by Erik Davis
We figured it out mathematically.… We’ve been training on a holodeck for roughly thirty minutes, and now it’s time to stop. The game’s over. It’s time to put into practice what we’ve learned. So, we take off the virtual reality helmet, we take off the vehicle that we’ve used for this task. We set it aside, go back out of the holodeck, to reality, to be with the other members on the craft, in the heavens. Call it another dimension, call it another reality, who knows? We’re kept blind ignorant here, which is kind of the state [you would expect] with these vehicles.
Johnson ends this remarkable exhortation by insisting that the group is looking forward to their collective suicide for the simple reason that they do not identify with their bodies. “If you could just see it that way,” he implores, “if you could just get into our headspace a little bit, and just see how happy we are, how strong willed we are about doing this, how committed we are.” Johnson’s slang is interesting here, for while “headspace” is a fine West Coast idiom for another person’s point of view, getting into one is also an excellent description of virtual reality, the technology that clearly played a significant role in the cult’s gnostic imagination.
What is it about virtual reality that can stoke such imaginings? Technologically, VR can be described as an immersive simulation, a digital construct that users engage, as it were, from the inside out. At the very least, VR exploits and even celebrates the phenomenological fact that we are mind as well as body, and that the twain do not always meet. But VR is not simply a technology; it is a concept that exceeds mere gadgetry and all its inevitable bugs and breakdowns. The concept is absolute simulation: a medium so powerful that it transcends mediation, building worlds that can stand on their own two feet. Though existing VR technologies don’t really work this way, the belief that VR constructs a world, a simulacrum powerful enough to temporarily overwrite our material one, has been embraced as an article of faith by the technology’s fans and detractors alike. VR’s utopian proponents ground their idealistic visions of the technology in the immersiveness, playfulness, and social immediacy of virtual spaces. On the other side of the fence, Neo-Luddites deplore what they see as the ultimate expression of technology’s insidious drive to replace the Real, to sever thought from embodiment, and to tear apart whatever gossamer threads still bind us to nature and to our material human communities.
For many, VR has thus come to symbolize the demiurgic powers of the computer itself, with its powerful graphics, immersive spaces, and complex, rule-based models and projections. The universal machine, it seems, is capable of building pocket universes. Institutional computers have long cranked out simulated worlds for science, industry, and entertainment, while powerful PCs, gaming consoles, and online MMORPGs continue to democratize and psychologize this computational creationism. In his book Out of Control, Wired editor Kevin Kelly uses the phrase “God games” to describe digital ant farms like Populous and SimEarth, programs that allow users to “grow” toy worlds by altering, for example, levels of carbon dioxide or the rate of urban development. “I can’t imagine anything more addictive than being a god,” writes Kelly, giving voice to a widespread if often unconscious cultural hunch that there is something actually ontological about computer simulation.15 That is, by simulating the complexity of reality with greater and greater mathematical finesse, computer worlds are actually becoming more real. The proponents of artificial life, for example, hold that by programming the logic of life into a computer simulation and letting it evolve on its own terms, we will wind up with digital entities that are, for all intents and purposes, alive. In the culture at large, the future evolution of computer games and VR gear almost guarantees that the worlds concocted on the far side of the looking-glass screen will begin to possess, at the very least, the seductive sense of reality that we associate with powerful dreams.
From the perspective of the mythological imagination, there is nothing particularly new about this ontological fun house. Celtic fairy lore bulges with enchanted landscapes, while the protagonists of Hindu yarns often find themselves wandering through infinite nests of Borgesian dream worlds. Most famous perhaps is the Taoist trickster Chuang Tzu, who dreamed he was a butterfly, but wondered upon waking whether he was actually a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. The simulacrum has always been an object of fascination and dread, especially when it becomes a world unto its own. Today the mere existence of computer simulations, and especially VR, gives this powerful mythopoetics a technological basis. That is, regardless of how convincing or “realistic” VR technology actually is, the presence of such simulating machines releases the metaphysical ambiguities of the simulacrum into the contemporary world, a world whose materialism, both philosophical and consumerist, makes it ill equipped to handle the archaic and tricky power of the phantasm. Heim’s “relativity sickness” may become as common as attention deficit disorder.
In this sense, we might see Applewhite’s cult members as dark prophets of a time when the alienation from primary physical reality has reached such an all-time high that the world can be written off as a thirty-minute training program whose usefulness has peaked. Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable and least-noticed aspect of the cult’s farewell tapes was their backdrop: a green and succulent garden soaking up the lazy Southern California sun, with a chorus of songbirds proclaiming the return of spring. It was as if these men and women were subliminally telling us what the Marcionites proclaimed almost two millennia ago: that even natural paradise is a simulacrum, a trap for the luminous beings we are.
