From: markp@apple.com (Mark D. Pesce) Subject: CONF: 3CyberConf Review, Austin, May 14-16, 1993 Date: 25 May 1993 16:06:40 -0700 Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA 3CyberConf - Some Thoughts It's now been 48 hours since I boarded a plane to leave Austin, and 3CyberConf is just starting to settle in my brain. It wasn't your usual dry scientific fare, more like a meeting between third century Gnostics and eighteenth century democrats. The conference was a perfect microcosm of the new discipline developing at the intersection of literature and technology, theater and communications theory. This is the only field where the canonical texts are gathered equally from both strict science (Wiener's Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences of the late 40's-early 50's) and from science fiction (Gibson, Sterling, et. al.). The references to either set of texts are equally valid for discussions within the discipline. This gives the entire conference a mythical quality, where fictional evocations of a technical event (still in the future) compete with discussions of the nature of the self and the fragmentary effect of communications technology on community. The "wireheads" (among whom I count myself) were outnumbered by the psychologists, architects, and artists. Although cyberspace is a communications technology, and therefore must be implemented before it can be used, it raises questions of such an essential nature (the relationship of perception to reality, and to the self) that any discipline that flirts with this question (most do, and certainly all of the arts) is immediately drawn into the discussion. The presumption within the discipline is that the technical problems will be solved (as they are, albeit slowly) and that the technology will become available to a large number of people within the next few years. Given the recent announcements of large-scale partnerships between various telecommunications service/content providers, cyberspace's existence and eventual success within the marketplace seems assured. It seems to be where the market is headed, eventually. This meant that venture capitalists attended 3CyberConf as well, listening to the sound of the approaching wave. On the technical front, the emphasis appeared to be with the MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, or if you're trying to sell it to XEROX, Dimensions) which provide spaces (currently text-based) for the interaction between large numbers of people. While the "virtual reality" technologists continue to improve the displays, sensors, and affectors of immersive experience, the artists, psychologists, and communications theorists are playing with MUDs, right now, examining the data-based construction of the self. Right on time, the Gibsonian "personality construct" has arrived, with the MUD, and it looks as if the human "self" will never be quite the same. This points up the main thread of the "subtext" of 3CyberConf, a topic never directly addressed by the papers delivered, but on everyone's lips: what is the self in cyberspace? Is it utterly deconstructed into a machine-manipulable entity? Does it evolve into a meta-self which selects from self-constructions the way we now rummage through our wardrobes? MUDs are giving up some answers to these questions, and, while the "wireheads" solve the technical problems, the psychologists, designers, and artists are using MUDs, learning about the future of the self in a well-networked world. Another major topic was the "effect" of cyberspace on the sense of perception. Two papers in the Friday session framed the outlines of a debate on the limits of the man/machine interface. One discussed the necessity of the development of a "cybersemiosis" or relationship between the self and the machine, and argued for the development of techniques which would allow the permeation of ego by cyberspace technologies. The second paper framed this permeation of ego as a pathogenic experience (unless handled very carefully) and called for the development of "vivogenic" techniques for supporting cohesion of the self within cyberspace. This development towards a highly expressive interface between man and machine, toward cyborg, and the emotional energies expressed in such an evocation, drives this debate into highly charged territory. The participants seem to accept that cyberspace is a new, closer relationship between the self and the machine, but, at the same time, that it liberates so much of the self (in a transcendence of space) that the positive features outweigh the shape of the technical artifact, and will transform the clunky head- mounts and crude graphics into a human spaceship for exploration and experience. And what about community? What kind of worlds are we creating? What kinds of communities emerge from spontaneous behaviors? A number of papers and panels discussed the network as an entity, and what it meant to the future of community. Disintegration (The Stealth Landscape) and fragmentation (The Decline of City Dailies, Mass Media, Central Place and the Challenge of Specialized Electronic Cyberspace) recurred as some of the primary themes of these papers. As the world goes on-line, as the inter-net becomes inter-national, with citizens of the "second" and "third" worlds, the network may fragment further, into a Babel of communities, each with their own internal rules, language, and psychology. What of theft? What of terrorism? Or rape? All of these phenomena have been observed on the network, on USENET, the Internet, in MUDs. How is the social contract extended into the personality construct? How do we prevent our communities from becoming chaotic, terrorized or dominated by other ideologies? This seems to be why no one is really worried about what the wireheads are up to - some of the other questions being asked are so much larger than connecting a wire from point A to point B, that the essentially technical nature of the conference is drowned in a debate on human rights and responsibilities which echoes back to Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. And finally, beyond all of this, there is a consensus forming about a new relationship between the definitions of work and play. Navigation in immense databases, certainly one of the Big Problems of the theory of cyberspace, seems to draw more from the integral elements of play than the reductionist elements of work. As researchers learn more about the construction of information, learn how to design information so that it is inherently navigable, they end in creating spaces which draw from archetypal form, where glyphs replace phonetic language, where data morphology replaces static shape. In a MUD, the distinctions between game and reality confuse themselves, and every interaction involves aspects of both. It's as if von Neumann's ghost had possessed the debate at 3CyberConf; the same computing machines whose architecture he first described would eventually end in expressing the elements of his game theory. It was exhausting. The first day's program stretched over 18 hours, from 8 AM till 2 AM, only to begin again at 8 AM the next day. Amazingly, everyone showed up, and started it all over again. The energy was incredible - it seemed as though everyone had been asking the same questions, looking for the same answers, and, like some crazy jigsaw puzzle, the pieces, or at least some of them, came together for a few hours in Austin. I don't know if we have a complete map of where to go from here, but the debate has been framed, the Big Questions are being asked, and people are out there, looking for answers. We wireheads will go away now, and solve your technical problems, while the rest of you figure out how to be sane in an very well-networked universe. Mark D. Pesce 18 May 1993