Wyche, S. P., Magnus, C. M., and Grinter, R. E. 2009. Broadening Ubicomp’s vision: an exploratory study of charismatic pentecostals and technology use in Brazil. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Orlando, Florida, USA, September 30 – October 03, 2009). Ubicomp ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 145-154.

The authors of this paper study a sample population of extreme users of ICT, the Pentacostal Christians in Brazil. While there are some sub-groups of Pentacostalism that eschew all technology as the work of the devil, increasingly, many others are embracing technology. The manner of this embrace is somewhat unexpected, and the authors argue, illuminates some new facets to the problem of realizing Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing. In fact, the authors challenge whether or not this is the precise vision we should be aiming for, in light of the ways some people accept or reject technology, and of course how they appropriate it for religious purposes. That said, the authors do seem, themselves, to be pitching these insights to the designers of ICTs who they acknowledge do aim for ubiquitousness on a global scale (if that’s not redundant). The main contribution of this paper is that it exposes the “complex negotiations embedded in technology adoption” (146).

I get the sense that this paper is born from a somewhat noble attempt to be more inclusive in design. I say “somewhat” because the purpose of this inclusion is to generate more consumers, and in the end to create converts to the kind of worldview that embraces the encroachment of ubiquitous computing into all areas of our lives. But the article seems to present a few trite guidelines for the HCI community that, if we stopped and thought for a second, we could have said without having done any research (and indeed, I struggle to see how their interviews substantiate these conclusions). For example, “Ubicomp researchers can apply this finding to their work by accounting for individuals’ physical and spiritual needs or -body and soul – when developing applications to promote healthy behaviors” (152). Yes. Duh! But perhaps the fact that this needed to be articulated at all points to a great blindness to spiritual matters in the technology world; i.e. a chasm between the worldviews that produce technology vs. spirituality/religion.

And it is always good to remind technology designers of this essential question asked in this paper: “Whose user needs are marginalized at the expense of furthering a western normatie agenda about appropriate ICT use” (153)?

For me, this paper exposes the need for another point of clarification when I speak of the need for spiritual engagements with technology. The authors here provide anecdotes of individuals believing that spirits are communicating to them via their technologies (e.g. people turning off their televisions to avoid the devil, or following links on the Internet believing the spirits are guiding their clicks), and cases when spiritual healing has been directed to them through their technologies. This is not something unique to the Pentacostals. Psychic healer, Jo Dunning, for example, holds regular healing sessions over the radio and the phone. And I can personally sympathize (to a degree) with the belief that technology is as plausible a medium of communication as any (especially when you compare it to the ‘channels’ through which God communicated in the Bible). For example, when watching Most Haunted Live, I will always turn off the television when Yvette Fielding is about to begin her incantation for the devil. Not worth the risk I say. I’d rather not have the devil in my living room, thankyouverymuch.

So clearly when people are engaging with technology in this way – even if only to decide to disengage – they are imbuing that engagement with some spiritual significance. The spiritual component here is the experience of enchantment. “Our findings” they report, “suggest that joyous ecstacy is compatible with contemporary life, and that technology can support it even in our modern secular world” (152). It is important that we have evidence of people being able to have enchanting experiences with technology, because we tech-savvy folk (or anyone whose job involves using Excel) tend to feel that technology is far from enchanting (perhaps closer to being impossibly irritating). This hints at the potential of technology to support what I call soul-satisfying experiences. But – and perhaps it’s just that my goals have changed a bit in light of Wertheim’s book – I am more interested in community aspects of spirituality than I am in enchantment. I mean, it’s easy enough to design enchantedness into a digital experience: just tart it up a bit, make it flashy! It’s a more interesting challenge to figure out how we may design a new orientation to community through people’s engagement with technology.

What this boils down to, my point of clarification, is that it is not the point of experience of engagement so much that I want to focus my design attention on, but on the ways in which a new kind of technological engagement can be intentionally crafted in order to produce a more meaningful engagement with community; i.e. one that helps us manifest those spiritual values such as compassion and selflessness.

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 8 – Cyber-Utopia

The main idea critiqued in this chapter is the belief that cyberspace leads to the development of “idealized communities that transcend the tyrannies of distance and that are free from the biases of gender, race, and color” (281). Famous proponent of cyber communities, Howard Rheingold writes that “Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became the mall” (282).

I think the problem in realizing this vision lies in the fact established in the previous chapter, that cyberspace is fundamentally amoral – which is not to say immoral, but moral-less. The examples presented in this chapter show how cyberspace in fact liberates us from the norms of social behavior we are accustomed to in the real world. Yes, there are creeps in the real world too, but creepiness is allowed to expand in cyberspace, precisely because this space demands nothing of us in terms of moral behavior. It has only one commandment: “Thou shalt not limit another’s free speech.”

This space generates a weird mentality, or indeed purpose. The goal is to get, to colonize. Instead of creating a world where “men of all nations will walk in harmony” (294), we seem to be climbing on one another to avoid drowning in the oblivion. “On the contrary, commentator Ziauddin Sardar suggests that what we are seeing is not so much a space for vibrant pluralism but a new form of Western imperialism” (294). As Wertheim shows, it is also an affirmation of the patriarchy; women are not entirely welcome in this space. And futher, “With the world constantly being formed anew at the digital frontier, traditional ways of thinking and being are all too easily reduced to quaint curiosities: ‘Other people and their cultures become so many ‘models’, so many zeros and ones in cyberspace.’ It is a process that Sardar decries as ‘the museumization of the world’” (295). What are the effects of this museumization? It serves to affirm and enshrine the thinking that produced the Internet in the first place, which is another way in which we are heading toward Lanier’s “lock in.”

I do like this idea from high-technology entrepreneur Esther Dyson: “Because there will be so much information, so much multimedia, so many options [online] people will learn to value human connection more, and they will look for it on the Net” (283). But I think that cruelly, while we may crave human connection more as it becomes more and more difficult to make connections in the real world and people feel increasingly isolated, forging relationships on the Internet only reveals how they pale in comparison to the real thing; Internet connections devalue human connections. How painful that we are stuck in this cycle whereby our engagement with social media increases our desire for human connection ever more as it decreases the value of these connections. This is like Zeno’s paradox; and we will never get to the point where we feel fulfilled by these connections.

