Together, in Cyberspace.

Originally published on: https://readyaiminquire.com/post/666832028297216000/together-in-cyberspace

‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.’

William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984.

‘IRL’ is such a weird phrase. ‘In real life,’ meant to demarcate an online interaction from an off-line one, to make real the DMZ between cyberspace and space. Baked into the very words is the implication that whatever might happen online is not real. The virtual, relegated to the immaterial, the abstract, the non-real. Subsumed as a separate category, somehow nestled under the real, yet not a part of it. ‘IRL’ denotes the apparent un-reality of online interaction. It’s an absurd phrase, indeed: a contradiction upheld by Luddite biases that digital space cannot possibly compete with the real. Yet in the past two years one would be hard-pressed to maintain this clear distinction between IRL and virtual space, to with a straight face maintain the fundamental meaninglessness of virtual interaction, as is implied in the virtual’s exclusion from partaking in real life. Families have bid farewell to their elders via cameras and screens; friendships maintained through incessant typing and texting; lovers kept together by voice recordings and selfies; all of them in cyberspace. Screens, texts, cameras, and mere words are not the same as the last hug from a loved one, nor indeed the friendly pat on the back by a friend, or a lover’s gentle kiss — for how could it be so? Nonetheless, dismissing virtual spaces so outright is like rejecting the ‘realness’ of a soldier’s last letter home, or a grey inscription on a tombstone. So, are virtual spaces any less meaningful?

The distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ is already fallacious. Following Gilles Deleuze, ‘the real,’ that is to say, the realm in which human experience and meaning is negotiated, has two constituent parts: the Virtual and the Actual. The Actual is the physical spaces and places around us humans, such as they are our streets, cities, homes, and shelters. In shorthand, the Actual is constituted by that which materially is. The Virtual is somewhat more difficult to grasp (pun very much intended). It encapsulates the immaterial realms in which humans create and recreate meaning. This is a label most commonly applied (predominantly by us anthropologists) to the spirit realms of various animist peoples, communities, and societies[1]. In a nutshell: these spirit realms are understood to exist, and have a direct impact on the Actual world. Nonetheless, such realms cannot be directly acted upon by humans. They can be entered through shamanistic rites and rituals, but only for the select few, yet we — or rather our spirits — forever roam these distant shores. Just as the Actual and the Virtual constitute the Real, so do these spirit realms constitute a part of the world, as it is understood by varying animist cultures.

Why might this matter? I am sure you have long figured out the parallel I am drawing. Still, for the record, here it is nonetheless: virtual spaces — cyberspace — are real spaces, and spaces in which humans create meaning. It is, in the words of Marc Augé, anthropological space. Anthropological space are the spaces in which humans make sense of the world, physically and metaphysically: negotiate their identities; make sense of their place in the world; establish and re-establish their kinship ties. Augé contrasts this to what he calls non-places, space designed not for humans to make sense of, or to linger in, but rather merely to move through. In a non-place, meaning is not made: it is the corridors of an airport terminal before you reach your gate and finally meet your loved ones; it is the passageways of a local mall, that you must move through to get to the store you seek; or indeed the long stretches of highway, roads that may as well be entirely virtual as they flit past us outside the car window. Cyberspace, it is safe to say, is not a non-place, though undoubtedly they do exist online. Looking at each blog like this, each community group on Facebook, the organically organised ‘Twitterspheres,’ or Subreddits dedicated to the most obscure hobbies, cyberspace is filled to the brim with anthropological spaces, where nerds share their love and build community and belonging around extremely niche board games, or where a movement of guerrilla gardeners organise and plan the next step of their green urban revolution… Or indeed, where we all, just some months past, were forced to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and births.

So again, why does this even matter? Subsuming virtual spaces under the rubric of ‘not in real life’ carries not only risks on broader societal levels, but also on micro-scales. We can already see the impact that memes and trolls have had on broad sociopolitical discourse, as the actions of teenagers who are just taking the piss, rather than the social movements that they are. Populist politicians have gained support specifically in these sections because these virtual spaces are indeed anthropological spaces. Meaning is negotiated within them, and what happens there impacts the material world. We might not stand in these virtual fields, among these wireframe cities, but nonetheless we carry out actions there: each abstracted screen name and avatar is a person, doing a thing.

On a smaller, or more individualised, scale the implications are, not surprisingly more personal, but they also run the risk of leading to ever more alienation — a matter all the more apparent as long as our political leaders retain this sense of social distance, and remain unwilling or incapable of taking these spaces seriously — that is to say, as spaces that are just as material as streets, town squares, or parliamentary halls. The broader issues here are immense, as a large portion of “us” (and I count myself among them) digital natives operate perhaps not only on a different level, but within a different dimension from the generations before us. I can count the times that socialising with friends in an online video game, or the communities that sprung up around it has been waved away as a waste of time, or something unreal, while myself and many others made genuine friends, and maintained even more friendships through this virtual dimension. How many of us do not know the pain of seeing an old video-game friend’s profile read ‘last online: 1,127 days ago.’ It matters to us precisely because it was real.

We may not be wearing VR goggles tethered to pastiche cassette-futuristic computer-tables to chat with our nans on Facebook, nor do we ‘plug in’ ourselves and cruise through wireframed cityscapes while video-calling friends, families, or lovers, stuck in their own lockdowns, or merely being located beyond our horizon. Though this development may yet come, sooner than we might have expected. However, presently we do not, as it were, interact with virtual spaces as we do with actual spaces: we do not see them, taste them, smell them, or touch them. But they are felt: emotionally and socially. Cyberspace, such as it is, remains elusive, but this doesn’t mean we do not operate within it, and in some parts of the world we are arguably inside of it, constantly. A permanent backdrop that we feel, to the life that we see. It is our Spirit Realm, the realm that exists and impacts our actual world, bleeding together; screens are our portals, and cyberspace makes itself known to us not necessarily by its material dimension (for this does exist: underseas cables, satellites, server farms) but by the social connection, togetherness, and meaning production that we carry with us, like we carry a smartphone.

There we are. Together, in cyberspace.

[1] Do note: this is an extreme condensation of a whole subfield of anthropology, and I summarise a field that has studied groups from Amazonia, to Greenland, to Papua New Guinea, to Siberia. In other words, it would be an understatement to call this an extremely small nutshell. Nonetheless, the broad principles stand.