John Zerzan

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Theodore Gracyk

Minnesota State University Moorhead

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University of Texas at San Antonio

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Second-Best Life: Real Virtuality

Telos, Dec 21, 2007

Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity prod... more Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relationships. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial mass society, not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized. In this context, it is striking to note that the original usage of "virtual" was as the adjectival form of "virtue". Virtual reality is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider loss of identity and reality. Its essential goal is the perfect intimacy of human and machine, the eradication of difference between in-person and computer-based interaction. Second Life. Born Again. Both are escape routes from a gravely worsening reality. Both the high-tech and the fundamentalist options are passive responses to the actual situation now engulfing us. We are so physically and socially distant from one another, and encroaching virtuality drives us ever further apart. We can choose to "live" as free-floating surrogates in the new, untrashed Denial Land of VR, but only if we embrace what Žižek called "the ruthless technological drive which determines our lives. " 1 Cyberspace means collapsing nature into technology, in the words of Allucquere Rosanne Stone; she notes that we are losing our grounding as physical beings. 2 The key response in the arid techno-world is, of course, more technology. Drug technology, for the 70 million Americans with insomnia; for the sexually dysfunctional males now dependent on Viagra. Cialis. etc.; for the depressed and anxious who no longer dream or feel. And as this regime works to further flatten and suppress direct experience. Virtual Reality, its latest triumph, comes in to fill the void. Second Life. There, and whatever brand is next to offer dream worlds, to a world denuded of dreams. In our time, "virtual bereavement" and "online grieving" are touted as superior to being present to comfort those who mourn, 3 where tiny infants are subjected to videos; where "teledildonics" delivers simulated sex to distant subjects. "Welcome to Second Life. We look forward to seeing you in-world", the website promo beckons. Immersive and interactive, VR provides the space so unlike the reality its customers reject. For a

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