I would argue, further, that by looking for a way to assuage our isolation on the Internet allows us to ignore the greater responsibility of fixing this problem in the real world. How will we ever take the necessary action to repair our societies and generate social capital in our physical communities when we could just as easily hop into Second Life?

Wertheim writes, “With these utopian visions we witness the emergence of the idea that man, through his own efforts, can create a New Jerusalem here on earth” (284). To me, this seems, sadly, like we have developed intense abandonment issues; though this is hardly a surprise, given the fact that Wertheim shows in the rest of her book exactly how our God was taken away from us. But are we really happy to accept this meager substitute for heaven; or do we do so simply because we know it won’t leave us?

Another idea that Wertheim challenges is the idea that the Internet is the utopia for discourse. “Connery suggests… that the history of the coffeehouse ‘holds a potential warning for those who dream that the Internet will create utopian discursive communities” (289). In the coffeehouses, for example, hierarchies soon developed, and elitism and exclusivity, presumably precisely what the cafe sought to extinguish, prevailed over democracy.

I don’t see there being anything wrong with utopian visioning. I think it helps us know where to aim. I think we would do well to take up this challenge: “our common task is to do a better job with the Net than we have done so far in the physical world” (Dyson, 282). And while it is poetic, I think it is true that in the Dantean sense, we create our own hell: “Now cyberspace too is an inner space of humanity’s own making, a space where the vilest sides of human behavior can all too easily effloresce” (296).

Wertheim leaves the reader with the thought that perhaps the greatest potential of the Internet lies in the fact that it is fundamentally a “network of relationships.” “It is this inherently relational aspect of cyberspace that I believe can serve as a powerful metaphor for building better communities” (298).

I do hope so. If we can at least recognize our responsibility in the creation of cyberspace, we’d be off to a good start: “If cyberspace teaches us anything, it is that the worlds we conceive (the spaces we ‘inhabit’) are communal projects requiring ongoing communal responsibility” (302). This is where literature on moral healthcare might come in handy, oddly, because just as the medical profession has realized in recent years, we have to begin to develop codes of practice that accommodate a plurality of religions. This means we have to figure out what it is that we can create that will be acceptible to all members of this cyber community. Religion is not universal, but a spiritual longing may be, as evidenced even in the rhetoric of the cyber-enthusiasts who see in cyberspace the potential for salvation.

The key to reenvisioning the potential of this community is to think outside the box: “As Einstein himself recognized, it is the language we use – the concepts that we articulate and hence the questions that we ask – that determines the kind of space that we are able to see” (304).

And finally, Wertheim notes: “To recognize the contingent nature of our conceptions of space is not to devalue them – relativistic space is no less useful or beautiful becaus we understand its cultural embeddedness. But in recognizing this, we may become less likely to devalue other conceptions of space” (305). Aha! – things do not have to be the way the are! Things – cyberspace even – can be different! People can be different too, if we change our thinking!

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 7 – Cyber Soul-Space

This chapter explores the ways in which cyberspace is uniquely poised for comparison with religious – i.e. Christian – eschatology. The parallel lies in the perceived possibility of trancendence that this new space offers. After all, Revelation is about: “Transcendence over earthly squalor and chaos, and above all transcendence over the limitations of the body” (256). As Lanier says (quoted by Wertheim), “I see the Internet as a syncretic version of Christian ritual, I really do. There’s this sensibility and transcendence that’s applied to computers, regularly. Where did that come from? That’s a Christian idea” (253).

Wertheim presents numerous examples of people adopting sartorial religiosity (much the way an admitted atheist, Stephen Hawking, does when he speaks of the Mind of God) in their speaking about cyberspace and its potential to grant salvation. Wertheim calls this “posited immortal self, this thing that can supposedly live on in the digital domain after our bodies die”, the “cyber-soul” (266). “What we have here, with these visions of cyber-immortality and cyber-resurrection, is an attempt to re-envision a soul in digital form” (266). The question is why many have come to accept this substitution.

The answer, according to Wertheim, has its roots in Pythagorean mysticism:

A contemporary of the Buddha in India, of Zoroaster in Persia, of Confucius and Lao-tzu in China, Pythagoras was a mystic of a uniquely Western stripe. Half a millenia before the birth of Christ, he formulated a radically dualistic philosophy of nature that continues to echo in cybernautic visions today. According to the Samian sage, the essence of reality lay not in matter – in the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water – but in the immaterial magic of numbers. For Pythagoras, the numbers where literally gods, and he associated them with the gods of the Greek pantheon. True reality, according to him, was not the plane of matter, but the transcendent realm of these number-gods.
For Pythagoras, the soul too was essentially mathematical. To him it was the soul’s ability to express things rationally – literally to in terms of ratios – that was its primary characteristic. In Pythagorean cosmology, the true home of the sol was the transcendent realm of the number-gods, and after death this is where all souls would return” (267).

As Wertheim explores in greater depth in her previous book, Pythagoras’ Trousers, the irony is that Pythagorean mysticism was a religion, but it is the seedbed of modern physics (which we tend to think of as being unquestionably secular), i.e. the desire to find mathematical relationships underlying phyiscal phenomena. And indeed this thinking has paved the way for the wild imaginings of the cyber enthusiasts. Wertheim comments on the implausible scenario we find ourselves in: “That this site of religious expectation is being realized through the by-products of science – the force that so effectively annihilated the soul-space of the medieval world picture – is surely one of the greater ironies of our times” (255).

To me, it seems that the religiousness of this cybertalk verges on idolatry, rather than resembling what I would call spirituality. Commenting on the connotations of Gibson’s famous cyber novel, Neuromancer, David Thomas says it suggests “that cyberspace must be understood not only in narrowly socioeconomic terms, or in terms of a conventional parallel culture, but also… [as a] potential creative cybernetic godhead” (254). (A similar notion of the godhead can be found in the Matrix trilogy; the twist in these, however, is the recognition of this godhead as false, and the subsequent affirmation of the human above this false godhead when Neo breaks through and destroys the Matrix.) The point I am making is that we may worship this new godhead, it is a God that demands nothing of us but our reverence, and it requires none of the demands of spiritual life.

