(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 26, on February 4, 2024)
https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14428351-implausipod-e0026-silicon-dreams
Silicon Dreams are those glittering visions of mythic intensity that inspire the continued development of revolutionary technologies. Listen to this episode of the Implausipod to learn more about where they come from, and how the mythic imagination has been behind the development of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other tech innovations.
When Neuromancer appeared, it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the garages and cubicles, where what is still called new media were, fitfully, being birthed. Thousands who, on reading his description of cyberspace, thought to themselves, That’s so freaking cool!
And set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality. End quote. This is by Jack Womack in the 2004 introduction to the 20th anniversary version of Neuromancer. And this episode of The Implausipod is about those silicon dreams.
Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And as we ease into 2024, we seem to be living at that intersection, as the technologies of sci fi past are being shown off every week, with new products and instruments of echanger like automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence being brought to market, and older technologies like 3D printing and drones being so commonplace that you can find them at a Costco or Target.
But this process isn’t anything new. It’s been happening for at least 35 or 40 years. And when I first began researching it, almost 20 years ago, back in 2005, I had a hunch that I might be onto something, but reality is far outpaced even my wildest imagination. And that imagination is what this episode is about, the mythic imagination that inspires the development of new technologies, whether it comes from science fiction or fantasy or other sources as well.
So for this episode, I’ll take you back to that initial hunch and how it led me to track down the sources of those myths and what impact they had on the creation of the digital sublime and how that has impacted our current reality as well.
And with the incipient release of the Apple Vision Pro, their forthcoming AR VR headset, or whatever their marketing department is describing it as, this hunch couldn’t be more timely because my early work was on the development of virtual reality.
Now, the hunch came about reading something else unrelated.
It was Ray Kurzweil’s work on the singularity that came out in the early 2000s. And I noted how much the work was influenced by or influenced upon, basically co creative, of the works of science fiction that were coming up in those prior 20 years. And it seemed to me that there had to be a lot of overlap between science fiction and science and the development of these new technologies.
But at the time, the literature wasn’t there yet. There was a few authors that had worked on it, notably William Bainbridge, who took a look at the early influences on the development of the space program in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution. Now, this was a sociological review of it. So he was looking at science and engineering at NASA and elsewhere through that sociological lens.
And in so doing, you noted how a revolutionary technology, like spaceflight, came around mostly theoretically before it was even attempted practically. And that theoretical drive was often influenced by, you know, the visions. In this case, we’ll go back to the mythic visions, that can be influenced by, in this case, fiction.
I mean, visionaries had long thought about traveling to the moon long before science fiction was even a genre, for everything with Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon from 1865 all the way up to Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 short film with the bullet in the eye that we all probably famously remember.
So the idea was definitely there, but the technology wasn’t ready and the science wasn’t necessarily sure either. So this is what all made it a revolutionary idea in what we might call Kuhnian terms. They needed a goal, a target, a vision of what to work towards collectively across different countries and different cultures and different political systems.
They were all still kind of building towards this shared collective vision of getting to the moon in this case as the objective. And this holds true for other technologies as well. In the 40 year retrospective on the original publication of his work titled The Spaceflight Revolution Revisited, Bainbridge notes that we’re seeing something similar with the development of the singularity, referencing Kurzweil explicitly, and that that drew from influences going back to the 50s with Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The City and the Stars.
And we can see that thread connecting all the way through to 2023 with the developments of ChatGPT and OpenAI. So, a 70 year development timeframe from inception to manifestation to when something actually comes about and is brought forth into reality. And did we see similar timeframes with the development of rocketry from inception to landing on the moon?
Yeah. And are we seeing similar lengths with even current technologies like, again, VR or direct neural implants with Neuralink recently being in the news? And again, the answer is yes, anywhere from 40, 50, 60 years from inception to something being made manifest in the world. Now, there can be reasons for this.
Often, it can be tricky, but what drives that development over that long of a time frame? What keeps us going towards the realization of those dreams of something that will necessarily outlive those originally imagined it? And perhaps several other generations following, but still working towards that idea, that realization.
And the answer is a cultural one. This is where the role of myth comes in.
When we hear the word myth, particular associations often come to mind. We can think of mythic heroes from ages of legend, like Heracles and Thor, Zeus and Odin, and the modern retellings of those, whether they’re showing up as superheroes in Marvel and DC movies, or cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny being a stand in for Anansi or Coyote.
In fact, comic book literature as a whole is filled with the retelling of myths and legends, but also we can see it in our political discourse as well, with myths about the foundation of a country, like those in the United States, with the myth of the Promised Land, or the Founding Fathers, or Pocahontas, or any of a number of other things.
Usually you can tell by whether they’ve shown up in a Disney movie or something. And I’m not harshing specifically on Disney here, at least not for this. The idea is that these myths are the tales that we share, that we share collectively. They’re part of our common cultural understanding. And we’re gonna call this, for lack of a better term, the mythic dimension.
