CYBEREAL FUTURE

Erica’s, aka Babyldorkgalactinerd's, comment on my last post grew to be and deserves a whole post in reply.

Chuckle, I do at the resistance you show to my idea that the extrapolated future of society is to make online games the real world so that linking books and transporters really do replace fuel farts of dangerous vehicles, exploitation of exotic cultures and rape of natural resources. Wars can be fought by gamers in their world if that's what they want, leaving the rest of us free of collateral damage to develop coagulations of kindred minds with no will or way to harm others.

For one who rejects cybereality in such a future, it will be like visiting Grand Canyon before the tourist village was established, to be seen as the ruins of a no longer needed tourist industry, visited by occasional lovers of beauty, nature and history who still know the real world is nature, being much less violated now that the clever manipulations of society are restricted to their version of the real world with minimal affect on the natural world.

Back when Buckminster Fuller was fueling World Games I perceived the possibility of a species split for humanity which I labeled the Twidgets and the Naturals. His think tank, composed of the cream of the graduating classes in chemistry, physiology, earth sciences, was dedicated to the possibility of containing all the earth degrading effects of technology within giant city sized domes which recycled all its effects without affecting the environment outside. It was pretty far out, such a structure, but ran out of energy when his candle burned out.

But could not all the human addictions — family, fame, power, luxury — acquired within western civilization, beyond food and shelter, be satisfied by a cyberworld of ones own choice, if one must be had at all? Hell, if you don’t want to live in any of the worlds you find, take the good parts you do find and fashion your own. Expansion unlimited, no need to exploit indigenous people. My own daughter, once addicted to Everquest, confessed to a preference to relating to me in the game rather than visiting (now the game is heaven, but that's another story). The only transportation required would be of the half breeds who live on their natural farms and deliver their produce and food products to twidgets in the cybereal world, door to door, having become atrophically, apathetically effete in the natural world, more so than addiction to autos and air-conditioning has already accomplished. Of course there will be cross overs of all degree, whatever works.

The past is littered with simple myths taken as reality by people in their time, this one would be to save us from the inevitable future resulting from western culture’s myth of antagonism toward and destruction of nature and each other by which we live in its invisible prison without bars, by deactivating its effect on the planet as the population willingly adopts the more benign myth of a proxy life behind the cybereal separation and its limitless room for imperial expansion and clever innovation.