Real. Virtual.
Summer 2002, Volterra.
I had the image of the material world enveloped by a virtual world of information there, as I walked along its walls.
Volterra has a multifaceted nature, layered within the rocky body of the cliffs on which it is built, among the stones that make it up, in the Genius Loci that animates its multimillenial history. There I found a deep well dug by the etruscans and somehow still active, home to a museum and a destination for tourists, among whom I was one. Walking towards the address of the archaeological site, I had the printed pages of the website in my hands. Its history was online, with all the information needed to understand it, reach it, visit it.
Strange. I thought.
Website, archaeological site. The well had a dual reality. It is physically dug into the earth, but it is also dug into a digital metaphysical double, both have a place, an origin, one identifiable by geographical coordinates, the other by a URI/URL sequence in the intangible universe of information.
And then I had the vision, for a moment, for the first time, of a glitch between material and digital.
The perfect vision of the cosmology that dominates us today was before me. I was captivated by a moment of ecstasy, the ineffable moment that only visionaries can have of grasping the universal in one glance, sudden, as it happened to the british naturalist Francois Trafford on Saturday, March 21, 1869, when on the ridge separating the gulf of La Spezia from the Cinque Terre sea, he claimed to have seen the entire globe, including the poles. And I had the first clear sensation, that from the vision passes to the body, of being enveloped by it. I realized that matter, information, and thought could be perceived on the same plane, that it is not a question of reality or virtuality, but of dimension.
A dimension that is simultaneously spatial, temporal, and cultural, because it is precisely the condition of the virtual not to belong to the here and now but to the vibrant and broader dimension of the possible and the potential.
And I clearly still see myself walking, gaze lowered to the cobblestone where my shadow broke across the uneven limestone of Volterra’s walls, reflecting on how at that precise moment I was not only inside a space-time sphere as everything in this material dimension, but I was also inside a cultural sphere, the one that the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin defined as Noosphere, analogous to the terms atmosphere and biosphere to indicate the sphere of human thought, where the more humanity organizes itself into complex social networks, the more it gains awareness.
And that this awareness was taking shape and substance, was literally speaking in what was then the nascent Internet network, the last element that was to constitute the globality of the information space, the infosphere anticipated in 1980 by the American sociologist Alvin Toffler, who at the time could only envisage it. I was walking in a world that was creating a new metaphysical dimension, something intangible yet totally pervasive, like a new form of ether. Information on the Web expanded, empowered the world with knowledge, and consequently gave us a new awareness of things, moreover accessible to anyone and anywhere.
It was exciting. This was the spirit that animated the beginning of the internet era, a revolutionary promise, indeed, more: an inevitable evolutionary process, to put it as Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, something that went beyond the scenarios until then elaborated that divided us between apocalyptic and integrated, going beyond Dystopia and Utopia, offering us a new, third way, something that immerses us here and now down in the construction of the future, a daily act of concretization: work was being done towards the realization of a Protopia, generating a society that tries to constantly improve itself, facing challenges incrementally and with a growth mindset. The future is already here.
This intuition was the founding part of what became my entire path in the development of thought on the Metaverse: a fifth cultural dimension that allows me to include it among those global processes, first cultural and then technological, that involve the entire humanity, processes that were highlighted with the appearance of the digital network, but which are entrenched and derive their origins from concepts still deeply rooted in Western and Eastern cultures and that are an integral part of our modernity. It amuses me to think that someone really believes that the Metaverse spontaneously originated in the head of a charming writer from Maryland.
For this reason, I cannot think of the Metaverse as a technology: engineers and designers handle that very well, or as an expressive medium, and artists handle that very well. I am interested in and will always be interested in it as a laboratory for a prototypical society, as a new cosmogony where foundational aesthetics and mythologies are generated, and as a new ecumene, a place where humanity can live.
After the insight, the visit. The well was cold, very dark. Its bottom was not visible, sunk into the abyss of time and earth, only the mouth was visible. I did not speak of my vision with what would become my wife, who accompanied me on the trip. I did not speak of it to anyone, and besides, visionaries who have shown theirs were either not understood or met a bad end.
And even today, as we rapidly approach the ability to make the Protopia of the Metacosm co-created with artificial intelligences intertwined in a collaborative spiral, tangible and evident, we play like children with mediocre and commercial “experiences”, engaging in endless discussions on the techniques of “immersivity” that 99% of the times end in themselves. Meanwhile, reality roars, hisses, and explodes. And meanwhile, we are completely losing the proposal of the Metaverse as a social, political, cultural laboratory, New Possible World.
While this possibility is the best possible experience, the deepest immersive connection is with reality, which is what people really want, beyond the emotional aspects of the moment. That’s where they find the meaning of Avakindness, being an avatar fully in tune with the Person.
Here we can find spaces for great and amazing laboratories on the three great paradigms of contemporaneity: the environmental paradigm, the social paradigm, the ethical paradigm. The first would allow us to experiment with the Virtuous Utopia of the Convivial Landscape indicated by Massimo Quaini, a geographer and exquisite intellectual, in which the landscape issue — the disposition to see a territory as a combination of nature, culture, and history — can be prefigured and experienced to redesign the pact between human society and nature, the only one capable of mutually conserving life. The second would allow us to try, in a world unbound by material necessities, to be oneself without the boundaries and rivalries of reality and where to linger and perhaps find other solutions to conflicts, as was tried in Al-Andalus, the virtual caliphate that experimented with “convivencia”, the Spanish term that indicates the harmonious coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the south of the Iberian Peninsula during the Islamic caliphate. The third would allow us to deepen the ethical status of the digital identity of the avatar, as a representative of an identity with all the dignity that entails, and consequently on how to apply all the protections that are given to our physical identity, as the EU is trying to govern in the proposal to adopt a strategy on virtual worlds.
The Metaverse is not a refuge for fools, nor for utopias. It is the place of Protopia.
This article was published in UltraMagazine, June 2024
https://ultra-magazine.webflow.io/
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