Virtually Real: The Documentary

I was reading clips on the Imagining the Internet website from Elon University and came across this quote, ““Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.’”

I read that and had that EUREKA! moment, after which I wrote this potential first line for Virtually Real (either the book, or the documentary), “Welcome to the future where everything is different and nothing’s changed.”

I had been ruminating over the reality that Web 3.0, or the Metaverse, or whatever the hell anyone wants to call it would create a clash of cultures out of the need to find a common language. Here an old-time futurist (mull on that for a while) foresaw the need for a common language because of the use of the telephone, and that that common language would create harmony, and peace. I wonder how he would have felt if the plausible common language outcome was Mandarin, and not English. But I digress.

But not really. In reading this passage I found my historical touchstone, the previous illustration of how we, humans, adjust to influential technological changes. Fear. Promise. Dispair. Hope. People envision the entire range of plausible outcomes, and yet, technology invariably ends up augmenting our world, not taking it over.

As Jamais Cascio reminded me over coffee, “technology does not change culture; they develop together.” There is no tail wagging the dog. There is a symbiosis, despite the Luddites’ fear of technology, and the technophones’ belief that we’ll all live richer, better lives solely because of technology.

So how does one create a narratively compelling story out of the tag line “nothing changes?” Well, I’ve done it before, winning a staged reading in a playwriting competition with a play called “Cold Coffee,” about a diner where at the end of the day, the characters are different, but nothing else about how each day progresses changes. I sense the development of a theme here.

I can’t say that there are never dull moments. There are many moments where I find myself drifting off and staring at walls, but that’s a whole different issue, which I think is more related to raising children. But I digress.

The last few weeks have seen exciting conversations with Jamais Cascio, Damon Hernandez, and Henrik Bennetsen (Stanford Humanties Lab). I feel like I’m really getting a lot closer to beginning writing this story. Don’t'chya love that? I’m getting closer to the beginning.

The project, however, has followed a classic curve of my thinking I knew what I was pursuing, and setting an aggressive goal of researching and interviewing for four months then going straight into post-production. Yeah, right.

We’ve seen a few of those statements over the past few months. Eight months in, however, I feel like I can almost taste the primary theme of this story. The frustration lies, however, in my not being able to pinpoint that taste yet; It’s still alluding me. ARGH!

A few more weeks of chewing all that I have, and I think I’ll be close.

One thing for sure, it revolves heavily around the Metavers Roadmap Project.

So what does the Asus announcement about cheap laptops have to do with Virtually Real? Nothing and everything.

The introduction of the $299 laptop with 256MB of RAM, and 2 GB of storage is just the next step in development. I know when I saw my first USB flash memory stick I instantly thought “when is this going to replace the hard drive?” Well, here we are.

Let’s apply that tangible change to other aspects of technology (tangible in both the physical size of these new laptops, and virtually tangible in how few dollars one needs to spend on one). Of course this exercise is nothing new — just think of Moore’s law.

A few of the folks I have interviewed for Virtually Real have gone so far to say that 3D immersive spaces are going to be a passing fad, just as was VRML 90s, and other 3D technological attempts. Speak with a futurist like Jamais Cascio and you start to get a different sense of where things may go.

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