Junk Shop of Eternity

Junk Shop of Eternity

Sentimentality is a cute but largely useless trait to possess - and possess it I do. Aesthetics and pragmatics don't stand a chance against But It Was Made Especially For Me or The First One I Ever Bought/Made/Was Given. It isn't that I was brought up to be a materialist, nor that I place value and security in palpability (although many writing about my generation say that we have and do), but is instead based on something that goes beyond the realms of capitalism and being just plain shallow.

The danger, perhaps, is that our understanding, appreciation, and love of Beyond Face Value Worth predates the internet and cloud storage. So does its slightly less sophisticated cousin I Just Really Like It.

In many games, avatars are limited in how much they can carry around with them at any one time, and even when games permit the buying of houses and safety deposit boxes, they are generally used to store items that will, at some point or another, fulfill their purpose and thus vanish from existence. That Second Life is not really a game is pretty well-established, and one of the smaller reasons for this is its deviation from this practical limitation. What I am trying to say is that SL avatars have the potential to be wardrobes-to-Narnia; they can walk around carrying as many things as they like in their inventories, and they don't have to worry about overtaxing their agility or juggling heavy garments with the invisible item bag. The items they carry, too, are rarely of the one-time-use variety. As I write, Kitti has an inventory of 12,384 items, and from conversations with other SL users, I've come to realise how small Kitti's inventory is. 

If a large wardrobe can hold, let's say, 100 items at the outside limit, that means Kitti is effectively carrying around 1,238 wardrobes, all of which lead to Narnia. As Louis said to Lestat, we're making a junk shop of eternity.

If there is a limit on how large Linden Labs allow their user's inventories to be, I have no idea what it is, and it isn't any limit I'm afraid to hit any time soon. Of course, having a large inventory stored somewhere in the internet isn't quite as carefree and easy as it sounds - your computer has to haul up the list of items in your possession and recall all of the pathways that lead to those intangible objects, and this can create a serious amount of lag. But lots of other factors contribute to lag, and they can be overcome by super fast internet connections and super fast computers. And we're not the ones doing the heavy lifting. It's just not the same thing.

The maintenance and curation of our inventories is left entirely up to us, and that's where sentimentality comes into play. As technology develops and the quality of items in SL gets better, how do we balance innovation with sentimentality? How do we manage the deeply capitalist SL system of AcquireAcquireAcquire? 

These thoughts were prompted by, of all things, my virtual cats. Scout and James refused to produce more kittens, and whilst I was getting disappointed about the lack of new cats, I started wondering just how many cats I could fit in my skybox before I lost my temper over tripping over the damn things. And when I logged in this weekend and found almost all of the cats were sick and I had to pay for medicine for them, I realised I had to give the question some serious thought.

When KittyCats get sick, they magic up these little beds and thermometers. They're obviously carrying them around in their own little invisible inventory bags. Since these cats live out of Kitti's inventory, there are bags within bags. Bagception.

But how do I get rid of my virtual cats? I feel highly sentimental about them, for no real reason I can rationalise, and at the moment at least, I can navigate about half of the skybox without tripping over one and going cartwheeling into the wall. 

Where do I draw the line? And then, once done, how do I process the guilt of it?

Don't Nuke Our Cyberspace, Bro!

collective hallucination

I have begun reading a book, Technobiophilia, Nature and Cyberspace by Sue Thomas, and although I haven't read very much yet, it is really interesting. Interesting enough to send me scurrying back here to take screenshots of Kitti in space-soldier gear in the multi-coloured sensation that is the bar at Hangars Liquides.

Thomas cites John Perry Barlow's 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, as discussing how 'the notion of the disembodiment of cyberspace got mixed up with mysticism and LSD for a while',  and goes on to say that the term 'cyberspace' itself has long been out of fashion, except with the military, 'where it represents a potential combat area'. In 2011, the US Department of Defense issued a document entitled a Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, the purpose of which, as I understand it, was to encourage a full use of cyberspace for offensive and defensive purposes. In the foreword (these documents have forewords?!), Barack Obama wrote 'the digital world is no longer a lawless frontier' - but does not go on to say what the virtual world now is.

Thomas goes on to say that the internet, the World Wide Web, cyberspace, the whole lot, has deep roots in nature: 'the bramble of interwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle'.

And that's it - that's what I'm getting at, getting into. In a few short pages of this book, a wonderfully terrible and frightening and empowering image of cyberspace, of the virtual world, as being something strange and dangerous and other has materialised. And it is complicated by Thomas' definition of cyberspace as being something that exists only in the mind - so this strange dangerous otherness becomes something we carry around in our heads.

Are you still with me? Maybe this is a bit self-indulgent, but hang in there.

There's a series of episodes of South Park in which the boys have to try to convince the military not to nuke the world's imagination after the imagination has been taken hostage by terrorists. The imagination becomes a battleground, and, in true South Park style the military do, of course, nuke it, and Santa has to save the day. I'm not sure that Santa is going to come and save us if our cyberspace gets nuked.

And doesn't it seem all-too-organic that cyberspace would be associated with LSD and hippydom, since it is a potential space of threat to the US Government? The opposition is almost funny.

What it seems to boil down to is vagueness. We don't yet know, truly, the limits of cyberspace. There are so many dark and shady places online, and in them lurk things most of us couldn't even dream up on an LSD trip. But the worst thing is that it, as a space, is organised. There are groups and hierarchies and networks along which pass all kinds of information in all kinds of formats. Very recently, people have met in cyberspace to organise, and then to conduct, riots and revolutions on grand scales. Is it any wonder that cyberspace and indeed the internet can be viewed as a threat?

Amongst the general public, understanding of how it all works can get mixed up and confused very easily, and misapprehension and not understanding something at all are wonderfully fertile grounds for fear.

Where do we, as inhabitants of the virtual world of Second Life - a 'collective hallucination' that has begun to have more tangible, more visible, roots, if anything in cyberspace does - fit into all of this? How much power do we have to shape cyberspace, considering that the space exists inside everyone who is aware of its existence to whatever degree and it is unlikely that we know nearly enough of these people to begin to make a dent? Whilst we might all be connected in cyberspace, we are most definitely not all listening to each other. Second Life is bigger than any one of us, and it is only a small part of cyberspace in the first place.

Already, it's starting to sound messy. I'm going to stop.

But isn't it interesting?