While the conviction that the world is a VR game can be chalked up to fringe psychosis, such mad beliefs can also be interpreted as dreamlike symptoms of a more pervasive cultural pathology. Datagloves and head-mounted video displays are visible symbols for a much more immersive “virtual reality”: the ersatz electronic environment of images and data that embower our bodyminds and social spaces. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard diagnosed this condition as a mass infection by the hyperreal, which he defined as a social, political, and perceptual organization based on the dominance of technological simulacra. Like an ontological virus, the hyperreal invades and destroys the older frameworks for understanding the real, replacing it with a new order of reality based on simulation. In his 1983 book Simulations, Baudrillard argues that Disneyland is the Mecca of this hyperreal civilization: an environment that is neither authentic nor fake, a copy for which there is no original, and the paragon of social control by “anticipation, simulation, and programming.” In Baudrillard’s deeply pessimistic view, the mass media have become a kind of orbiting strand of DNA that “mutates” the real into the hyperreal, eroding any space of authentic resistance and establishing the absolute dominion of the society of the spectacle.
Baudrillard’s apocalyptic theories can be read as highbrow science fiction, and in the realm of SF, his basic ideas, to say nothing of Marshall Applewhite’s, aren’t so novel. The idea that virtual technologies are instruments of social control can be traced to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World, in which “feelies” allow the slave society’s drugged and genetically engineered populace to “experience” the sensations of actors projected on a large screen. Perhaps the greatest SF novel of such demiurgic media control is Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, written in 1964. To escape the dismal toil of their lives, the human colonists on Mars while away the hours with Perky Pat Layouts, miniature dollhouses complete with Pat and Walt, svelte figurines resembling the postwar archetypes Barbie and Ken. After gathering together in their hovels, the colonists swallow an illegal drug, Can-D, which “translates” them into Pat and Walt’s Baywatch-like lives for a painfully brief spell. Some colonists view the virtual trip as escapism; others interpret it as a religious experience in which they lose the flesh and “put on imperishable bodies.” A satellite radio station owned by Perky Pat Layouts orbits Mars, emitting a stream of ads for new Perky Pat accessories, while the DJs deal Can-D on the side. Even psychic power
s are exploited for commercial gain, as “pre-cogs” working for PPL use their gifts to predict which new accessories will score with the colonists.
As the SF critic Peter Fitting points out, Three Stigmata paints a picture of a world where “the liberatory potential of the media and new technologies has been completely debased.”16 This world is not light-years away from us. Already networked computer games, theme park rides, and VR entertainment centers seek not merely to distract or entertain, but to immerse us in new, concocted realities. These virtual technologies are on a collision course with Hollywood’s dream factory; in this sense, Star Trek’s holodeck can be seen as the entertainment industry’s own holy grail. Many Hollywood blockbusters already aspire to become theme parks of a sort, either through roller coaster–like effects or by constructing stylish worlds that viewers want to stick around in film after film. Moreover, we are encouraged to bring chunks of these worlds home with us by buying up licensed icons and relics: dinosaur mugs, Godzilla caps, X-Men uniforms, 007 Visa cards. Most children’s programming now fuses merchandise and imaginative experience so thoroughly that kids (and their parents) must purchase action figures, clothes, and slimy substances in order to “play.” Even the PPL “pre-cogs” in The Three Stigmata reflect the sophisticated demographic techniques that market researchers, trend forecasters, and PR flacks now use to anticipate what images and styles will capture the nomadic flows of consumer desire.
The crew of the Enterprise always manage to emerge unscathed from whatever psychological or metaphysical disruptions the holodeck introduces between real and virtual life. But the Trekkers in Heaven’s Gate did not make it out of their own pocket universe alive. Indeed, their otherworld was so immersive that it did not just reconfigure primary reality according to a religious delusion; it annihilated that primary reality. As Baudrillard’s own work suggests, the simulacrum has an apocalyptic power. By manufacturing a multiverse of virtual realities, simulation can end the world simply by throwing the stability of all worlds into permanent crisis. As Jay Bolter points out, digital worlds wreak havoc with traditional Western metaphysical assumptions about the nature of creation. “The programmer-god makes the world not once and for all but for many times over again, rearranging its elements to suit each new program of creation. The universe proceeds like a program until it runs down or runs wild, and then the slate is wiped clean, and a new game is begun.”17
Applewhite and his crew checked out because they felt that Terra’s reboot was imminent, or at least that the game was growing dull. The cult’s trigger signal was an old prophetic standby: the comet in the sky. But even this ancient cosmic clod was touched with the infectious power of the hyperreal. Mopping up after the suicides, investigators found a downloaded picture of Hale-Bopp still glowing on the cult’s computer screens, an image originally constructed with the state-of the-art perceptual technologies of high-tech satellite astronomy. But the nature of the image had changed as it passed through television, newspapers, magazines, and the World Wide Web. For one thing, Hale-Bopp picked up a shadowy “Companion” as it hurtled through the electronic universe: a blurry doppelgänger described and photographed by inept astronomers, but transformed into a spaceship by the robust imaginations of the UFO fringe. In other words, Hale-Bopp became a simulacrum, a virtual reality, and by the time it arrived on the terminal screens of the cult, the image had exploded into a blazing sigil of posthuman yearning and millennial angst, emotions that inevitably pick up the alien call. The comet became harbinger again: a logo of the latter days, a great swoosh in the sky, a portent of a culture that can’t stop cracking up.
