12/4/2023 0 Comments First meta narrative workThe consummation of digital virtuality is a world where the story is already written and you do not make any choices at all. But the real-life hackers come from outside, probing for weaknesses in the walls of the virtual worlds, while the consensual hallucinations that most of us inhabit these days are designed, like Las Vegas gambling floors, to channel us into the places their builders want us to go. It is true, of course, that digital resources are vulnerable to this kind of cowboy criminality. Even William Gibson, whose wonderful 1984 novel Neuromancer named “cyberspace” and foresaw its supersession of “meatspace,” depicted virtuality as an anarchic “consensual hallucination” in which his virus-slinging protagonist could frustrate the feds with a series of daring dodges. The godlike power held by the creators of the new virtual environments was easy to miss in the early, utopian days of the Internet. That is the first step the second is to reduce the number of narratives on offer through algorithmic surveillance and behavioral nudging. Users conform ever more closely to one or a few of the narratives on offer, driven by powerful mimetic dynamics to converge on common thoughts, words, and actions. As the years have passed, however, the networks have imposed their own architectural logics on virtual life and discourse. It did look for a while as if the new social networks might open up space for a wider diversity of lives, conversations, communities, and experiences than was possible in the offline world.
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