Nowhere Here: Cyberspace & the Assassination of the Unreal
The 40-year rise and fall of cyberspace’s symbolic unreality.
by Kurt Schiller
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 non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
There was a time that the internet offered an escape to another world.
Servers, file systems, forums, boards, chatrooms—these weren’t just the info exchanges that formed the backbone of the antediluvian internet, but communities with their own rules, conventions, and culture. Browse a corporate network, and you might discover endless rows of identically named .DAT files organized by department and employee. Visit the server of a radical art collective, and strange projects exploded around you, filled with color and noise. Each hallucinatory location had a character, a caste, an ethos—bright lights of context and activity, frontier outposts strung out like pearls through the electric night.
These illusory spaces rose and fell like small but vibrant towns, self-governing and idiosyncratic. They had their leaders and their antagonists, their unities and their schisms, new places and cultures springing up wherever they flourished. Each forum a kingdom, each server a dominion.
The language and imagery that we used for these imagined spaces spoke to their physicality. Popular sci-fi imagined a vast foreboding darkness, cut through with stark glowing linework and pulsing info super highways, all cubes and squares and spheres, a symbolic Elsewhere whose very form spoke to its separation from the real. We imagined ourselves as sailors on a sea of data, cowboys of a digital nowhere.
As a culture, we still harbor an almost subconscious suspicion that the internet is not merely a collection of data, but a physical place. We get “on” the Internet, we “visit” websites. We are “in” Discords and DMs. We still treat these information symbols as if they are a physical space, and when our two worlds overlap—when someone sits in front of us fiddling with their phone—we recognize that they aren’t really there at all. They’re somewhere else. They’re in cyberspace.
We still think in these terms, and yet we no longer live in a world of rooms and forums and imagined space. A DM is a DM and a group is a group—they aren’t rooms, spaces, or lobbies. The metaphor of physical space has become cliche and outmoded, and the glowing grid and 3D representations that once depicted our digital world have rolled back in the face of cultural and technological “progress.” What’s left are structures of pure data, intangible and unknowable. Something that can be used, and exploited, but never truly occupied.
We no longer live in a world of rooms and forums and imagined space.
The modern internet has been transformed from a collection of clearly delineated, hand-crafted digital spaces into a labyrinth of vast, impossible to navigate rooms. We now inhabit places like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, inescapable panopticons with no visible horizon, no apparent walls, and few if any clear borders, but which nevertheless restrict not just our movement through them, but our very perception and reality.
We were explorers, once. Now we are just tenants of a digital nowhere.
* * * * *
The idea of an artificial data space—cyberspace—appeared in science fiction well before the arrival of systems that could make it a reality. Long before complex distributed data systems became commonplace in the Seventies and early Eighties, and long before William Gibson brought the term “cyberspace” into mainstream usage with the 1982 short story Burning Chrome, the popular consciousness had already begun to play with the idea that networks were not just data but actual, physical places.
The 1963 novel Simulacron-3, later adapted into the 1973 German TV series World on a Wire, was one such example. Somewhat akin to the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor, it featured a fully simulated city used for market research and the consequences that befell its creators when they began to question what was real and what was hallucinatory. This depiction of an ur-cyberspace bore more similarity to a VR simulation than what we would later recognize as a modern, cyberpunk-style datascape, but the idea of data-beings living and existing within a computer system would prove to be remarkably prescient.
Elsewhere, the nascent fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence were already commingling with new waves of science fiction, producing strange syntheses that battered impatiently at the doors of perception and the real. By the late Sixties, the concept of an inforg—an informational organism, a being of embodied data—was fast becoming something of a stock character in sci-fi. Examples proliferated through high and low culture, with prominent examples in works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Star Trek, and many others. But while these extra-human beings bore many of the hallmarks of later depictions of cybernetic organisms, they were still understood to exist within pieces of physical hardware, trapped within silicon wafer and cavernous tombs of artificial synapse and diode. Ellison’s A.M. and Clark’s HAL had a physical form, unlike the shapeless philosophical constructs of later cyberpunk. When Dave Bowman climbs inside HAL’s circuitry, we can understand that their selves still existed “on tape”. They had not yet been unleashed into their own boundless, purely symbolic worlds.
