Cyberculture, Here and Now

We were roughly ten minutes into Adam Greenfield's Picnic '08 talk when he dropped the 'C' word, suggesting a return to Cyberspace. The audience, save those who missed the dot.com bubble or have since blocked it out, shifted in their seats. Someone next to me peered up from his iPhone. Cyberspace, or the “consensual hallucination” described in William Gibson's Neuromancer, was central to the 1990s hype surrounding everything from Virtual Reality to Webrings. No surprise, then, if Greenfield triggered a collective sense of déjà vu among the attendees.

His remarks come after years of a general backlash against early Cybercultural concepts like Virtual Reality and Cyberspace (the two used to be synonymous). In academia, social scientists have rushed in to debunk 'cyberbole,' the various determinist accounts of life being drastically altered by digital technology. The industry darling, Autodesk, long ago ditched its Virtual Reality projects to focus on simulation software for industrial designers, electricians and auto mechanics. (Killer apps tend to be more mundane than in the popular imagination, with Lotus 1-2-3 being the classic example.) And on the Web, the image of a wild electronic frontier has given way to the cold imposition of geography, whether crudely through censorship or with more worthwhile applications that customize content according to one's location.

And in some ways, Greenfield’s ‘Networked City’ presentation continued down this path. Similar to locative technologies and augmented reality, his concept of the ‘long here’ refers to the communication of location-specific information – while walking through a neighborhood, you might simultaneously ‘browse’ its history, housing prices, restaurant reviews, etc. on a mobile device. Arguably, augmented reality and derivative concepts like mixed reality avoid the traps of the virtual, rejecting what Mark Dery and others saw as a desire in Cyberculture to escape materiality, to ‘jack in’ and leave the body behind. With the locative turn, the point is not to build new worlds, but to reinvent existing ones.

Greenfield’s ‘big now’ also puts users back in the real world, albeit one technologically expanded: he spoke of gaining insight into the “massive parallelism” in the world through new media. Applications like Twitter point toward a future in which users maintain remote, always-on connections with their friends, giving rise to what the New York Times recently called a “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.”

Why, then, is a return to Cyberspace appropriate? Why here and now? Greenfield argued that the basic feature of the networked city is that it unsettles the once “sovereign categories” of architecture and reality. This fascination with the fictional character of reality – in which even the material world may be reconfigured as alterable patterns of information – runs deep in Cybercultural thought. Sure, it comes in different flavors, from Baudrillard-like dystopianism to Kevin Kelly’s enthusiasm, but is prevalent nonetheless. And it seems this kind of informational determinism, rather than any technological one, is what ties together the earliest explorations in Cyberculture to today’s speculation on urban computing and the Internet of Things.

“Virtuality is the dominant reality of our time,” wrote R.U. Sirius nearly 20 years ago in Mondo 2000. Once a radical notion in an avant-garde magazine, this conviction has not so much disappeared as it has faded into the background. Until, of course, someone mentions Cyberspace at Picnic.