And this is where some of our ideas come from. And these can be ideas about how we shape our culture, how our political system is supposed to work. We’ve talked previously about the social imaginary, way back in episode 9, and this kind of continues on with that thread, or streams, we’ll kind of start changing our metaphor mid stream, for reasons to be explained next episode.
But the point being is that our innovations come from new ideas, whether that’s social innovations, political innovations, cultural, and technological, and when it’s technological innovations, they often come from elements of culture that deal with technology. In this case, science fiction. Now, that isn’t the only source and only pathway for new ideas, of course.
As Henry Petroski has mentioned, human wants have long outpaced human needs as a driver of new inventions. But when we’re talking about revolutionary ideas, radical innovations, stuff that’s new to the world, then it can be one of those primary sources. And as stated, it’s one of those things that can kind of keep the vision and drive going from generation to generation to generation.
And as an expression of our culture, literature has an important role in maintaining this drive. And in the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ve had an explosion of other cultural artifacts like film, television, photography, gaming, and the rest, and these all have a role too, but literature is going to be our primary focus.
And the role that literature takes is that of an exemplar. It points forward towards a daring imaginative goal that may not be achievable, but at least gives those who may be in a position to enact change something to aim for. As Northrop Frye notes, “the written word recreates the past in the present and gives us not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned up hallucination.”
This is from 1981. And it’s in this role that fiction finds itself as a part of literature, as a creator of the prophecies that contradict the conventional wisdom. It allows us to take all these opportunities and use them to drive towards the future. And building on what Northrop Frye said, the Canadian author John Ralston Saul elaborates, he says: “Fiction often reveals to us a greater understanding of our own society as it functions today.”
In other words, great fiction can be true for its time, as well as somehow timeless and true for our time. So this is the role that fiction plays, providing a goal, something timeless and transcendent and intense, something that we can work towards as if it was a dream. And this is what brings us to the development of these new and emerging technologies.
And I do want to stress that we’re looking at multiple technologies here. It isn’t restricted to just one thing. As Canadian academic Vincent Mosco pointed out in his book The Digital Sublime, there’s been similar cycles of mythic inspiration for previous radical technologies like the telegraph, electricity, radio, and television.
And as we noted in our Postcard from Earth episode, this can apply to cinema as well, what Andre Bazin was talking about with regard to the myth of total cinema. What these all link back to is what Perry Miller calls the idea of a technological sublime. An American historian of technology, David E. Nye, goes further into the exploration of this in his own work.
What the technological sublime is is that mythic feeling that we feel when we encounter new technology, the one that strikes right through to our emotions. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be anything electronic, it can be something like witnessing the Hoover Dam, or the first experience of air travel.
But honestly, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, and light switches can all conjure that experience as well, especially if you’ve never experienced it before. To return to Arthur C. Clarke, who we mentioned earlier, that old adage that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic holds true, and this is how we have to understand the enduring appeal and pursuit in development of a new technology, VR.
As the Apple Vision Pro launches, there’s no killer app for it. The business case for it is limited and tenuous at best. The use seems forced, often within the Apple ecosystem, and we don’t know what the enduring appeal of it is. Now, it may be that its time has finally come, with other developers like Meta and Valve both producing products within that market.
And this may create enough interest in it for not just a standard to emerge, but also user demand to match up with the available supply. And this is largely the challenge, to make reality match our dreams. Now, the myths of VR largely come from science fiction within the 70s and 80s, so there was contemporaneous development within the technological sphere as well.
Now, there are authors who have gone into great depths about the history of VR, circa 1990. I’d refer the audience to both Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality and Michael Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality from 91 and 93, respectively. But when it comes to cultural representations, there have been versions of virtual reality going back for decades.
In 1973, there was a short film version of the Ray Bradbury short story The Veldt. which was originally written in 1950. It was marketed as educational programming, and so the contents of that were burned into my brain when it was shown at school. It took my little eight year old brain a little while to understand what those lines were eating in the final frames of that one.
And you can follow a stream through from that one to their first appearance at the Holodeck on Star Trek The Next Generation in 1988, and then every subsequent appearance thereof. And somewhere in between we had the original Tron from Disney. But the visual representations were few and far between. The main source of representations of virtual reality was science fiction.
While we had early versions of computer use, like John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider from 1975, which would still be recognizable to a modern audience, but with its gated communities, urban decay, and computer viruses and identity theft, the first major representation of virtual would be Vernor Vinge’s True Names from 1981.
Now, both Shockwave Rider and True Names had something in common, that they were gobbled up by the people working in computer engineering at the time. Whether it was on campus or within specific firms, the reports are that both those titles were ones that were held in high regard by computing enthusiasts in the 70s and early part of the 80s.
