Cyberspace and the World We Live In

Robins, Kevin. "Cyberspace and the World We Live In." Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Development. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds. London: SAGE, 1995. 135-55.

Cited in R. Farnell's "Attempting Immortality: AI, A-Life, and the Posthuman in Greg Egan's Permutation City". (Maly, 02/07/02)

From the opening paragraph, Cyberspace, according to William Gibson is a 'consensual hallucination'. The contemporary debate on cyberspace and virtual reality [VR] is something of a consensual hallucination, too. There is a common vision of a future that will be different from the present, of a space or a reality that is more desirable than the mundane one that presently surrounds and contains us. It is a tunnel vision. It has turned a blind eye on the world we live in.

You might think of cyberspace as a utopian vision for postmodern times. Utopia is nowhere (utopia) and, and the same time, it is also somewhere good (eutopia). Cyberspace is projected as the same kind of 'nowhere-somewhere'. [... Like Oz, and, quoting] Barrie Sherman and Phil Judkins [...] 'truly the technology of miracles and dreams'.

In VR and the hallucination of cyberspace we are free "'to play God'" and morph/transform things at will and create a kind of alternative reality.

Robins does not approve.

RDE, completing, 28May19