One thing cyberspace seems to help us do is accept the plausibility of an immaterial self – e.g. we can all grasp the me-but-not-me-ness of an avatar – which solves one of the greater religious conundrums. For centuries, theologians spoke of an incomprehensible “glorified body”, “free from the limits of the mortal flesh”, “in every sense incorruptible”: “Just what it meant to have a body in a place that was, strictly speaking, outside space and time was a question that much vexed medieval scholars, but tha was indeed the position on which all the great theologians insisted” (259). We get it now.

But the mistake we make – it’s a small, seemingly logical leap – is to think that avatars are or could be this “glorified body”. And this is never more evident in the language adopted by the virtual reality community, and in particular the sub-community within this, the proponents of downloading ourselves into cyberspace to achieve deathless, cyber-eternity. The fault of this logic lies in the fact that there has been another series of substitutions along the way: the transmutation of the human from an ineffable “self”, to a material composite of atoms, to (finally) a “pattern of data” (e.g. FMRIs): “Such cybernautic dreams of transcending bodily limitations have been fueled by an fundamental philosophical shift of recent years: The growing view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body, but by an information code” (260).

Perhaps an ever greater fault of this logic, in my opinion, is in the misunderstanding of the point of religion, which I personally see as a code for how to be a better person. For reasons that make perfect sense, we are obsessed with the notion of salvation. But I would argue that capitalism (and its psychosis, consumerism) has created a culture where we accept the abstracted object as a satisfactory embodiment of the real thing; and as such, we would readily accept the shortcut to heaven of downloading ourselves into eternity. Consider how this works for money: As Marx said, “Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.” I am suggesting that this same abstraction has happened for salvation: it is reduced to the end value, i.e. eternity, but obscures the necessary human labor, i.e. the hard work of being a good person. The result is that we see it as entirely plausible to take a shortcut to heaven. After all, in a capitalist world, “He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward.” So long as we can get eternity, it hardly matters that we don’t deserve it. (I would love to explore this idea further… but not here.)

Wertheim says it best: “In cyberspatial fantasies of reincarnation and immortality, the soul’s eternity entails no ethical demands, no moral responsibilities. One gets the immortality payoff of religion, but without any of the obligations” (269). This is because, crucially, “The cyber-soul… has no moral context” (269). Here we see a perversion of the Pythagorean origins: “In the original Pythagoreanism, to take away the moral context would have been to spiritually bankrupt the entire system – which is effectively what the new cyber-Pythagoreanism has done” (270).

It makes sense, then, that we are so keen to justify our deservingness of cyber-salvation by imagining “the divine parts of ourselves, that we invoke in that space” (Pesce, 253). Where is the evidence of this divinity? There are examples of it, I’m sure (see Hawken’s Blessed Unrest), but there are probably far more examples of troll-like behavior. Nothing about this space, I would argue, necessitates divine behavior.

One of the problems that Wertheim highlights (although I would emphasize it much more than she does!) with regards to this obliteration of the material self is that it devalues physical communities. “What is left out here is the element of community and one’s obligations to the wider social whole” (280).

Orthodox Christian theologians have long stressed that an essential reasons for valuing life in the flesh is that on the physical plane we are bound into physical communities to whom we have obligations and responsibilities. Someone who does not value life in the body is less likely to feel obligated to contribute to their physical community: Why bother helping a sick friend if you believe he would be better off dead? Why bother trying to extend life in the flesh if you think it is an evil to be transcended as quickly as possible (279)?

Futher: “Commentator Paulin Borsook has noted that the culture of the Silicon Valley cyber-elite is indeed imbued with a deeply self-serving libertarianism that shuns responsibility toward physical communities. It is a tendency she terms ‘cyber-selfishness’” (279-80). This is why I think it’s important to reenvision the Internet in spiritual terms, perhaps beginning from the notion of “selflessness.”

As a side note, I have to wonder what happens to this possible divinity – which has obvious moral implications – if we ever do achieve immortality. Do we even need religion at all once we have conquered death? I actually agree with Richard Dawkins that human morality does not depend on religion; but I do think that if we succeed in removing the need for religion, we will feel a substantial loss and go through a long period of moral bewilderment.

I wonder if one of the interventions we can make in a revisioning of the Internet would be to reintroduce death into technology. We tend to chuck data into this space as if preserving it in a sub-zero freezer. It will stay there forever, in case we need it later. But what if data had an expiration date on it? It would require more attentive care, and an editing eye in the first place. Would we really put effort into maintaining negative contributions? Or would this compel us to contribute more positively?

I am getting the impression that if we design technologies from the perspective of this Western line of thinking, or indeed invoke Christian rhetoric, the path inevitably leads to the development of increasingly realistic virtual reality simulations. Consider this quote from a virtual reality modeling language (VRML) expert, Pesce: “Let us begin with the object of desire. It exists, it has existed for all of time, and will continue eternally. It has held the attention of all mystics and witches and hackers for all time. It is the Graal. The mythology of the Sangraal – the Holy Grail – is the archetype of the revealed illumination withdrawn. The revelation of the graal is always a personal and unique experience. …I know – because I have heard it countless times from many people across the world – that this moment of revelation is the common element in our experience as a community. The graal is our firm foundation” (251). For the virtual reality folk, enlightenment lies in realizing the absurdity of our thinking that there is meaning in our physical reality, any more than there is if we were living in one great computer program. If it is real enough, they suggest, we wouldn’t even know that we are living in a simulation. Everything that seems real is not. All is illusion.