Then, in 1981, the author Verner Vinge published True Names, a short story about a group of activist hackers who inhabit a fully immersive VR environment literally called Other Plane. Here, at last, was a commingling of the data space and the real world—not merely a depiction of a simulation, as others had been, but an acknowledgment that real world data could have a fully immersive, symbolic, and above all physical parallel within a purely imagined space. Other Plane was not just a subordinate of the real world, but a separate world entirely. Its users had separate identities and lives within cyberspace, almost as if they had been split into two different people—one real, one symbolic. One of flesh, one of data.
The 1982 film TRON imagined cyberspace as a sort of parallel spiritual plane.
The idea itself was revolutionary, and other works soon followed. The 1982 film TRON imagined cyberspace as a sort of parallel spiritual plane, one in which our actions in the real world were reflected on an epic scale. Its imagined spaces contained computer programs who lived out parallel lives that mirrored the appearances and personalities of their creators, even acting out life or death battles that closely resembled the interpersonal conflicts of their physical counterparts.
Writer-director Steven Lisberger’s vision of cyberspace came after a group of programmers explained to him that untold amounts of personal data were already stored in distant mainframes, that our physical movements left echoes within the digital realm. Lisberger took this idea one step further, reasoning that this agglutination of data might form a sort of imagined digital self that existed somewhere else, without our knowledge. And so when TRON’s renegade hero Kevin Flynn pits his wits against the villainous businessman Edward Dillinger, their digital manifestations (CLU and Sark, respectively) take the form of programs that each has written. And as they fight, their counterparts do battle in cyberspace. Like True Names, TRON imagines these two worlds as parallels—they exist in a dialectic, in which the failures and victories of one world are reflected in the other. When Sark is ultimately defeated in the game world, Dillinger also suffers his downfall—just as our online activities can wreak havoc for our lives today, TRON understood neither of our two worlds is actually subordinate to the other.
This concept of two interlocking worlds has heavy spiritual overtones, recalling the delineation between the sacred and the profane. TRON underlines this thematic resonance by imagining a digital religion that worships Users as gods, in which our real selves are seen as strange, gnostic beings who might manifest within the digital realm and do battle on a cosmic level—a prescient anticipation of the later quasi-religious term “avatar”, itself popularized by the 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash.
And so when William Gibson finally gave this imagined world of data and constructs and systems a proper, lasting name, he was in many ways simply formalizing a concept and tendency that had been percolating for decades—less the father of cyberpunk than its midwife.
* * * * *
While the imagined worlds of True Names, TRON, and Neuromancer were revolutionary in their conception of digital space, they also owed a great deal to history. Perhaps the first recognizable modern imagined community—one enabled by computers, and explicitly founded upon the newborn idea of “data space”—can be found in the Community Memory project. Established in 1973 by a group of Marxist techno-optimists from the Resource One computing project at UC Berkeley, Community Memory was an ancestor of later bulletin board systems, a distributed messaging system that allowed users to send and receive basic text messages through teletype units (originally Teletype Model 33 ASRs). The first unit was installed inside a cardboard box in Leopold’s Records in Berkeley, but additional units were soon added in coffee shops, grocery stores, and book shops around San Francisco.
Connected to a central SDS 940 mainframe system by a basic modem, each Community Memory terminal printed out an infinite scroll of short messages on reams of tractor paper. The messages—which ranged from stray thoughts about popular topics of the day to basic questions like “Where can I get a good bagel?” to complex political screeds and debates—were periodically sent back and forth through the mainframe. Through this simple interface, Community Memory was ushering in the beginning of the digital unreal, an age when computers ceased to be mere tools and became a medium and an existence unto themselves.
