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BS ‘n’ About…
Cyberspace
There is a museum in Phoenix located in a turn-of-the-century frontier home. Sitting astride two eras, its garage holds both autos and carriages, its rooms both candelabra and electric lights. Were its occupants prepared for the sweeping changes brought about by the newfangled gadgets decorating their lives? Are we?
The Information Age is in full swing. Has anyone asked ‘What comes next?’ Barring catastrophe or major war, a good bet would be that the next great leap comes with full-scale, mind blowing virtual reality.
Meet an old girlfriend in Paris. Climb Mt. Everest. Boff your favorite sitcom star. Never leave the house. This is probably a very bad thing.
The Internet will prove to be the most incredible advance mankind has ever made, replacing the telephone and the television, the office and the classroom, the library and the legislature. It will be at the core of the rest of our existence as a species.
And look at what we’re doing with it: selling get rich quick schemes and naked pictures. Seeking the lowest common denominator. Targeting the basest of desires. It’s television all over again.
The Tube’s downfall was giving program control to the Almighty Ratings, toilet paper conglomerates, and Madison Avenue boys. With that control went the ability to do anything adventurous or unbiased. What sells? Sex, greed, & envy. Violence, lust, & guilt.
At its core, television is a multibillion dollar industry in the business of keeping us on the sofa long enough to influence our consumer choices. It is never in television’s best interest for us to turn it off. It doesn’t want us to ‘get a life’.
The American Dream of hearth, home, and family has been replaced with an unquenchable desire to Be like Mike. Our hopes, our dreams, our very lives seem so mundane when compared with the vicarious thrills of the Tube.
We’ve proven we can’t handle the allure of television. Hours we used to spend talking and reading, singing and dancing, walking and swimming, thinking and writing, we now spend on the sofa. We no longer know our neighbors. We no longer need them. We have TV.
How are we ever going to handle a virtual reality Net? For $39.95 we can BE Mike. We can DO whomever. Cyberlife will be infinitely richer and more interesting than real life, so much so that many of us, make that MANY of us, will find little corners of cyberspace in which to hide out from the world.
The potential for psychological addiction may make reality a rather tenuous concept by next Millennium. Invest in IV and diaper companies. Virtual Reality is coming. …and when it gets here we will be just a little less human for it, having turned into the cyborgs of our storytellers. Download love. Upload immortality. Bio-engineered schizophrenia.
Allowing cyberspace to be dictated by a free market economy is an invitation to disaster. We risk rending the very fabric that holds us together. There is just way too much profit in things that are bad for us.
The Net is going to impact us in ways we have yet to imagine. We can’t let it advance with nothing more noble than greed behind it. Imagine the world today if, 50 years ago, nuclear technology had been open to the free market. Imagine utter chaos.
And there are some very unsettling aspects about the whole Internet business anyway. The Internet, with a capital ‘I’, started a few years ago when access rates went from $2 a minute to $20 a month. Usage went up a bizillionfold overnight and, for the most part, the apparatus was there waiting for us, ready and raring to go. It was as if a 1000 store mall had been built in the backyard and you didn’t find out about it until opening day. Doesn’t it seem like there is a BIG untruth there somewhere?
And everywhere you turn some techie is proclaiming ‘No one owns the Net!’ Yet every inch of phone line, satellite, and cyberspace is owned by some big company. With technology as it is, and governments as they are, censorship is a foregone conclusion, invasion of privacy a given. Imagine the potential. AHitler@reichstag.de or JEHoover@fbi.gov would have.
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