Now that I write that, it seems an almost perfect application (though clearly a perversion) of Buddhism to the digital realm. But I think the key difference is in the implications of this in the cybernautic sense, which equates to an imperative for a grab everything, free-for-all (Wertheim describes this in the next chapter as a digital equivalent of Western imperialism, the colonization of cyberspace (294)). Something quite different happens when you interpret this nothingness as a call to dwell in a mental/emotional plane, as opposed to living in a simulated material plane. Nonetheless, this is getting complicated. Particularly because of the enlightenment connotations, which do evoke Buddhism more than Christianity. One of the religious associations with cyberspace, for example, is the parallel between cyberspace and the New Jerusalem: “The New Jerusalem, then, is a place of knowing, a space that like cyberspace Benedikt says is rooted in information” (256). And this quest for knowledge seems to make sense to me as spirituality. “The pattern of seeing new technology as a means to spiritual transcendence has been repeated so many times that Erik Davis has coined the term ‘techgnosis’ as a generic description of the phenomena” (278).

Again, I come back to the fact that cyberspace does seem, as counterintuitively as it may have seemed before reading this book, to offer unique possibilities for spirituality… but that these possibilities have not been realized because we are focusing on the wrong thing, getting all twisted around. On a very fundamental level, the basis of religion according to Emile Durkheim is the organization of the world into “sacred” vs. “profane.” And in sociological terms, cyberspace makes perfect sense as a “sacred space”, because it is the antithesis of our “profane”, material world. According to Stenger, cyberspace creates “‘the ideal conditions’ for what Eliade terms a ‘hierophany‘ – that is, ‘an irruption of the sacred” (254). This is a continuation of a lasting theme in Western organization and understanding of the world: “Western culture has within it a deep current of dualism that has always associated immateriality with spirituality” (254).

The imperative, in light of this, is to begin to treat cyberspace as sacred space; and to develop it in such a way as to encourage spiritual, sacred engagement with it. In this way, cyberspace may be a means of helping us become better humans.

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 6 – Cyberspace

Wertheim suggests that the very fact that cyberspace is constructed of bits and bytes, as opposed to particles and forces, is what allows it to exist outside the realm of the physicalized space… i.e. outside the space which has squeezed out the soul. In other words, this is the great spiritual potential of cyberspace. “Because cyberspace is not ontologically rooted in these physical phenomena, it is not subject to the laws of physics, and hence it is not bound by the limitations of those laws” (226).

But let’s not get too ecstatic. Is it not still a product of mathematics??? I suppose that the level at which we interact with the Internet that mathematics has been obscured from our view… but then the last few chapters have shown just how much of the physics – i.e. the mathematics! – of our world is obscured from view. I would argue that it’s all well and good to say that the substance of the objects of Internet are not those that we have painstakingly physicalized, but to suggest that the Internet is entirely free, that it has unbounded potential or “infinite scope” (225), is misleading. It is constructed from mathematics. And it is bounded by the technology which mediates it.

Then again, it’s important to recognize the spiritual potential of the Internet as being a specifically non-material space akin to the “spiritual realm”, given that this spiritual realm seems not to be able to exist elsewhere at the moment. This is the reemergence of dualism (227)! “Yet while physical space and cyberspace are not entirely separate, neither is the latter contained within the former” (228). Now our minds have their own space once again!

In this sense, we may see cyberspace as a kind of electronic res cogitans, a new space for the playing out of some of those immaterial aspects of humanityman that have been denied a home in the purely physicalist world picture. In short, there is a sense in which cyberspace has become a new realm for the mind. In particular it has become a new realm for the imagination; and even, as many cyber-enthusiasts now claim, a new realm for the ‘self’” (230).

Admittedly, this dualism is the source of much concern regarding cyberspace. Wertheim goes on to explain at great length how people can use the Internet to engage in psychological play we are denied in the real world, but that for some this can become addictive and encourages them to
disengage with the real world, never actually solving their real problems: “the notion tha we can totally remake our ‘selves’ online obscures the very significant difficulties of achieving real psychological change” (247). Certainly it is dangerous to fragment ourselves and think of our cyberspace creations as equal to physical ones, as Turkle does here: “Experiences on the Internet extend the metaphor of windows – now real life itself [as one of her MUD subjects notes] can be ‘just one more window’” (246). I remember as a child bursting into tears when my character on Kings Quest died, screaming, “I’m too young to die!” This is cute for a 6 year old who has not yet grasped the difference between VR and RL, but it’s disturbing when it happens to adults today.

Wertheim argues that the Internet allows for a massive “consensual hallucination” of which we are more than happy to take part (and which is not altogether diffrent from the consensual hallucination we take part in when watching television) (233). But is that all that different from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the soma tablets? (At the same time, as Wertheim correctly points out, “a multileveled reality is something humans have been living with since the dawn of our species” (242).)

What Wertheim never articulated is the fact that in many ways, cyberspace began as a void. It is an infinitely large void, which we are welcome to try to fill with ‘stuff’, but which will never be full. Now that we have an impossibly giant alternative space, it is as if a giant dam has broken and what followed was a massive flood. A trash dump, if you will. This is not to say that all of what fills cyberspace is junk, but I do suggest that the filling of this space has been unstrategic. When space is infinite, real estate values shrink to zero; which means that we haven’t paid any attention to the construction of the stuff of cyberspace.

It’s probably necessary to disentangle cyberspace from the Internet. Cyberspace in no way necessitates the Internet in the form that it has taken (see Lanier’s book). And I think that the Internet is an amazing thing for so many reasons. But I think that in the sense that it fails to serve a more spiritual purpose it is because it bears the responsibility of being our “data space“, as Wertheim calls it (229). Data is not always meaningful, particularly if it does not connect to other bits of data to tell what is effectively a story. The Internet now is like a massive warehouse or storeroom. But perhaps we need to design an alternative Internet (another space within cyberspace) that is more of a studio space or workdesk.

I should soften this a little. The Internet has always also been used in very creative ways. One example is the MUDs that Wertheim discusses that require people to craft elaborate character stories. This is fabulous creative activity. And the Internet is being used in all sorts of other creative ways. But the navigation through all the muck prevents us all from using the Internet creatively.