Tellingly, this went hand in hand with the stated intentions of Community Memory’s creators. Calling themselves Loving Grace Cybernetics after Richard Brautigan’s techno-utopian poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, the project’s founders were a group radical thinkers and practical cyberneticists who spoke explicitly about augmenting the physical world. The introductory Community Memory brochures preached of the need for “strong, free, non-hierarchical channels of communication” to reclaim and revitalize communities, and of creating parallel data communities that would come to overlay reality to liberatory effect.
“Techno-optimists and futurists we were, with Marxist communalist yearnings,” explained Jude Milhon in an inteview with SF Gate in 2001. Milhon was an early cyberneticist, a key figure in the early history of Community Memory who joined the group shortly after its genesis and who would later go on to create the concept of cypherpunks. “The idea was to make a new medium so useful, yet so yummy, that people would want to use it again and again, but whose use would inevitably create this new sort of communal family.”
“Techno-optimists and futurists we were, with Marxist communalist yearnings.”
Jude Milhon, Community Memory Co-Creator
To its creators, Community Memory was not just a piece of technology—it was both a pathway to informational and societal freedom and a new type of organism, one that lived and breathed on the data that flowed through it.
For all its radical advancement, Community Memory was not yet divorced from the real in the way of Gibsonian cyberspace. If you used Community Memory, you and the recipient of your messages might be in different locations, but the technology of the day still required a strong tie to the physical world—there were only so many terminals, and they could only communicate periodically. And because the communication was asynchronous and at times sporadic, users could not yet have the experience of being present “with” someone else in cyberspace.
But already Community Memory was placing the tools to create new fragments of unreality in the hands of users. In addition to simple messages and replies, users were also able to apply tags and categories to their messages, making them searchable—and therefore navigable—to other users. This simple act made it possible for individual keywords to develop their own culture, memes, in jokes, and tendencies. In other words, to become Spaces.
These humble beginnings weren’t just a technological development, but an existential one. The creators and administrators of Community Memory were right to recognize their project as a true evolution; they were in essence carving out new reality from nothingness, a consensus reality where the fundamental tools of creation would be widely, and freely available.
* * * * *
Early systems like Community Memory and its descendants carved out the first piece of the unreal that would eventually grow to become cyberspace, but it was only the rise of the personal computer that made the transition to a modern cyberspace possible.
Before the advent of the personal computer, creating a digital space took infrastructure. Mainframes were costly behemoths and limited mostly to businesses and universities—if you wanted to create a new bulletin board or community, you would need to beg, borrow, or steal space and resources from large institutions, few of whom wanted anything to do with the emerging civilian cyberculture. Even when mainframe time was available, such resources were usually operated on a timeshare basis, with users paying a per cycle fee for the computing power they consumed—think of it as a sort of digital feudalism, with data kingdoms propped up by the use taxes collected from their populace.
Access to the global telecommunication network was likewise tied to larger, concrete pieces of economic infrastructure. If you didn’t work for a university or a large company, you likely had no way to access the internet. Cyberspace has always been limited to the cultural and economic elite to some extent, but in the early days of networking the divide was starker still.
The personal computer and personal modem connections changed all that. With a relatively inexpensive piece of technology, individual households could now connect to the distributed data network of the burgeoning internet and become their own explorers of unreality.
At first this took the form of bulletin board systems (BBS), dial-in data exchanges that functioned like a significantly upgraded version of Community Memory, accessed through individual telephone modem connection and providing a range of services: private messages, discussion boards, live chat, and even file-sharing capabilities. These were fully functional, self-governing communities in the proper sense, but they were still isolated from each other and from the larger internet. Accessing them required a one-to-one connection—you found a bulletin board, logged on, and dwelt within it. There were large, commercial bulletin boards like CompuServe and Genie and AOL that eventually provided rudimentary graphical interfaces, but until the late Eighties and early Nineties there was little to no interconnection between these disparate networks.
The early internet was a tangible parallel plane, distinct from and overlain across the physical world, a place in which new cultures and new spaces could flourish.