IX
Datapocalypse
When asked whether he was an optimist or a pessimist, Marshall McLuhan would invariably respond that he was an apocalypticist. This characteristically snappy comeback not only reminds us of McLuhan’s devout Catholicism, but gives a hint as to why the man was so loath to take explicit moral or political stances regarding the electronic society he helped bring to public consciousness. To the consternation of his many critics, McLuhan placed himself in the position of a media seer who divined the technological “signs of the times” at an ironic and fatalistic remove from the secular stage of social action and historical conflict. But McLuhan was not so much a technological determinist as a technological exegete; he read the mediascape through the filters of his own erudite imagination, allowing analogies as much as analysis to lead him forward. This method allowed McLuhan to give intellectual voice to a hunch much deeper than the sociopolitical discourse of most media theorists: the hunch that human being and human civilization are undergoing a tumultuous transformation, one so total and irrevocable it can barely be divined.
For the true apocalypticist, the sense that history is about to turn a corner conjures up a psychological stance far more complex than optimism or pessimism, because the apocalyptic turn partly derives its power from the commingling and even confusion of salvation and doom. Even the old school visions of the biblical apocalypticists were deeply polarized, split between rapture and plague, the New Jerusalem and the Antichrist, the coming of the Messiah and the final trip to the pit. McLuhan’s schizophrenia on this account could be extreme. On the one hand, he could proclaim, as he did to Playboy in 1969, that computer networks hold out the promise of creating “a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.” Invoking Dante’s belief that humans will live as broken fragments until we are “unified into an inclusive consciousness,” McLuhan brought it all down to brass tacks: “In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”1 But at nearly the same time, McLuhan was capable of nursing vastly darker views about the new technoculture. In a letter to the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, McLuhan flip-flopped on his Playboy vision in about the starkest terms imaginable:
Electric information environments being utterly ethereal foster the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body [of Christ], a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this world is a very great electric engineer.2
Here McLuhan condemns electronic media, not only for encouraging a denial of the material world (by which he means the gnostic heresy of Docetism), but for producing a demonic simulacrum of the very mystical body he invoked in Playboy. In the letter to Maritain, he also hints that certain powers and principalities are actually engineering this satanic state of affairs, suspicions nurtured by McLuhan’s dabbling interest in Catholic conspiracy theories about cabals of gnostic Illuminati scheming to manhandle the course of history.
McLuhan was hardly alone in his apocalyptic hunches, then or now. Many today feel a sense of vertigo growing at the heart of things, an almost subliminal rumbling along the fault lines of the real. The fringe-watcher Art Bell, who famously broadcast news of the weird on his enormously popular talk radio show, called it the quickening. Bell’s term is apt, because the mere acceleration of technological and socioeconomic change today is enough to lend a surreal and terrifying edge to the social mutations that mark our everyday lives. New technologies are transforming war, commerce, science, reproduction, labor, culture, love, and death at a speed that boggles the best of minds. As global flows of information, products, peoples, and simulacra gush into our immediate lifeworlds, they chip away at our sense of standing on solid ground, of being rooted in a particular time and place. The French philosopher Paul Virilio, a curiously postmodern Catholic, argues that the sheer velocity of information, images, and technological metamorphosis is actually dissolving our sense of historical time. Though we long ago accustomed ourselves to the manic rhythms of modern life, it seems as if we have been captured by an even deeper and more violent undertow in the tides of time, a ferocious rip that threatens to pull us out to sea.
O
f course, our generation would hardly be the first to feel the rumblings of some tectonic shift in the bedrock of history. In fact, it’s tough to find a time during the last couple of millennia when some people somewhere didn’t think that the last days were upon them. Given the right social or psychological conditions, the right degree of utopian passion or violent upheaval, and the intense sense of imminence that characterizes apocalyptic time will emerge. Though countless culminating dates have come and gone with nary a hoofbeat or a trumpet call, eschatological prophets refuse to stop second-guessing the calendar. Toss in a major odometer click like 2000, and mirages of Armageddon and the Golden Age are guaranteed to pop up on the horizon.
Perhaps the West has written itself into a narrative trap and cannot escape its old grandiose fairy tale of fulfillment and annihilation, a story that, like all good stories, both demands and staves off its own end. Though the cosmic sense of an ending can be seen as a peculiar pathology of the historical religions, the eschatological imagination long ago leaked into secular myths of history and scientific progress. As we will see in this chapter, technologies are shot through with myths that frame the story of time, myths of utopia and cataclysm alike. So it should not be surprising that many of the stories circulating about the “information revolution” feed off the patterns of eschatological thought, nor that technological images of salvation and doom keep hitting the screens of the social imagination like movie trailers for the ultimate summer blockbuster. Indeed, you need only scratch the surface of technoculture to discover the infectious intuition that, whether angel or Antichrist or AI supermind, something mutant this way comes.