Jaron Lanier walks into a room the same way he talks; with a barely contained effervescence. Matching the zest of his untroubled, boyant gait with intellectualfervor and excitment, the cyberprophet and inventor of the phrase "virtual reality" continues to engage the issues of our digital world with freeform, intellectual improvisation; pursuing wild tangential ideas as he peregrinates to a final summation. He retains a guarded enthusiasm for the new information technology, despite the fact that many of his original utopian visions have not come to pass (sensory gloves and goggles still don_t come packaged with Nintendo games). But as he says, "The story isn’t the technology, but what people make of it." And it’s on that score that Lanier remains refreshingly excited, slightly skeptical, and decidedly utopian. With his baggy pants, oversized t-shirt and wild mane of dreadlocked hair, he seems a cross between Bart Simpson and Bob Marley; giving off a kind of mad genius air, but providing a kind of elder statesman’s view of the current dot.com hype. This unique perspective still serves him well he travels the world lecturing for such diverse groups as the U.S. military and university design departments. In between lectures, Lanier has also been known to jam with musicians like Brian Eno and Sean Lennon. And when he’s done playing around, he writes columns for CIO and Gear magazines and examines the arcanities of cockroaches for the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. It’s clear at this point that virtual reality may not have turned out the way Lanier thought it could, but, and he would likely agree, his actual reality seems rockin’ enough..
Q I understand that you’re now trying to, of all things, harmonize two distinct branches of physics.
JL There are two primary branches in twentieth century physics. Quantum mechanics and Relativity. Both test out perfectly, but are considered incompatible. Our goal is to use virtual reality to help physicists identify patterns in complicated mathematics that they might not otherwise be aware of.
How can virtually reality bring those two sides together? The various schools of mathematics that you can use to try to bridge these two branches of physics are more complicated that the ones used for either side by itself. The question is, if you had a universe that ran according to these theoretical mathematical principles, would it look anything like ours? So what we try to do is create computer simulations to see if, in general, the right sorts of things happens. We analyze each school of mathematical thought and ask general questions about it: Does it support complex processes? Would it create a universe where basically nothing happens? I am working with a brilliant physicist named Lee Swollen, who wrote a book called Life of the Cosmos.
Q It’s good to hear all the work on virtual reality wasn’t for naught.
JL I was away from it for a while, but I’ve returned to it in the last couple of years. And it’s actually been a pretty good experience; many people I see in the field now are the same ones I knew in the 80s, but it’s all more pleasant than it was before. I think we were all younger, and more competitive. But now, it’s a good time for virtual reality.
. Q How are your hopes and dreams for its applications different than they were in the eighties.
JL Well, there are many things that are different. Computer processors have become faster right on schedule but improvements in other areas, like our ability to make high-quality display screens or precise senors —those things are moving slower than I expected. It’s frustrating. Back in the eighties, the whole idea about how society would encounter the digital universe was this very fresh thing that you could talk about. We could be very utopian about it. Now my problem isn’t utopian thinking, it’s trying to retain students when most would prefer to go off and make millions of dollars with a dot.com or something. It’s a move away from the visionary. The digital thing has become so commonplace that it’s almost a banality. Much of it is wonderful but at times, it can be very disappointing. But that’s the way of the world. That’s life. That’s what we all signed up for.
Q What ever happened to that utopian vision, where did all the cyber-prophets like Terrance McKenna go?
JL I think many of the basic ideas that we always talked about back then, have turned out to be true; like our conviction that the internet would never be totally controlled. And maybe the Recording Industry Association of America will in fact be able to sue enough people and scare enough congressmen to bring it under control. That could happen. But so far, it seems the universe is the one we were predicting and hoping for—one in which there is a realignment and much broader distribution of power and knowledge, and a very industrious spirit. These elements at least haven’t been killed yet. I think the next few years are going to show us where it goes.
Q What should we watch out for?
JL The most troubling aspect of the industry, which is certainly affecting our potential for real progress, is the near universal emphasis on greed. I’ve just seen it in students who see the internet only in terms of fortunes, instead of revelations. Sometimes I tell students that there are there immense, poignant problems that they could work on and they’ll respond: ‘Those would only benefit humanity. I want to make money.’ I just die inside. What is this for, then?
On the other hand, we should be utopian about human potential, but we should never be utopian about people themselves. What I mean is that if you believe you’re going to fix people, eradicate their evil impulses, you basically make yourself into a fascist. You have to then dictate how people must be. And the truth is, people are evil. It’s not like these are aliens that are screwing with our minds. We are responsible for the trouble we get into. And this affects not only our sense of moral, ethical balance, but our ideas of aesthetic value. It is a problem of ugliness and banality caused by the commodification of all things.
Q But how do we get over that?
JL Well, there is a profound problem here. If you want beauty, it has to come from people’s madness. But along with their beauty comes all sorts of bad things, like racism and so forth. Starbucks exists in every neighbourhood because its façade is so bland that it doesn’t offend anybody’s sense of quality. Yet in Starbucks’ blandness is contained a lessening of aesthetic value. Essentially what we have done is to implement a homongenated corporate ontology in place of indivuality in order to achieve a consensus in our new global village. I don’t want to start sounding like a French philosopher. But there is a real problem there. As soon as you get style and flavor, you position yourself in opposition to somebody else’s view of propriety. And so I think that in a funny way, our desire to be better people, to be more moral, has made us ugly. See what I mean?
Q We are being so safe, it’s dangerous.
JL Yeah. If you wanted to put up a building that had flavor and style, what would it be? If you were to erect a new courthouse, there is no way that you could make it neoclassical or European, because it would seem so culturally incorrect. So what can you do? What aesthetic can you select? Nothing is acceptable. So it winds up looking like a box. That’s what has happened to physical architecture in the twentieth century and that’s what we are doing to information technology now. Q
You mean in the design of web pages?
Not just in the style of the web pages; there is a definite lack of personality to the internet that I wasn’t expecting. Forget about the fact that it’s still flat and two dimensional instead of a 3D virtual reality, as I had expected. It doesn’t have a lot of blood in it. It is just, I don’t know, safe. Maybe that’s the way it should be.
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