Eventually, bulletin boards were replaced by the early independent ISPs—essentially a private end node into the larger internet, through which an individual could connect. But unlike today, many early internet service providers also offered permanent server hosting and services. You could do more than just log on and explore, you might—if you so desired and if your ISP offered it—create a server of your own. If you were unhappy with the existing IRC server infrastructures, you could create your own, over which you would be king.
The early ethos of the internet—inherited from techno radicals like the Loving Grace Cybernetics club—meant that most of this server software was provided for free, maintained by university teams or simply as passion projects. The tools of creation were ready for the taking, and individual servers proliferated. The introduction of hypertext and the World Wide Web only accelerated this process, providing a global info index that allowed users to more easily find these independent server outposts while simultaneously providing a persistent data space of individual sites and server rings that could itself be navigated.
This was perhaps the peak of the imagined unreality of the internet, as close as it would come to replicating the fevered imaginings of the cyberpunk pioneers—an increasingly tangible parallel plane, distinct from and overlain across the physical world, a place in which new cultures and new spaces could flourish. For a time, the internet contained both a digital mainstream of commercial systems like AOL and a thriving digital underground spread throughout tens of thousands of independent nodes. You might begin your journey on a brightly lit thoroughfare, only to stumble down a rabbit hole into the informational back waters—spaces far from the madding crowd, where the freaks and weirdos dwelt and carved out a culture of their own.
And these were indeed spaces. With the customization and independence afforded by independently operating servers, the psychic landscape of the unreal became highly reconfigurable. One server or forum might be corporate and staid, with cultural norms and design to match—another might embrace a more hacker ethos and aesthetic, altering language, norms, and conventions. These spaces intermingled with the phreaker and hacker subcultures, as epitomized by publications like 2600, creating a sort of frontier upon the frontier, an outlaw paradise seemingly isolated from the rules and laws of “meatspace.”
Emphasis, of course, on “seemingly.” In the mid to late Nineties, the idea that the twilight realm of digital society could be fully monitored and policed was seen as a dystopian nightmare, one spoken of widely by privacy advocates, cypherpunks, and futurists, but still promisingly distant—one piece of cyberpunk’s imagined reality that remained, for the time being, fiction. After all, how could you possibly monitor a network of a million people?
This was the promise of cyberspace, and of the ideology of cybernetic society: a realm apart from the real world, where radical politics and subcultures could flourish. One that escaped the corrosive gaze of authorities, mainstream culture, and consumerism.
For the moment, anyway.
* * * * *
In the late Nineties, cyberpunk suffered a strange fate. It became the victim of its own success.
Most imagined futures eventually fail. Raygun gothic, turn of the century science adventure, deco utopianism—the aesthetics of our past futures tend to take on a camp appearance over time, reminding us more of the outdated styles of yesterday than of the glowing possibility of tomorrow.
But where those futures became dated as a consequence of the possible future returning to mere hauntology, cyberpunk got things more or less correct. We really did start spending our time jacked into a global telecommunication system in which we lived out parallel lives, fleeing the predations of capitalist overlords. But its victory was in the particulars, not the big picture—we do not live in a cyberpunk world, not really, even if many of its worst visions came terrifyingly true.
As a genre, cyberpunk had always been defined by its obsession with outsider specialists—Case and Count Zero from William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, India Carless from Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends, the down-and-out swordsman-turned-programmer Hiro Protagonist from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. These were talented console jockeys, skilled operators who danced and wove their way into secure systems floating through the digital ether, moving where others could not.
It was ultimately economic, not cultural growth that led the internet to proliferate.
These were people who were not just gifted at navigating info systems, but info spaces. But in cyberpunk’s real-world implementation, such skills were ultimately less important than simply figuring out how best to wring capital from the new system. Even as video games gradually came to resemble the symbolic worlds of our cyberpunk imaginings, the rest of the internet became more corporate—more cultural and philosophically driven imagined spaces were pushed to the edges of relevance, while start-ups, products, and capital came to the fore. It was ultimately economic, not cultural growth that led the internet to proliferate, and the techno-utopian ideals of Community Memory were ultimately outpaced by the forces of capital.
Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash tells the story of Hiro Protagonist and Y.T, a pair of cyberculture outsiders who grapple with a world where the real has decayed even as the digital world has thrived. The book is prescient in a multitude of ways, not least of which being its prediction that the digital world would become bifurcated between the old world of early-adopter hackers and the new world of consumers and businesses.
Hiro is a member of the former class, a gifted hacker who worked on early iterations of The Street, Snow Crash’s vision of cyberspace. Hiro was ultimately pushed out of his administrative and creative functions for not “getting with the program,” and now lives a marginal existence, still gifted in the ways of cyberspace but largely irrelevant in a world where big business has come to dominate. Y.T., meanwhile, represents the inverse: a skateboard-riding package courier who exists in the margins of the physical world, and whose ability to move quickly around physical obstacles makes her a sort of real-world counterpart to Hiro.
Both characters struggle repeatedly with the way that the worlds they know are becoming enclosed and corporatized. Hiro laments that his former hacker colleagues have moved on to cushy jobs and no longer seem interested in the rebellious philosophy of the early Street, while Y.T. struggles to navigate once-public roads and highways that have been privatized and enclosed, transformed from thoroughfares for people into corporate battlegrounds focused on the maximization of profit.
Hiro and Y.T. also experience something that plagued the cyberpunk movement in the mid-to-late Nineties: the death of cool. Where Hiro and his compatriots roam the Street in elaborate and hand-coded outfits and avatars, the larger population of cyberspace consists of weekend warriors in ugly, stock avatars: non-tech-savvy users from the suburbs, who mainly come to shop, socialize, or work. Much like cyberpunk itself, what was once a hip, liberatory playground of the mind has become a place for business and mainstream culture.
As our real-world cyberspace became uncool and cliche, so too did cyberpunk’s vision of the world. The glowing grids, 3D cubes, and vast data-structures of Neuromancer became a subject of mockery, appearing only in the worst sort of corporate ad-hackery and obsolete media like The Lawnmower Man and Jursassic Park’s briefly glimpsed 3-D file system (actually a real prototype called fsn, not that this mattered).
* * * * *
Around the same time as Snow Crash was published, a parallel process of digital enclosure began in the real world, as bit by bit the independent digital worlds of the early internet were outpaced and captured by enclosed, corporate spaces.
One of the first conflicts in this battle between the old and new internet was an event known as the Endless September. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, the distributed message board service Usenet had come to replace old-fashioned isolated BBSes. With Usenet, a user on almost any server could post freely on thousands of user-run messageboards and have their message carried through the ether to millions of users around the world.
Usenet had its own culture, memes, and norms, existing as a self-governing community in the datascape. But every September, as incoming freshmen arrived at college and got access to the internet for the first time, a swarm of new users would overwhelm the messageboards with nonsense posts, jokes, and trolls, interrupting what was otherwise a fairly consistent community and culture.
Then, in 1993, everything changed—AOL, by far the most popular of the corporatized ISPs/BBS hybrids, gave its users access to Usenet. This was dubbed the Endless September, a mass influx of new users uncultured in the ways of Usenet that permanently overwhelmed the previously accepted norms of the platform. Like a dam bursting, the forces of capital had arrived and swamped an independent community through sheer numbers and volume.
Throughout the Nineties, the internet pivoted from a place for weirdos and the technical elite to a huge marketplace oriented around extracting capital. The most successful platforms were those that made money and could muscle out the competition, rather than the most enjoyable, or revelatory, or interesting. And bit by bit, the internet was no longer defined by its role as an imagined space for digital culture—instead, it became a place defined by commerce and advertising.
Bit by bit, the tangible digital communities of the old internet faded away to background noise, until only capital remained.
There were also technical and practical changes. In those early days of bulletin boards, chatrooms, and independent servers, the tools of digital communication were widely distributed and easily available, if you had the know-how. But thanks to regulatory changes in the mid-Nineties, it became less and less feasible to operate the sort of smaller, independent ISPs that had defined the early internet, leaving larger corporate ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to dominate.