As Katie Hafner and Michael Lyon note in their book Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, “Bruner became a cult figure as the book swept through the worldwide community of science fiction readers. It had a strong influence on an emerging American computer underground, a loose affiliation of phone freaks, computer hackers in places like Silicon Valley and Cambridge, who appeared simultaneously with the development of the personal computer.”
And six years later, this was still going on when True Names was published. As James Frenkel notes, quote, “When True Names was written, it was considered visionary, and was read by some of those who have had a great deal to do with shaping the internet to date.” And while I admit that his mention is problematic now, writing in the afterword to True Names, Marvin Minsky, the co founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, writes, and I quote,
“In real life, You often have to deal with things you don’t completely understand. You drive a car, not knowing how its engine works. You ride as passenger in someone else’s car, not knowing how that driver works. And strangest of all, you sometimes drive yourself to work, not knowing how you work yourself. To me, the import of True Names, that it is about how we cope with things we don’t understand.
But, how do we ever understand anything in the first place? Almost always, I think, by using analogies in one way or another, to pretend that each alien thing we see resembles something we already know.” end quote.
So it’s here in the early 80s where computer scientists and developers are being influenced by the science fiction texts, and you’ll note that I’ve hardly even mentioned the words cyberpunk or cyberspace up to this point in time.
We’ve covered cyberpunk in depth way back in episode 3, and honestly, we will continue to do so in the future. But the influences for the current implementations of virtual reality, which mostly draw from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, whether it’s Meta’ slash Facebook’s pursuit of creating the metaverse, or whether it’s Apple Vision Pro Wearer’s inadvertently becoming the gargoyles from Snow Crash, conducting OSINT at every opportunity, whether inadvertently or not.
But the point is that these ideas of how virtual reality might be achieved, what it would look like, and how it would be incorporated into our daily lives, were prevalent long before the development of the tech actually enabled its use on a regular basis. The vision of the technology of what it could be is what drove the development and subsequent adoption as the users could see themselves incorporating those technologies into their own lives in ways similar to what they saw within the books.
The reason why is that those ideas sparked the mythic imagination as we noted earlier. As Mosco mentions, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concludes that “myths are neither true nor false but living or dead”, and the myths of virtual reality are still very much alive. All the attempts to bring them about in the real world, and the unsuccessful attempts at that, haven’t managed to kill the myth or kill the dream.
To quote Mosco a little bit further here: “A myth is alive if it continues to give meaning to human life, if it continues to represent some important part of the collective mentality of a given age, and if it continues to render socially and intellectually tolerable what would otherwise be experienced as incoherence.
To understand a myth involves more than proving it to be false. It means Figuring out why the myth exists, why it is so important to people, what it means, and what it tells us about people’s hopes and dreams.”
So what does it mean if we’re continually pursuing these dreams of being someplace else, not on this earth, of having different jobs, of having different lives, having a different society that we live in?
And what does it mean when those dreams are pursued by the very richest among us? For those who, to quote a James Bond film would say “the world is not enough”, we can understand what the silicon dreams might mean to the average citizen, the regular users, or even to the developers to bring about something “freaking cool”.
But what does it mean to the technocrats and the industrialists and the billionaires? Why are they so dogged in their pursuit of something that has no killer app? Stick with us as we dig deeper into this in future episodes of The Implausipod.
Thank you for joining us once again here on the Implausipod. I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com for any questions, comments, or concerns. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. All research, writing, editing, mixing, and music is done by me, Dr.
Implausible. Join us soon for The Old Man and the River, as we’ll look further at the impacts of pop culture on the development of technology. And then I think we’ll be returning back to Appendix W for a couple episodes before the release of Dune II. I hope you join us for that. Stay tuned, take care, and have fun.
Bibliography:
Bainbridge, W. S. (1983). The Space Flight Revolution: A Sociological Study.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2002). The Spaceflight Revolution Revisited. In Stephen Garber (Ed.), Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Forty Year of U.S. Human Spacelight Symposium. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. http://mysite.verizon.net/wsbainbridge/dl/spacerevisit.htm
Brunner, J. (1975). The Shockwave Rider. Harper and Row.
Frenkel, J. (Ed.). (2001). True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. TOR.
Frye, N., & Lee, A. A. (2007). The great code: The Bible and literature. Penguin Canada.
Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1996). Where Wizards Stay up late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster.
Mosco, V. (2005). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (1 edition). The MIT Press.
Ray Bradbury (Director). (1973, September 16). The Veldt. http://archive.org/details/the-veldt
Rheingold, H. (1991). Virtual Reality. Summit Books.
Saul, J. R. (2005). On Equilibrium. Penguin Canada.
Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. Bantam Books.
Vinge, V. (1981). True Names. Bluebird.
Womack, J. (2004). Some Dark Holler (pp. 355–371). Ace Books.