As Above, So Below

That quote is atributed to Paracelsus, the Swiss Alchemist. The question I always take away from my experiences with virtual worlds is this; "What are we, really?" In virtual space, I am an entelechy with volition, will, a soul or spirit even. I'm manipulating a little packet of electrons visible to others within the limitations of a lot of technical equipment I don't understand for the most part.

So how different is this from my material life? ("RL")? Are the bonds I form with other minded beings out there any less real? I think not. I don't talk much to people I know about this stuff, but I occasionally hear disparaging comments. Rememeber when the internet as a whole was the subject to a great debate that still echoes? It was variously a great liberating tool to link us each to another. To free us from the chains of time and place. A big flowery weapon in the hands of agents of social progress.

That or it was a sinkhole of sexual degradation, scammers and frightening depictions of horrendous violence. (And to this last, recall that MacLuhan reminded us in the 60s that any action is a form of violence, the root of the word being Latin for 'to act')

So how has this all panned out? I think we can see that as Terence McKenna predicted in the early 90s, the answer is "both/and". We are relentlessly spied upon by agents of corporate and state power. But we're able to trasncend things such as meagre circumstance, physical handicaps or agoraphobia to weave a complex and very dense network of interpersonal contacts. We can sow love and lust, hate and fear, paranoia or empowerment. We can engage vicariously in activities that hitherto were reserved for the wealthy. And we are doing it faster, and more purposefully than as a civilization we'd ever thought possible half a century ago.

The internet as a physical system is endlessly the subject of attempts by moneyed interests to turn it into a huge shopping mall, but their clumsy attempts seem to be falling far short of their successful capture of earlier electronic media. Rather the net seems to be turning out much more like print in an earlier time. Marshall MacLuhan said that television had reverted society to an analogue to a medieval visually based mode after centuries of a print based culture. The new electronic media seems to be wanting to split the difference.