Plowing the Dark 2, Meaning No End

It’s lights, Ronan. Just lights.

He took a theatrical step toward her. That’s right. He showed her his empty palms, then the backs of his hands. He stood against the north wall of the Cavern, a living silhouette, glowing with a luminous halo. Just lights. But then, what isn’t?” (p. 195)

Virtual Reality is just a fancy version of Plato’s cave. A version that fools us because we know it is virtual, but are in love with our ingenuity.

“Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets – tiny mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inverntor ever got the motors into them.

Out of nature. The train of syllables struck the boy engineer as a the most inconsolably bizarre thing that the universe had ever come up with. And this female mammal uttered the words as if they were so many fearsome, ornate Tinkertoys whose existence depended upon their having no discernable purpose under heaven. The words would not feed the speaker, nor clothe her, nor shelter her from the elements, or in any measurable way advance the cause of her survival here on earth. And yet they were among the most elaborate artifacts ever made. What was the point? How did evolution justify the colossal expenditure of energy? Once upon a time, rhythmic words might ahve cast a protecting spell. But that spell had broken long ago. And still the words issues from her mouth, mechanical birds mimicking living things. Sounds with meaning, but meaning no end.” (p. 199-200)

“That, finally was the hope. To live in the room that the painter’s suicide vacated. The soul simply wanted better accomodations. Something more spacious to fasten to. Something more like itself than that dying animal.

It had taken Adie a year and a half to see what she was working on. The rest of the lay world made the same leap in the space of a single Memorial Day weekend. Overnight, an explosion of interst rocked the RL, as if the mountainside they hugged chose that moment to simulate St. Helens. Media latched wholesale upon this thing that it refused to call anything else but virtual reality. The public took so quickly to the fantasy that it must have recognized the contour from something it already knew.” (p. 268)

Why did VR make too much sense? Was it well represented? Was it timely? Does it fit some deep desire? It would seem to be something we desire, but don’t use when we have it.

Software is the final victory of description over thing.

He held her declaration in midair, turning it over. With software, the thing and its description are one and the same. Any item that youcan learn how to say, you can make, pretty much out of raw syntax.

Saying and making…

… are one another’s night jobs.” (p. 307)

“Her work here was just a rough draft for technlogy’s wider plan. The world machine had used her, used them all to bring itself into existence. And its tool of choice – its lever and place to stand, the tech that would spring it at last into three dimensions – was that supreme, useless, self-indulgent escapism. The thing that made nothing happen. The mirror of nature. Art.” (p. 398)

About the Web?

“He’s been to a demo of his own, returning with a little piece of software that will turn the whole Net into a medium of universal exchange. He’s come away with the glimpse of the thing the human yarn has been spinning itself toward, ever since its first camp-fire recitation: every soul in the world, serving as every other soul’s twenty-four-hour server. Movable type was no more than a shadow puppet show.” (p. 404)

Note how this returns us to Plato’s cave.

And when the kidnapped man finally meets his daughter at the very end of the book, she hands him a crayon drawing of a man returning to a home as says, “Look! I made this for you.” (p. 415)