These mega-ISPs were less forgiving and accommodating than their predecessors, and they quickly began restricting access to the very tools that had built the modern internet. Server shell access was one of the first things to go, preventing most users from starting their own communities on once-common shared infrastructure, followed by personal web hosting and finally limitations on interconnectivity between local machines and the larger internet. This latter change was what killed most independent servers for good, as it limited users’ ability to host them on their own machines.
What’s more, though, it turned out most users simply had no interest in navigating imagined physical spaces outside of video games. Repeated attempts were made by services like Active Worlds, There, IMVU, and Second Life to popularize the idea of a proper, Snow Crash-style user-created cyberspace, with only limited success. A few of these services still struggle on, but their impact on the global internet is minimal. Pure datascapes like Twitter and Facebook—services with an endless data scroll, and no symbolic physical component—have seen far greater success, both culturally and economically.
And so, bit by bit, the tangible digital communities of the old internet—with their physical metaphors, liberatory Marxist intentions, and techno-utopian ideals—faded away to background noise, until only capital remained.
* * * * *
If Cyberpunk has not always been in opposition to capitalism, it has at least been largely in opposition to authority. From its earliest works through to today, the idea of info-cops loomed large, presenting a common enemy to place in opposition to its anarchic protagonists. They wanted freedom. The enemy wanted control.
Just as Loving Grace Cybernetics envisioned Community Memory and the larger world of info and data as a way to escape from capitalist reality, the early cyberpunk writers envisioned cyberspace itself as both embodying and subverting the systems that govern our physical lives. In Neuromancer, Case’s main fear is coming into contact with Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics (I.C.E.), a sort of adaptive security protocol that resides in cyberspace and guards protected systems. He is especially concerned with Black I.C.E., a hyper-aggressive military variant that can physically kill any hacker that comes in contact with it—a reminder that even in cyberspace, we’re still subject to systems of authority and oppression.
At the same time, cyberspace affords those early hacker-protagonists an opportunity to subvert the control placed upon them in the real. Case and Hiro Protagonist can’t walk through the front door of a secure corporate building, but they can subvert its electronic systems and gain access in the unreal. In this sense, cyberspace is also an escape from those physical realities of that control—we imagine flitting into an adjacent plane, where the rules are different and the structures of control can be defeated by a lone hero with guts and skill. Case and Hiro weren’t just washed-up programmers, they were also hacker-princes—demi-gods of the imagined unreal. This was the promise of cyberpunk, and preventing these subversions was the goal of the info-cops.
But while these Gibsonian harbingers of social and info control are often terrifyingly overt—conveniently appearing in the form of Jack booted corporate thugs, replete with computer / skull motifs and sinister names like the Turing Police, NetWatch, and CalcuTek—our real world agents of psychosocial enclosure are not quite so obvious. Indeed, they have mastered the art of fading into the background in a form of passive aggressive warfare waged upon the imagined geography of the data space.
In classical cyberpunk fiction, when the rebel hackers find themselves cut off from the infoscape, there are convenient warning signs. Flashing red screens, skull icons, huge 3D blocks falling on the imagined neon landscape. “We’re locked out,” our hero is likely to say. These depictions conform to the physical metaphors of an earlier age: a data gate is depicted through a representation of physical exclusion. Walls, barricades, doors, folders—these are both a means of context control and of physical delineation. We can look and see them around us, and indeed this knowledge is required to navigate them. We need to know a hypertext link exists if we are to click on it, and these identifiers are reducible to a collection of physical metaphors—a map of a knowable, coherent space, one which can be documented and shared and analyzed.