But cyberspace, again, represents a massive spiritual opportunity. Up until now, I had been thinking that it was easier to construct an object that embodies spiritual values, because objects have a long history of being associated with spirituality. I realize now that the Internet actually represents a space that closely parallels the spiritual realm. Critically, “Here is a space that offers, even if only temporarily and in very truncated form, a chance to at least get a glipse at other ways of being” (239). Cyberspace seems to affirm the notion of the soul! “Obviously, my ‘self’ only exists because there is a physical body in which it is grounded. At the same time, ‘I’ am not restricted purely to the space of that body. As Descartes recognized, there is a sense in which I am first and foremost an immaterial being” (250).

I just think we need to not waste this opportunity, and begin to craft this space a bit more strategically; particularly given Lanier’s warnings about impending “lock in.”

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 5 – Hyperspace

This chapter explores the explosion of complexity of the geometric figuring of the cosmos. Scientists now speculate there exist 11 dimensions. (It seems rather silly to stop there, at this point. Why not 429?) It began with the little seed of a thought: What if there were 4 dimensions? Would this unseen dimension hold the key to enlightenment? Surely all we needed now to reach heaven was to learn to see differently (194). According to Wertheim, Ouspensky’s hyperspace “promised ‘higher emotion,’ ‘higher intellect’, even ‘mystical wisdom’” (194). Quickly this idea was embraced by artists of the early 20th century, e.g. Malevich, who said of his enigmatic Black Square, it was “a desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of materiality” (196). Why be constrained by the formal rules of linear perspective if, after all, they ultimately mean nothing in the 4th dimension? Unfortunately, we cannot really enter these dimensions; but knowing of their existence confuses the geometry of the world that we can access, and again disorients us. (It seems there is some truth to Kandinsky’s statement that “The more frightening the world becomes,… the more art becomes abstract.”)

Mathematics itself had some fantastic successes in recent years, performing elegant acrobatics that proved the existence of hyperspace. As Eugene Wigner said famously, mathematics is “unreasonably effective” (219), and indeed it becomes, like the telescope was to Hubble, our only means of glimpsing them at all. The result is that this enshrined mathematics: “The elevation of space as an ontological category is now complete” (211). Wertheim muses: “It is a little-remarked-upon feature of modern Western physics that one way of characterizing the enterprise is by the gradual ascent of space in our existential scheme. The final triumph of this invisible, intangible entity to the ultimate essence of existence is surely one of the more curious features of any world picture” (212). We forever after see our world “refracted through the clarifying prism of geometry” (212).

One of the space implications of these extra dimensions is that they explained forces that we can feel and measure – i.e. gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force (209). And another space implication is the possibility that the very substance of the atoms of our being (a concept difficult to grasp in itself) is composed of space – crumbled, folded space, altering the shape of 3 dimensional reality. “Objects would not be in space, they would be space…. According to this conception of reality, our very existence as material beings would be an illusion, for in the final analysis there would be nothing but ‘structured nothingness’” (211). And further,

…time is no longer an attribute of subjective human experience. Thus not only are the atoms of our bodies stripped of independent status and reduced to spatial origami, our most fundamental experience of time as something lived and personal is annihilated. In the eleven-dimensional manifold of various ‘theories of everything,’ our very being disappears into ‘structured nothingness.’ We are dissolved in space (215).

Together, this means, “Homogenization has won the day” (214); or in other words, “our world picture is reduced fully and finally to a seamless monism” (215). There seems to be some recognition from Hawking and others that this mathematical explanation, while it works, is not particularly soul-satisfying. They, like Newton, are engaged now in a rebranding battle that ultimately seems doomed to the same failed fate: “the way forward is not to try to divinize physicists’ latest conceptions of space, but rather to understand their picture as just one part of the whole” (216). In other words, it’s the truth, but not the whole truth; and we should not be so mesmerized by its ability to accurately predict our world that we are blinkered to other forms of interpreting our reality. As Wertheim says, “What I challenge then is not the science, but rather the totalizing interpretation of what this science means” (216).

This is my sticking point as well, as hinted at earlier. Are there not other equally good ways of understanding reality? I have great affection for artist/mystic/etc. William Blake who stubbornly said that he didn’t care whether people said the earth was round, because to him it was flat. That is how he could make sense of his experiences. The message here is not that we should arbitrarily accept or reject what we understand to be truth; but it does imply that there are ways in which mathematical truths are less valuable in human terms than other more poetical or metaphorical truths may be. And again, why are we so keen on denying the value of these alternative truths? After all, “reality is not totally reducible to the laws of physics. Love, hate, fear, jealousy, delight and rage – none of these can be accounted for by hyperspace equations” (218).

Wertheim suggests we need humility in our mathematical quest, and recognize, as artists have recognized the limitations of linear perspective, that math only represents one picture of the world (218). We need not always stand in front of this picture; and when standing in front of it, we need not stand on the spot the physicists would choose us to view from.

Wertheim delights in the prospect of cyberspace necessitating this humility, as it is the space that is emerging “that stands quite outside their equations” (219). What seems clear now having read this chapter, is that the Internet is poised to usher in the paradigm shift I was longing for in earlier posts. The frustration, however, as far as I see it now, is that cyberspace is like a prisoner which has not realized that the cage door has been left unlocked. It has not yet woken up to its potential to jump tracks and begin down an entirely new path.

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 4 – Relativistic Space

The next paradigm shifting discovery explored in the book is Einstein’s realization that, despite what we had always thought, space and time are not absolute; they are individual! – “everyone occupied his or her own private space and time” (168). This means, startlingly, that we play a more crucial role in the very nature of our reality than we were previously aware. Rather than passively moving through space and time, “In Einstein’s picture, space is transformed from a neutral arena to an active participant in the great cosmological drama” (170).

Another revelation of Einstein’s relativity is that it exposes the fact that the “universe has an overall architecture,” quite different from Newton’s cosmos which was “devoid of form” (172).

And even further bubble-shattering, General Relativity showed that the “galaxies of our universe are not hurtling away from one another into an already existing space; rather as the space itself expands its reach, it takes the galaxies with it. Space, in a sense, becomes like a living thing – a continually swelling cosmic fruit” (173). It boggles the mind to think of the rate of this expansion: growing by a billion billion cubic light years every single day (173).

