: 2000/07/24 11:05:34 $	Home
Copyright © 1996-2002 Alex Lancaster.