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November 2, 2003
I was a bit bored yesterday afternoon so I wandered downtown to my bookshop looking for something to read on Bataille and literature and architecture in modernity.
I came across this book by Margaret Wertheim. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace caught my eye because of these concerns. I then remembered that I'd read Pythagoras's Trousers. a few years ago and though that she had captured the world of fundamental physics and analytic philosophy very well.
For all the talk about physics interrogating nature and letting nature respond, there is a social and cultural history of physics. The mathematicians appropriated space. You can interpret this history of mathematical physics and physical space as being deeply religious with its Theory of Everything in both its purely reductionistic sense (there is nothing but atoms and genes ) and the end of science, the whole story or aboslute knowledge sense. Religion is buried in that theory of everything written in a few equations; religion in the theological sense of the "gods" of science aspiring to become gods, or that in the quest they believe that they are gods and have been all along.
In the Pearly Gates of CyberspaceWertheim argues that the notion of cyberspace is an attempt to create a secular Heaven on earth. The layers of meanings surrounding cyberspace involve our society's dreaming about utopia. An example of this utopian impulse is John Walker. He says that he was full of:
"....almost unbounded optimism I felt during the 1994-1999 period when public access to the Internet burgeoned and innovative new forms of communication appeared in rapid succession. In that epoch I was firmly convinced that universal access to the Internet would provide a countervailing force against the centralisation and concentration in government and the mass media which act to constrain freedom of expression and unrestricted access to information. Further, the Internet, properly used, could actually roll back government and corporate encroachment on individual freedom by allowing information to flow past the barriers erected by totalitarian or authoritarian governments and around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media."
Buried in this optimism is a cultural conception of cyberspace. Though this is an outgrowth of modern materialist science, it posits the existence of a genuine yet immaterial world and so involves particular conceptions of ourselves. Hence we can talk about the metaphysics of cyberspace.
It is a space in which people are invited to commune in a nonbodily fashion; a virtual world--- a computer generated world. Secondly, cyberspace is the escapehatch from physical space and our physical embodiment: it's techo-utopianism embodies a religious dreaming.
to be continued
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