Wertheim pauses to take stock of the implications of the shift this all represents:

For Aristotle, space was but a minor and rather unimportant category of reality. Newton, by contrast, made space the formal background of his universe, the absolute frame of all action. Yet Newtonian space possessed no intrinsic qualities of its own, being just a formless and featureless void. As such, says physicist Andre Linde, in the Newtonian scheme space ‘continued to play a secondary, subservient role,’ serving merely ‘as a backdrop’ for the action of matter. With general relativity, however, space becomes for the first time a primary active category of reality. According to relativity, you cannot have material objects without a supporting membrane of space. Space thus becomes in Einstien’s vision a major pillar of the modern scientific world picture (175).

And once we realized the destructive nature of black holes, thanks to Hawking, space takes on entirely foreign characteristics still: “in the relativistic vision, space has become literally monstrous” (177).

An existential crisis of sorts emerged from our dawning realization of our relative insignificance. Even our universe is just a puny “island universe” among innumerable other islands. “We find ourselves, then, in a paradoxical situation, for while we are the first culture in human history to have a detailed map of the entire physical cosmos, we are, in effect, lost in space” (184). While Wertheim here most likely means we are lost in the intellectual or indeed physical sense; but clearly she would not disagree that this is metaphorically accurate as well. In other words, where are we in the universe? – where do we belong? – and subsequently, this compells us to wonder why we exist at all, given how small our impact could possibly be. Wertheim asks, “is it any wonder we have turned to the stars seeking friendship and meaning? Is it any wonder that we long to be part of some intergalactic community imbued with purpose and direction” (184).

The particularly disorienting thing about modern cosmological space is that it is directionless (184). Whereas in Dante’s cosmology, one sought God by going upwards (this was a directed journey), everywhere in space, and every direction in space, is equally likely to contain meaning. Space is now homogenous (185). This means (to paraphrase the fictional superhero Dashielle Parr of the Pixar film The Incredibles), if everything is special, then nothing is. Or another way of understanding this: we have infinite freedom now, but freedom to what? – to roam aimlessly?

The other effect of homogenization is that it boxes our thinking:

Yet while we in the West have been developing an ever more detailed and adventure-filled vision of our physical cosmos, we have negated the very idea of other planes of reality, other ‘spaces’ of being. By homogenizing space and reducing ‘place’ to a strict mathematical formalism, we have robbed our universe of meaning and taken away any sense of intrinsic directionality. The flip side of our cosmological democracy is thus an existential anarchy: With no place more special than any other, there is no place ultimately to aim for – no goal, no destination, no end. The cosmological principle that once rescued us from the gutter of the universe has left us, in the final analysis, with no place to go (185-6).

And yet it seems that the tendency is to keep walking down this dark alley, as we have found some promising breadcrumbs thus far on our journey. Math has revealed some quite remarkable things, so we continue to follow this line of thinking; and meanwhile the further we go, the colder, darker, and scarier it all seems to get for humans. This raises the question of whether ‘truths’ can or should be subject to a heirarchy; or perhaps whether if they must, we might want to have a bit of a reshuffle. We think that mathematical or scientific thinking is more ‘true’ than metaphorical or poetic thinking; but which makes us happier? Which satisfies us as humans more? And isn’t geometrical figuring of the universe simply an interpretation of the ineffable, as is any painting or poem???

My dad sent me a quote today in an email. It says, “What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don’t believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we’re making the ‘hard decisions.’” I do wonder if the same can be applied here to this obsessive mathematical quest (continued in the next chapter through to the discovery of 11 dimensions), as it may be to our technological innovation. Is it not perhaps wiser, at least in the case of the latter, if we hop onto a different track entirely, one that leads to light, rather than alienation and darkness? I recognize this is hyperbole, but the point remains: inertia is not justification in itself for persisting along the same lines of thinking. And as Einstein himself famously said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 3 – Celestial Space

Up till now in Wertheim’s historical arc, “natural science was [in the words of Jeffrey Burton Russell] ‘an inferior truth pointing to the greater truth, which [was] theological, moral, and even divine” (119). In other words, artists were concerned with discovering natural truths as the key insight into the Creator, as “God’s utterance or song” (119). And crucially, the two were separate truths. That is, until another artist, this time Raphael, challenged this separation. In his Disputa, he used perspective to unite (albeit imperfectly) the heavenly realm with the physical realm (126).

This chapter also tells the tale of Cusa, the scientific thinker who concluded that “the universe has neither an outer boundary nor a center, since either would constitute an absolute” (129). This completely disoriented humanity. Without either, in this “unbounded space”, how could we understand where we were? How could we establish a hierarchy, if in this conception of the cosmos “all positions were equal” (129)?

Counter to our initial thinking about the implications of this revelation, Wertheim argues, “By shattering the heavenly spheres and breaking the medieval cosmic hierarchy, Cusa elevated the earth from the gutter of the cosmos and ste it in the domain of celestial nobility” (129-30); because, after all, the geocentric system located the earth at the “bottom of the cosmological scheme” (130).

This chapter also shows the way in which technology has functioned to enable the enhancement of our senses (which in turn reinforces their elevated status as receivers of the greatest ‘truth’). The telescope gave us super-eyes. “If… perspectival imagery trained Western minds to see with a ‘virtual eyes,’ the telescope extended our vitual gaze beyond the wildest imaginings of the Renaissance painters,” i.e. into a space we “know only through ‘virtual eyes’” (142). Wertheimer identifies another parallel with cyberspace: “Both other space and cyberspace are mediated spaces that we see through a technological filter. And just as today we are beginning to get a sense of the potential vastness of cyberspace, so also Europeans of the seventeenth century were just beginning to get a sense of the potential vastness of the new space they were discovering at the other end of their optick tubes” (142).

We have to realize that before this approximate point in history, humans did not have to grapple with the notion of infinite space. How has this idea affected us?

