As the 20th century draws to a close, the idea of a virtual campus – paralleling or perhaps replacing the physical one – seems increasingly plausible. If a latter-day Jefferson were to lay out an ideal educational community for the third millennium, she might site it in cyberspace.
The costs of reaching and aggregating audiences should diminish sharply. There will be opportunities to produce and distribute low-budget entertainment for very small audiences and to identify and reach scattered audiences with the most specialized of interests and tastes. The infobahn may become a vast, global Broadway lined with thousands of virtual theaters. So the social superglue of necessary proximity between performers and audience is losing its old stickiness, and the traditional architectural types and social conventions (going to the theater, cheering for your local team in the ballpark) that we associate with performance are coming unstuck … Established distinctions between producers and consumers of entertainment … are breaking down. Soon, all the world will be an electronic stage.
In the world that we cyborgs inhabit … the electronic retinas of our video cameras produce shifts and fragments. Rooms and buildings now have new kinds of apertures; the scenes that we see through the glass are rescaled and distant, the place on the other side may change from moment to moment, and the action may be a replay … Once, places were bounded by walls and horizons. Days were defined by sunrises and sunsets. But we video cyborgs see things differently. The Net has become a worldwide, time-zone-spanning optic nerve with electronic eyeballs at its endpoints.
We will all become mighty morphing cyborgs capable of reconfiguring ourselves by the minute – of renting extended nervous tissue and organ capacity and of redeploying our extensions in space as our needs change and as our resources allow. Think of yourself on some evening in the not-so-distant future, when wearable, fitted, and implanted electronic organs connected by bodynets are as commonplace as cotton; your intimate infrastructure connects you seamlessly to a planetful of bits, and you have software in your underwear. It’s eleven o’clock, Smarty Pants; do you know where your network extensions are tonight? … metaphysicians will be tempted to reformulate the mind/body problem as the mind/network problem.
Electronic organs, as they become ever smaller and more intimately connected to you, will lose their traditional hard plastic carapaces. They will become more like items of clothing – soft wearables that conform to the contours of your body; you will have them fitted like shoes, gloves, contact lenses, or hearing aids. Circuits may be woven into cloth. Microdevices may even be implanted surgically … You will also begin to blend into the architecture. In other words, some of your electronic organs may be built into your surroundings … “inhabitation” will take on a new meaning – one that has less to do with parking your bones in architecturally defined space and more with connecting your nervous system to nearby electronic organs. Your room and your home will become part of you, and you will become part of them.
Anticipate the moment at which all your personal electronic devices – headphone audio player, cellular telephone, pager, dictaphone, camcorder, personal digital assistant (PDA), electronic stylus, radiomodem, calculator, Loran positioning system, smart spectacles, VCR remote, data glove, electronic jogging shoes that count your steps and flash warning signals at oncoming cars, medical monitoring system, pacemaker … and anything else that you might habitually wear or occasionally carry – can seamlessly be linked in a wireless bodynet that allows them to function as an integrated system and connects them to the worldwide digital network … you will have acquired a collection of interchangeable, snap-in organs connected by exonerves … your nervous system will plug into the worldwide digital net. You will have become a modular, reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborg.
We are all cyborgs now. Architects and urban designers of the digital era must begin by reauthorizing the body in space.
Does the logic of network existence entail radical schizophrenia – a shattering of the integral subject into an assemblage of aliases and agents? Could we hack immortality by storing our aliases and agents permanently on disk, to outlast our bodies? (William Gibson’s cyberpunk antiheroes nonchalantly shuck their slow, obsolescent, high-maintenance meat machines as they port their psychic software to new generations of hardware.) Does resurrection reduce to restoration from backup?
My software surrogates can potentially do much more than provide origins and destinations for messages: when appropriately programmed, they can serve as my semiautonomous agents by tirelessly performing standard tasks that I have delegated to them and even by making simple decisions on my behalf … A more maliciously conceived one might be programmed to roam the digital highways and byways, looking for trouble – for opportunities to corrupt the files of my enemies, to plunder valuable information, to eliminate rival agents, or to replicate itself endlessly and choke the system. Fritz Lang got it wrong: the robots in our future are not metallic Madonnas clanking around “Metropolis,” but soft cyborgs slinking silently through the Net. The neuromans of William Gibson are a lot closer to the mark.
The most crucial task before us is not one of putting in place the digital plumbing of broadband communications links and associated electronic appliances (which we will certainly get anyway), nor even of producing electronically deliverable “content,” but rather one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have.