This may be a bit of a ramble, I'm working on putting some thoughts together... I can just see the shape of something on the outside of my vision.

Darja was drunk, this happens. But she asked the same question over and over again, that night outside of Axis with Matt.

"Where is the internet?"

And I promised I'd answer, because little did she know that this question takes up a good portion of my mental real estate at any given time. And I hope that she find the answer at all interesting. Because I think it's one of the most important things in the world. It's important to understanding how the developed world functions, important to understanding the nature of information-enriched lives, and of particular importance to me, important to understanding magic and (two for the price of one) important in how the location of the internet creates a vision of a possible transhumanist singularity that is vastly different to the one you may have been exposed to.

Let's step back a few years to Virtual Reality. Recently there was a lot of buzz surrounding the Lifeboat Foundation's List of the Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies. Number ten on the list is Virtual Reality. Now, the list makes a lot of sense in regards to photorealistic graphics, the nearness of haptic interfaces allowing tactile signal to accompany the lush almost-real landscapes and soundscapes that are available with even home technology. And of course the article makes quick mention of Second Life and WoW, two large and deeply immersive virtual worlds... only two, I might add, among many.



And of course, virtual worlds are freaking amazing and enthralling. And as many of you may know, there's a lot more available out there than games or simulations. Huge chunks of Second Life are giant art installations of one type or another... art installations that are now competing with commercial real-estate for land and which are needing to come up with more an more money to pay for land and services in the fast-paced and growing Second Life economy. An economy that has an exchange rate for real cash, I might add.

Anyone in the internet field, five years ago would tell you that the real meat of the internet, that the place you mind goes when interacting with the data from your computer is "out there" in "cyberspace" or "cyberia". The internet, if you had to give its location a name. is the place where your attention is while you are engaged online. This isn't wrong.

And of course, VR has obvious applications of Kurzweil-style singularity fans. Once VR is perfected, we (or our AI masters/friends) will be able to craft endless high-fidelity worlds for our minds to inhabit. VR will allow us to colonize the vast expanding reaches of cyberspace. While Cyberspace is, in theory, the abstract intellectual real-estate that our gazes/attentions inhabit while we interact with the internet -- when we have the ability to map these ideological realms and informational shoals in Virtual Reality, we'll be able to inhabit Cyberspace, making it in effect as real a place as the neighborhood grocery.

However, when you step back from that picture and look at it, only approx 1% of the world's broadband users are plugged into persistent virtual worlds like WoW. Sure it seems like everyone you know is hooked on the sweet, sweet gaming crack of WoW, but let's face it, you "know" a small sample of people in the great scheme of things. One or two percent of a subset of those who are connected to the internet is not actually a large amount.

Virtual Reality is certainly a neat technology, and it certainly is key to a particular model of the face of the future, but that model of the future -- minds forever voyaging into the deep reaches of cyberspace -- is a model that doesn't map to the current nature of cyberspace. Why is that?

Well, I (and here's where I'm going into pure theorizing) figure it's because Cyberspace isn't out there. The locale of cyberspace has shifted over the last few years because of the acceptance and implementation of key technologies. Cyberspace, if the word has any real ideological weight anymore, is right here. If you look with the right sort of eyes, you can see the shape of it, even without a helmet and goggles. (Though goggles never hurt any enterprise.)

Twelve thousand, six hundred miles up there is a constellation of satellites orbiting the earth. That constellation is administered by the US Department of Defense and is known as NAVSTAR GPS . And while we weren't looking, the gaze of those 31 heavenly bodies changed the shape of the world.

I could get technical here, but I'll stick to the simple version. If you want a more detailed version, check the internet. However, the basic setup is simple, there are a bunch of satellites in space that allow, with the right equipment, someone to pinpoint a location almost anywhere on earth. GPS is vastly more accurate than latitude and longitude and it allows boats to navigate shipping lanes better and cell phones to navigate cars to weddings with ease.

But it's just a fancy map, right? Yes and no. GPS co-ordinates are not so much a map as a reference point. It's a way to take a real geographical location like Fountain Square in Cincinnati or the north side of Uluru in Austrailia and attach a little invisible bit of data to it. The GPS system allows you to attach a little bit of data to a piece of physical meat and dirt real estate.

That's huge. That's ginormous.

