My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.
This... is a synthetic world many of us live in today - a dream, if you will.
Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.
Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.
A troll's life is a no-physical-contact existence. You will die alone, as you die daily, online.
If you make the Internet, live on the internet.
All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.
Perhaps we can get to the point where we can outsource our own personal experiences entirely into a computer - and possibly our own personality.
Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.
I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
My life exists in an imagined reality.
The only thing that is fundamental (real) is consciousness itself; all else is virtual- i.e., a result of an exchange of information within consciousness.
I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.
I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way.
Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.
Am I living in a simulation?
Electronic man has no physical body.
The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.
A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life. . . but a painted surface lives.
What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
I have spent most of my adult life proving that I existed. A blog is an accessible way of doing this - there is a date and place in cyberspace that I existed a year ago, to the day, and the proof is still there.
Cyberspace as a mode of being will never go away. We live in cyberspace.
Manufactured--synthetic--even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be--I would love you.
I created a human being from paper and I put it on the screen, a unique individual. I wish every performance, every IMDB credit, I would do it over, because I would do it better, because I would do it less. If that makes any sense.
