The Coming Virtual Age

[Anonymous No.12463943]

/lit/ I have a very bad feeling about the future and what is going to take place in the next few decades.

The main focus at present is on the death of the white native populations of Western nations, but I think we are observing something far more subtle, especially in developed nations, which is the death of Reality itself. I fear that in a few decades, perhaps sooner, "reality" will no longer be a stable, easily-defined notion that we all relate to and share by virtue of necessity. The world as it is, that is the phenomenal world we all observe and navigate via our host bodies, will one day in the relatively near future be sufficiently replicated and subsequently edited / modified to meet the preferences of a growing number of people who will have been raised from infancy to be intimately familiar with ideas of both alternate reality (e.g. Minecraft-esque reality-lite duplication) and increasingly virtual reality (which will become a common fixture in peoples' lives for various educational and consumer reasons, e.g. learning about the Holocaust first hand in school, visiting Bermuda, sexual experiences). Reality itself, or the Server on which we all happen to have spawned by chance (some being born with maxed out character attributes, many others poor or crippled etc) will I believe come to be treated (probably moreso than at present) as a rather miserable, disappointing, over-crowded place, in which we (as increasingly solipsistic, selfish - Autism coming from the Greek for 'Self, autos - consumers with few existential anchors or Server-affirming "metanarratives") will look to flee from at the earliest opportunity, in order to experience our pleasures etc elsewhere, initially in limited virtually-replicated reality servers designed by consumer-tech companies, but in time designed by ourselves.The existing notion of shared Reality, aka Server 1.0, will probably continue to serve as some kind of homepage of rallying ground, but will probably closer resemble a kind of vast server storage area, whose governance is almost irrelevant as long as the machines are functioning properly and allowing unrestricted access to our own private servers. If I am correct, and I believe I am, we will soon witness a mass voluntary exodus from Reality 1.0, with those leaving dispersing not as a group to another shared space (which is why Mars is so boring and irrelevant for the future of the species) but to the countless technological heavens we ourselves will have designed.

[Anonymous No.12463958]

>>12463943
The advancements of computers is vastly exaggerated. Remember that the greatest icon of Silicon Valley was not an engineer, but a salesman.

[The Coming Virtual Age No.12463990]

Imagine the confusing birth of the first self-conscious human being: made nauseous as alien thoughts flooded its brain and considerations about its own conduct became foisted upon it (as Zappfe writes about in The Last Messiah). What a truly difficult time that must have been for those primitive animals transitioning into "human beings", forced to callibrate their perception of life and of themselves as though having suddenly found themselves in another world foreign to that one where mere animal impulses governed their conduct. In time this confusion gave way to banal acceptance that "this is the only life there is"; that a return to the primitive was beyond consideration; that being a self-conscious human sharing the Reality server was the unalterable fate of their kind. The dawn of the Virtual age will in my opinion prove to be the second milestone in human evolution, and I predict that in about 20 years, again perhaps sooner, we will come to view the Internet as little more than a database of archived information and a place to communicate with others more easily (though we will come to loathe doing so). The Internet is then the second Noah's Ark, where vast amounts of information has been gathered in time for the death of Reality (aka Server 1.0). Life in Server 1.0 has already, for the majority of people in Western nations, become something which is perceived to exist in order to mould itself according to one's demands. I would call this the Bespokification of life; represented by the death of "chance" (as evidenced by the decline of footfall-dependent retail, "suitable enough" romantic relationships, default subscription to one's localized culture and associated beliefs etc) and the growing emphasis on one's own subjective desires and the external world's capacity to appease them. Server 1.0 has also taken on something of an alien character, especially in the eyes of younger generations whose primary existential space is the abstract, intangible, digital one currently only offered by the internet and poorly-replicated virtual worlds available in video games etc. Technology has already led to an inversion of the natural perspective for many, esp. younger, people: rather than approach the abstract, the imagined, and the intangible as something alien and exotic, the phenomenal, physical reality shared by those of us in Server 1.0 is now the alien, surreal space - one of the reasons why the use of iPhones to document one's existence is so widespread, as the life previously navigated by impulse, localized tradition and duty is now one navigated by means of analysis, adventure into the previously mundane-now-exotic, and ridden with anxiety and paranoia. The phenomenal, tangible reality of Server 1.0 is now at best a nuisance, a mass of wearisome physical data that ideally one would manipulate to suit one's desires and preferences.

[Anonymous No.12464025]

Either learn to code or enjoy competing with 85 IQ brown people for the opportunity to flip hamburgers

>but what about leisure (the basis of all art and higher civilization)?
We'll give you a new Black Panther if you're a good goy, now get back to work

[The Coming Virtual Age No.12464040]

>>12463958
In the 1990s the Virtual Reality industry had all but died after its brief spell in the subcultural limelight in the 80's. Tech hobbyists and futurists considered the sense-o-rama (a bulky, one-off piece of equipment which pumped out various scents according to what kinds of scented objects one approached in VR) the most fruitful result of their interest in VR. Ready Player One actually provides an accurate insight into what early VR actually set out to achieve, but obviously never could due to its product being incapable of mass production and not at all convincing to the individual seeking to immerse themselves as much as possible in another perceived reality without being reminded that it was not their home server. Now, only two decades later, it is a multi-billion dollar industry with so much consumer demand that competition is fierce and stumbling blocks such as latency issues etc are being overcome in months rather than years. The brain is already quite capable of treating a newly perceived reality as being the only one which exists, as evidenced by our experience while dreaming or consuming psychotropic drugs. With prolonged immersion into a merely somewhat duplicated virtual reality, it's very likely that the brain will already come to treat Server 1.0 reality as a mere alternative, one of many unlockable "Maps" where, just as it so happens, one needs to visit every once in a while to consume food and bathe one's host body.

[Anonymous No.12464495]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12464512]

Good posts. What if nature is something we were meant to leave behind? What if the mystics and Zen monks are the true regressives?

[Anonymous No.12464515]

>The main focus at present is on the death of the white-
stopped reading

[Anonymous No.12464522]

>>12463990
You put something I've been thinking about in very good words. I feel like we are the process of nature optimizing its information density, just walking down the street now is so empty compared to the virtual realms in our pockets, wait until augmented reality hits and we'll be able to overlay the virtual over the boring, drab Real.

[Anonymous No.12464539]

We're turning reality into its own soundbite.

[Anonymous No.12464540]

>>12464025
>codemonkey thinks it's relevant
Kek.

[Anonymous No.12464556]

I think it began with film, the image really, a kind of compression/condensation of meaning and significance, the shaving away of dead time and contingency, of IRRELEVANCE

very good posts anon, you hit the nail on the head