So GPS goes from the military and transportation sectors and what happens? Well, people start playing with it. I won't lie, we're still firmly in the "play" stage in regards to this technology. But you get stuff like Geocaching and you get various art installations playing off the ability to track things in realspace. Limited GPSes are common in cellphones in the US (for 911 calls) and fully featured GPS systems are common in more high end phones and consumer cars and the like. Truck drivers, lost salesman, bike messengers, urban explorers, performance artists, army units, police, wardrivers, and more all are using GPS information (perhaps at several steps removed, even) more and more in their day to day life. This isn't really news, though.

But what are all of these people doing?

The more we use GPS systems or the systems built upon them for any use, the more we're applying metadata to all of those points in space. GPS systems are enabling us to attach vast amounts of data to real points in space. Bit by bit and piece by piece, we're attaching incredibly vast amounts of information to geographical tags. This is huge. The ability to tag an access the geography with metadata has the potential to shape tech trends and our methods of interacting with information.

Example: Sitting here in Bloomington, Indiana during burning man last year, I logged into Second Life -- not to see something that existed only in the virtual world, but to see a friend's art installation at Burning Man. There, in an abstract part of Linden Lab's San Francisco-based servers, I got to interact with a digital art installation linked via a very precarious wireless system and a GPS unit to a physical representation of that same installation there in Black Rock City. Where was my focus? Where was the Gaze that creates Cyberspace by its attention?

Example: Several mobile phone companies offer services where your phone's GPS can alert you to others around you that share your interests and their locations. Standing on a street corner I can flip open my phone and get connected to any other subscribers who dig comics or goatsex in my geographic vicinity. I can then, select a place for us to meet up and we can all let google maps draw us a path there so we can discuss goatsex in the flesh. Or we can just trade info, swap flickr accounts, or correlate any amount of sate from our individual locations. This same technology has changed the shape of both protest actions across the world as well as conceptualizations of occupying space in wartime..

I don't think I need to go on about all the shit you can get up to with Twitter and Google Maps and all of that. If I do, let me know and I will, but for now, while I'm talking about Google let's look at on fascinating possibility they seem to be bringing to bear as we speak. Google is in the testing phase, according to many reports, of a virtual world that isn't as virtual as you may think given that it is, according to rumor, an exact replica of Earth based on Google Earth's satellite and GPS data.

Think about that: A virtual mock-up of earth, where each meta-tag of GPS data is linked to a meta-tag representing itself in the world. A vast explorable "virtual" world embodied at the very base level in the form of the physical world due to GPS data. Think about that. I'm sitting at the bus stop and I pop open my phone, bring up google maps and bring up a virtual map of my location, allowing me to "see" everyone in my area who is also visible online.

Add RFID tags into that and suddenly fucking everything from my dog to my clothes has a meta-tag which can interact with the meta data of the GPS grid.

So what does all of this mean? What doesn't it mean? Well, like you'll see in all sorts of speculative fiction (my favorite example actually is in Shadowrun 4th ed, strangely) we're on the cusp of the development of "augmented realities" as opposed to virtual ones. If the place where my information lives is just one cell-phone app away, and is embodied in real geographical data, then the concept of cyberspace is moot.

Or to put it more succently: If Cyberspace is the place where the gaze of the person accessing the information lies, then what we're seeing now is that gaze reflected back on the material world via the ubiquitousness of GPS and RFID technologies. We're re-inventing ourselves under our own scrutiny.

Yeah, this means Minority Report style targeted ads and more and more ways for the panopticon society to watch itself. But it also has the potential for a new technology of embodiment, breaking down Cartesian dualities through the simple act of being able to see the information clouds that surround us constantly. We can take our ideas, put them in the world around us, and interact with them in more and more novel ways. We can share ourselves and our thoughts and ideas in a while spectrum of new ways. We can see the information in all things in increasingly practicaland manipulatable fashions.

Am I making sense here? Sometimes I think this topic brings out too many of my passions.

And the long version, is that the way technology seems to be trending is not that we're on a great leap out -- trading an embodied existence for a virtual one -- but instead that cyberspace is (and has) inverted on itself, leading not to a reinscribing of Cartesian duality via downloading and escaping the biological body, but to a new form of embodiment. If we're in cyberspace, if cyberspace surrounds us already, then there are whole new ways of exploring it. But I try to leave the far-future prognostication of Kurzweil and company.

Me? I just want to try and share the way I see the world, today. And the potential I see is glorious and scary.



And this is why I stopped reading Spook Country :P Also, I never even got into how Personal Area Networks fit into this.