Another interesting point made in this chapter is that while many of the thinkers we associate with cold, rational, scientific thought were in fact motivated by theology; and it is the unintended consequence of the acceptance, appropriation, and further evolution of these ideas that gave birth to the godless conception of the world; to the materialist vision where “man stood not at the center of an angel-filled cosmos with everything connected to God, but on a large lump of rock revolving purposelessly in an infinite Euclidian void” (149). One example is Descartes, who theologized infinite space “and justified this hitherto abominable concept by associating it with God” (144). And surprisingly, Newton did similarly: “More so even than his predecessors, Newton justified his vision of space on theological grounds. Space, as he famously put it, was God’s ‘sensorium’ – the medium through which the deity exercised His all-seeing eye and His all-encompassing power. For Newton, the presence of God within the universe was indeed guaranteed by the presence of space. And because in his view God was everywhere, then space must also be everywhere – and hence infinite” (148).

I am intrigued by this sensorium concept. This is easier to accept for natural creations. But I imagine that many people find it more difficult to see the sensorium in man-made creations such as the Internet. Now being able to create our own infinite space, have we made God redundant as creator? Where does God fit into the modern world if He is no longer needed as the creative force in the universe? Yicks.

The implication of the notion of physical space extending into infinity is that it left no “room” for “any kind of spiritual space” (150). Wertheim quotes Edwin Burtt: “The natural world was [now] portrayed as a vast, self-contained mathematical machine, consisting of motions of matter in space and time, and man with his purposes, feelings, and secondary qualities was shoved apart as an unimportant spectator and semi-real effect of the great mathematical drama outside” (152).

Wertheim emphases the uniquely Western nature of the ensuing psychological crisis this created. “The reason we lost our spiritual space, as it were, is because we had linked it to celestial space. We had ‘located’ it, metaphorically speaking, up there beyond the stars” (150). She points out that there are other cultures (we might call them ‘primative’) which locate the spiritual in dreams or “in the mythical past that remains interlinked with the present” (150).

This would suggest another potential springboard for radical technological innovation: we have to reconceive of the location of the soul, because as it is located in the physical, it will remain forever homeless.

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 2 – Physical Space (part 2)

The chapter continues by explaining that while it might be a bit grand to suggest that art is solely responsible for the modern scientific conception of space, “‘scientific advances’ alone do not account for the huge psychological shift that had to take place before Western minds could accept this conception” (115). She continues, “To explain that shift I believe Edgerton is right when he says that without the revolution in seeing space wrought by the painters of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, we would not have had the revolution in thinking about space wrought by the physicists of the seventeenth” (115).

The particular change in thinking she goes on to describe is the defeat of Aristotelian vision by Galileo’s conception of the void. This in turn had its own profound implications. “For him [Galileo], ‘the real world [was] a world of bodies moving in space and time.’ Everything else – all the rich sensual qualities such as colors, smells, tastes, and sounds – were now to be regarded as just secondary, by-products of the ‘true’ reality which was matter in motion in empty space” (116). Furthermore, where does God fit in this vision of reality?

If the underlying substrate of reality is just an empty physical void, what place is there for the Christian soul? How indeed could humans, with our emotions and feelings and our longings for love, be accommodated in such an inherently sterile space (117)?

We should recognize this as another fork in the road, though I admit I see no way of going back and taking a different path. The path back has overgrown; there is no returning to a world without the understanding of the importance of the void.

I am reminded of a book a read last year called Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. In this book, Auge describes the abundance of places that we physically encounter with increasing regularity which are characterised by the way in which they eschew all creative social life, all meaningful organization. Auge argues that no organic social life is possible in these spaces, precisely because they lack place-ness. It might be necessary to eventually unpackage the terms “space” and “place” before being able to make a meaningful comparison between Auge’s anthropology and Wertheim’s scientific history; but I am struck by the idea that the void has extended into our physical reality such that we are now actively designing voids.

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 2 – Physical Space

Wertheim next explores how artists began to influence our worldview by the incorporation of what we might call earthly physics into representation (78). Until Giotto, really, artists created religious icons that did not aim to represent the world that is accessible to the eye, but instead depicted distorted figures on golden backgrounds, asserting the otherworldliness of their subjects, “striv[ing] to evoke the Christian realm of the spirit” (84). But Giotto did something completely alien: he housed iconography, religious subjects, in physical space, “representing the realm of nature and body” (84). In short, medieval art was symbolic, whereas Giotto’s art was the beginning of representational art. Or in other words (those of philosopher Christine Wertheim, paraphrased), “while early medieval artists painted what they ‘knew,’ Giotto and the new masters of the fourteenth century began to paint what they ‘saw’” (85).

The major leap is the development of perspective, which allowed for (although Wertheim does not explain it as such) the extension of space backward through the frame. Like with the creation of Purgatory, this is another instance of the discovery of a new kind of space: space as depth. It relied on the “the art of empirical observation” (83), which we have subsequently heralded as a cultural maturation, “‘progress’ toward a ‘true’ understanding of the world… a ‘true’ representation of the world” (83). The result: the literal “grounding” of Christian imagery, “wresting it away from its previous heavenly focus and bringing it down to earth” (85).

As this skill became more and more refined, “Physical vision has now supplanted ‘spiritual vision’ as the representational ideal: The eye of the material body had replaced the ‘inner eye’ of the Christian soul as the primary artistic ‘organ’ of sight” (107). And thus the postmedieval age welcomed the “profoundly physicalist zeitgeist” (108). From now on, not only was the eye the tool used to create art, but was also the target artists aimed at, positioning the viewer at a specific point from which he or she is intended to receive the image (111). Of course, this trick of perspective enabled fantastic illusionism, but it also was manipulated by future artists: “Thus, while perspective painting began by embodying a ‘point of view,’ it ultimately became once again a means for distancing the viewer from his or her body” (115).

What’s interesting is that some (including preeminent scientific thinker, Roger Bacon) believed this represtational approach, what became known as “geometric figuring”, would make religion more accessible to the masses, i.e. if it “could be the basis for an illusion so powerful that people would be convinced of the ‘reality’ of what they were seeing” (91). Wertheim writes further, “As the first person to comprehend the extraordinary illusionistic power of mathematically rendered images, Roger Bacon might justifiably be called the first champion of virtual reality” (91).