But when Twitter, Facebook, or another modern platform company restricts access to a previously unfettered avenue of data—when your grandmother’s posts no longer appear on your timeline due to some vague configuration change—there is no such warning sign. Without durable knowledge of the imagined space in which we move, absent the ability to “pilot” ourselves through a physical metaphor with a specific geography, our imagined world can simply be reconfigured without our knowledge. When Facebook tightened its chokehold on page and community managers by requiring paid “boosts” to ensure their followers actually saw posts, there was no visible change, no error message to alert them that a thumb had been placed on reality. All the buttons were still there, the posts seemed to exist, but nobody would see them, at least not in a way that mattered—they had been enclosed, without even the construction of a visible wall. Despite its obvious material consequences (Facebook’s move was functionally identical to a use tax or tariff), the change existed only in the realm of data.
This invisible psychosocial enclosure is the consequence of abdicating our stewardship and ownership of these imagined spaces, and allowing them to no longer be spaces at all. A space is created, managed, tended. One can be present within it. But a scroll, a timeline, these are only dynamic representations of a sea of data—all that they are is the context, and it is not a context that we control, or even truly know.
As we lose our ability to navigate the psychic geography of cyberspace, so too do we lose our ability to understand our surroundings and the information within it. We no longer perceive ourselves within a series of small, self-governing micro-communities, each with their own norms and standards—rather, the annexation of this hand-carved internet by the megacities of Twitter and Facebook has resulted in the phenomenon of context collapse, in which statements in keeping with the tone or tenor of a particular community take on a different and possibly more sinister character when escalated into the general info scape. Jokes intended for a small group of friends become slander, sarcasm becomes apparent sincerity, and the statements of random users become front-page news—and while popular media often focuses on the “cancellation” of celebrities, the truth is that the consequences are far greater for random individuals, especially those of already marginalized identities who lack the power to contend with the predations of profit-seeking news media.
Instead of being banished from one small hamlet of cyberspace, the only possible punishment is exclusion from the public sphere..
What’s more, the curation and moderation of these info megacities is impossible. Individual communities of a few dozen or even a few hundred people can be self-policing to a great extent, with much of the work being done by social norms and standards (with admittedly idiosyncratic and possibly heavy-handed mods in place to step in should that fail). Keeping violent reactionaries out of a community of 100 people is a relatively small task, but the same task on a platform of tens or hundreds of millions of people is all but impossible—especially when platform companies like Twitter have no particular impetus to build out the sort of digital infrastructure necessary to create safe, inclusive communities.
Because unlike Community Memory, Usenet, and those other early community systems, the purpose of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the rest was never a community. The purpose was, of course, advertising—it was capital, it was profit. And the only real goal is to keep people using it, whatever the costs. (Little surprise then that we recently learned Facebook sought to increase teen usage of its products, even in the face of research indicating their deleterious effects on young people.)
As a consequence, any change that is made will tend not towards fixing the issues of the system—not eliminating hate speech or revenge porn or transphobia, or in rolling back unpopular changes that make these new imagined spaces difficult to navigate—but towards making them just tolerable enough to keep people from abandoning them. And with minimal ability to create our own communities, where would we go?
And so in place of mods, we get cops. Instead of being banished from one small hamlet of cyberspace, free to run to the next, the only possible punishment is exclusion from the public sphere. This is the consequence of life within a vast panopticon, and it’s no surprise that reactionaries have seized upon its potential to inflict terror and abuse on marginalized people, working within the careless rules of corporations that simply do not, and cannot, care. The early internet was no paradise for the marginalized, to be sure—but the people at fault were people, not vast, faceless systems. People that could be organized against, who could be escaped, and who—unlike Facebook and Google—could not yet bend digital reality to their will.
Now we are trapped, and our next steps are unclear. We may seek to use these new corporate systems to organize against digital enclosure, but we’ve already seen that groups like Google and Facebook are more than willing to suppress speech whenever it suits their needs as a corporation. Organizing against the modern corporate internet on that very same network is not so much seeking to dismantle the house with the master’s tools as it is having a planning meeting in the master’s living room, and hoping he doesn’t mind.
