Out of This World
Outer space, virtual worlds, and the true final frontier.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week, a short note founded in two stories from the tech-industrial complex.
A few days ago in New Week #58, I wrote about Blue Origin’s plans for a commercial space station. The company wants to Orbital Reef to be traversing our skies by the end of the decade, and hopes it will come to replace the outdated ISS.
Meanwhile, on Friday Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is now Meta. This name change is part of a reorientation that will see the company put the metaverse at the heart of everything it does.
Two technology stories; what unites them? The answer: they both deal in indirect, and telling, forms of escape.
It’s become commonplace to observe that buried close underneath the surface of the billionaire space race is a fantasy of escape from our planet. Given the environmental crisis unfolding here, it’s hard to argue with the idea that Earth should take priority over a desire to see Mars.
I’ve come to think, though, that the metaverse may come to enact an even more significant form of escape. Or, at least, estrangement. Inside the hall of mirrors that is 21st-century modernity, our relationship with the world around us – with what we once called nature – is already tenuous. As we now head deeper into the new frontiers that are virtual and simulated worlds, will that relationship sever in ways we can’t yet understand?
In response to these forms of escape, then, I suggest a remedy. A new locus of attention. A third frontier, beyond the new worlds dreamed about by Bezos and Zuckerberg.
The science-fiction visionary JG Ballard liked to tell literary critics that his great interest was not the outer space of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, but inner space. His books, he said, travelled the terrain of the human psyche.
Ballard was a great writer; I aspire to the idea that something of his spirit haunts this newsletter. And this conviction of his – that the most urgent subject for a future-minded writer is not outer space but the human soul – is more true now than ever.
We all know that strange and powerful new technologies are emerging. Not least those that will allow us to venture into the cosmos, or build simulations that become entire worlds unto themselves. But it’s in the collision between those technologies and human nature that our shared future is made. The energy generated by that collision has always fired the engines of history.
So if we are to understand our future – and exercise some influence over its direction – then we must seek a better understanding of ourselves. In the 2020s, there is an urgent need to turn inwards, and explore the frontier that is inside us.
Where, then, is the moonshot of Ballard’s inner space? Where is the billionaire-funded project to better understand the human brain, and the nature of human consciousness, in an age of digital technologies?
I don’t say all this to criticise space exploration, or the development of the metaverse, in any simple way. New virtual worlds will allow for powerful new forms of human flourishing. And a collective step into space will bring the most precious phenomenon we know about – human consciousness – to new parts of our observable world: a project that is meaningful in its own right.
But as well virtual worlds, let’s attend to this world. And as well as outer space, let’s explore Ballard’s inner space.
A confession: I don’t preach a doctrine of self-knowledge, here, without a larger agenda. In the end, a deeper understanding of ourselves must lead us to overturn the separation between humans and nature that sits at the fountainhead of modern thought. We must come, instead, to understand ourselves as inescapably a part of the natural world.
That thought should make us feel less alone. We are not, as we moderns now tend to think, cast adrift inside an indifferent universe; when we erase the false distinction between humans and the world in which we find ourselves, that belief no longer makes sense.
To explore Ballard’s inner space must be to achieve this transformation in our self-understanding. If we can do it, then we’ll be equipped to process the new forms of meaning made available to us by our adventures inside the cosmos, and the metaverse.
After This
Thanks for reading this week.
I know that these Sunday instalments have been shorter recently. And hey, we all have enough to read.
But I haven’t abandoned the longform essay! I’m planning a series of essay box sets, which will form part of the next evolution of NWSH. The first will be called The Worlds to Come, and it will dive far deeper into the some of the themes I explored in this note. Expect more on virtual worlds, and our estrangement from the real.
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I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.
David.