Wertheim makes an important observation, almost as an aside: that while Christians thought that geometric figuring was the key to winning the battle against “infidels”, these infidels had their own geometric figuring: “Not perspective, but a highly evolved art of mosaic and tessellated pattern-making with which they adorned floors, ceilings, and walls. This beautiful Middle Eastern art form was itself the product of a culture richly imbued with mathematics. Yet this Arab art never sought to simulate physical reality; like Gothic art it aimed at a subtle symbolism in which a divine order was signified by the beauty of complex geometric patterns” (91).

Yes! This is a fork in the road – the point at which we turned toward representation as truth… as the goal. This can still be seen in our modern technological innovations. We are constantly seeking simulacrum: imperfect representation in the digital realm of our physical experiences (e.g. Facebook ‘friends,’ online ‘chat’, etc.), even the very simulation of humans in virtual reality. The thing that’s wonderful about discovering these forks in the road is that we have identified a potential place to intervene. How might we, then, design technology that does not seek representation but rather aims for “subtle symbolism”???

The inspiration of this chapter is that art in this case was the impetus behind a profound paradigm shift; and if Giotto can catalyze this all with a painting, just imagine what a radical new kind of technology might do, especially given the speed at which this new idea could disseminate via the Internet. In this way, it might be useful to begin with a shift in our thinking about the role of technology in our culture: is it possible that it is more closely aligned with art than we thought? Perhaps we should stop thinking of it merely as tools; it is, too, an expression of our interpretation of the world. This might free us up considerably to innovate in a whole new space.

By focusing on the creative potential of technology, rather than thinking of it as a product of the steady accumulation of science, we realize how important and powerful they are. Consider: “…for long before men of science accepted the new vision of space, it was artists who found a way to give coherent meaning to the idea of an extended physical void” (104), which “would prove crucial to the evolution of the modern concept of physical space that we know today” (105). Again, the lesson here is that it is one thing to seek a harmony between spiritual and technological life; but it is quite another, more interesting thing to use technology as the key expression that brings about a paradigm shift.

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 1 – Soul Space

In this chapter, Wertheim shows how different the Middle Age’s conception of space is from our own, using Dante’s The Divine Comedy as evidence of this. In this work, Dante formalized a new space to allow for the religious idea of accounting of sins: Purgatory. This makes this “a rare instance in which we can see clearly the emergence of a new space of being” (67), and therefore a great parallel with and insight into our own creation of cyberspace. In some respects, she argues, Dante was engaged in the task of creating a virtual world, mapping heaven and hell and in between. But this is Wertheim’s point: “The ‘virtual worlds’ being constructed on computers today usually bear little or no relationship to the world of our daily experience. For most VR pundits, escape from daily reality is preciselythe point. Dante, however, was not trying to escape daily life; on the contrary he grounded his ‘virtual world’ in real people, real events, and real history” (50).

This, I feel, is the difference between escapism and sublimation. And what worries me is that the technology we create now caters to escapism, when it has the potential to facilitate wonderful sublimation, creation, a greater experience of our actual world.

Another thing that is evident beneath the surface of Dante’s work, foreign as it may be to us now, is the orientation characteristic of the Middle Ages whereby people are guided “by a spiritual compass rather than a physical one.” In other words, Dante’s map was in a way spiritually correct, i.e. it resonated with a spiritual truth; regardless of the fact that we know that physically it makes no sense. (We have been to the moon, and we have not passed God on the way.) Other examples from the time, like the mappae mundi, represent completely warped landmasses with Jerusalem at the center. This makes a different kind of sense. And it is quite amazing to realize how foreign this type of thinking is to us now. Much has changed in our worldview; and yet we can never seem to imaging any other kind of thinking being possible than the worldview we currently hold. Thus is the nature of a paradigm. As Wertheim writes,

A major problem, I suggest, is that the very questions raised here are quintessentially modern. They are framed within the context of our purely physicalist paradigm, which was quite alien to the medieval mind-set. When we ask if Dante ‘really’ believed in a set of heavenly spheres or a hellish chasm inside the earth, we are asking questions about physical space. In our minds we start wondering how far above the earth the lunar sphere would be. How far below the surface would the second circle of Hell be found? At what longitude might Purgatory be? We do this because we cannot help it. Our minds have been so trained – so brainwashed – to think of space in purely physical terms, it is almost impossible for us to think in any other way. It is not just that we have been to the moon and found no crystal spheres, or that we have circumnavigated the globe and found no terraced mountain; we simply cannot imagine a place being ‘real’ unless it has a mathematically precise location in physical space (69).

In Dante’s time, it was possible to perform what we might think of today as amazing feats of intellectual acrobatics. Dante used somewhat familar means – geometry – but to bizarre ends, coupled with poetic language. “Passing through ‘the skin of the universe’ the virtual Dante looks out to see a Blazing Point of light around which circle nine rings of fire: God and the angelic orders symbolically rendered in light. Here, all directions and all dimensions fuse: ‘the Burning Point is not only the center, the innermost, but also the highest, the outermost’ reference. In this single point of infinite love is contained the whole of time and space” (72-3).

The key to this creative interpretation of religious experience is that “Body-space and soul-space have been melded into one-space. The mystery is beyond intellection” (73).

How foreign! How wonderful!

I get frustrated when people are so resigned to the state of things, poo-pooing alternative visions for our world with a simple, defeatist, “It’s just the way things are.” But as this example highlights, everything is a product of its time yet – or indeed, therefore – subject to change! This is why it is so important to be cognizant of the ways our technology is changing our very humanness! I am reminded of Marx’s assertion that there is no such thing as ‘human nature’ per se, and that what we think of as being innate to our humanness is in fact historically situated. “Life,” he argues, “is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”

The question I am left wondering, however, is whether a spiritual conception of our world is actually possible when we live amongst technologies that so aggressively assert a scientific paradigm. How can we reconcile technologies with spirituality when the two embody entirely separate ways of thinking? I suppose the answer lies in the realization that what we really need is a paradigm shift, and entirely new way of thinking that allows for both, or for something new and more harmonious with our mental health and wellbeing.