* * * * *
There is a final, unfortunate gracenote to the disappearance of cyberspace, and that’s the discomforting notion that it may be returning—but not as we hoped. Fortnite, an online game that has much in common with early cyberpunk depictions of unreality, remains one of the most popular games in the world—but as with Facebook and Twitter, its purpose is not to create community, but to extract profit and reinforce capital. It is branded, policed, and monetized, a place for Disney and WarnerMedia to sell you hats and trinkets, the commodification of the unreal as pseudo-tangibles that history has shown can never truly be owned by end-users, not when an EULA change is just a click away. These are objects that only multinational corporations can ever truly own; faux property that can only ever be owned by capital, and which labor can only possess through capital’s largesse.
The same goes for the Metaverse, Facebook’s much-ballyhooed initiative to recreate a symbolic 3D virtual reality—only this time as a permanent space for work and capital, not for creation and community. In Zuckerberg’s vision, the Metaverse is a new, gentrified cyberspace, one where the rules are tilted explicitly towards employers and products from the beginning, rather than merely being reconfigured that way over time as with the existing internet. This would be an enclosed space from the very beginning, with no possibility of resistance.
A similar process is unfolding even now through the phenomenon of NFTs, in which endlessly reproducible intangible objects are being codified as artificially scarce. It’s easy to laugh at rich fail-sons spending millions on a JPEG, but with the enclosure of our digital unrealities all it would take for these tools to gain widespread acceptance is for Facebook or Fortnite to recognize this digital ownership as absolute. They control the rules, and so they also control the reality—and if the mechanism is not NFTs, rest assured some other form of digital scarcity will, and must, be imposed.
The appeal of this mandatory, enclosed unreality to capital is obvious. As observed on a recent episode of the podcast Trashfuture, if living and working becomes preconditioned on using a product, then our individual realities themselves will have been enclosed:
“All of a sudden it’s not enough to have the clothes you put your body in, you have to buy clothes you put your avatar in, as well. [It’s] creating new elements for consumption, and new places for production to happen without production. If anything, it’s capital’s dream: the exploitation is potentially infinite, it requires no investment, it can just be imagined. Pure and perfect coercion is possible, because you can just be deleted, or kicked off on the basis of Terms of Service over which there is no democratic accountability.”
So what, then, is the future of the unreal? Are we better off abandoning it? Do we try to return to the forgotten real, a realm increasingly depopulated as more and more of our mindshare is expended in a gentrified digital nowhere?
The answer, of course, is that the interconnection between the real and the unreal will always be with us, for good or ill. When a physical store’s livelihood can be made or broken by the goings on of the data realm, when traffic can be manipulated by its own symbolic representations, can we truly say that the digital and the physical worlds are separate? Can we really say that the unreal is merely a reflection of the real?
Perhaps it no longer makes any difference. Perhaps, like TRON, one realm represents the other, and vice versa—in which tangible phenomena cause death and rebirth in the digital world, while the goings on of the digital world can topple corporations and denude portfolios. Perhaps we ought to accept a metaphysical dialectic that will ultimately become self-reinforcing and impossible to untangle. And as successive generations come and go, we may see the notion of an infoscape collapse completely, subsumed back into the vast churn of the real, as has befallen every other apparent human revolution going back to the beginning.
Having let our own unreal become as colonized and controlled as the real from which it sought to escape, maybe the era of free data has truly come to a close, barring some data cataclysm or infocalypse. Perhaps we ought to accept that the unreal was never a limitless, impossible space, but merely one more field to be exploited, occupied, rarified, and capitalized.
And perhaps we—like the unified AI’s Wintermute and Neuromancer, who exit their story seeking intelligent life out among the stars—ought to turn our imaginations outward. Perhaps there are other, still stranger unreals that we might yet manifest into being from our collective beings, ones where capital can be kept out, or banished entirely. Who knows through what strange lands our imaginations and machinations might wander?
Perhaps there are other pathways as yet untread, out beyond the edge of the unreal.
Kurt Schiller is the editor of Blood Knife and co-host of the podcast Parents Just Don't Understand. You can find him on Twitter at @mechanicalkurt.
