Collected Essays (18 page)

Good old cyberspace. Those were the days.

Note on “Five Flavors of Cyberspace”

Written 1996 and 1992.

Appeared as “Brain Plug” in the Australian magazine
21C in 1996
.

In 1991 and early 1992, I was working at Autodesk with a group that was developing a toolkit for writing virtual reality or “cyberspace” programs. I was laid off from Autodesk in the fall of 1992, and I spent the next year working on my Silicon Valley novel,
The Hacker and the Ants
. The second part of this article is drawn from that novel, and the first part is an article that I later wrote for
21C
. By the time I wrote that article, I had fairly wide-ranging views on the meaning of the word “cyberspace.”

Cyberculture in Japan

May 28, 1990, Morning. First sights.

We came in last night, first sight from the plane a long beach, the edge of Asia, the sand empty and gray, rice paddies lining the rivers, hill knobs sticking out of the paddies like castles, green and misty. The crowd at the airport: the variousness of the Japanese faces. I notice this again downtown later, the diversity of their faces from round to square, and skin color from yellow to pale white. Sylvia and I hit the street to walk around the fancy Ginza neighborhood once we’ve checked into the Hotel Imperial.

An arched stone passage under a train line, barbecue smoke streaming out, people sitting eating and drinking, a TV crew with 12 guys pointing lights at the announcer, who waits poised, then starts screaming crazily and the camera and lights follow as he surges forward into the BBQ crowd and confronts someone. Taxi cabs like cop cars streaming by. It’s all so cyberpunk.

We eat sushi and beer, and at some unknown signal half the people there get bowls of soup with clams in it. On the street we get lost, gawking at the huge electric signs. The oddity of seeing story-high electric letters that mean
nothing
to you. Pure form, no content. Burroughs talks about rubes staring up in awe at the crawling neon. It’s humiliating to be illiterate.

Driving in from the airport we passed Chiba City on the right, and on the left I saw a building that might have been a motel, with sloping buttress side walls that went right down to the edge of a solidly building-lined canal leading out to the Tokyo Bay, and I thought of
Neuromancer
. There were a DJ man and woman on the radio, she repeatedly giggling madly, then they started a song; Roy Orbison singing “Only the Lonely.”

Walking around the Ginza lost that night we see lots of groups of “company-men” in blue suits, some of them quite drunk by end of evening. One particular guy is doing the double-jointed wobbly-knee walk that my father used to call “the camel walk.” He’s fifty or sixty, gray-haired, leader of his buddies. They’re having such fun out on the street, everyone: no one begging or stealing or looking for a fight.

May 28, 1990, Afternoon. Around Tokyo.

Sylvia and I were up quite early, and spent about six hours exploring. We sat outside the Kabuki Theater for awhile to rest, and saw construction workers in split-toed cloth boots with rubber soles, good for climbing. “Split-toe” in Japan is like “hard-hat” in the U.S. Women in kimonos were going in and out of the theater, musicians and makeup people. They have the self-confidence of artists with a job.

The imperial palace is in the center of a park with deep-looking moats with slanting stone walls. There are also places where the slanting stone walls just come up from the ground, leaning against embankments. The walls are fascinating because at the edges they use rectangular blocks and towards the center they use huge irregular hexagons, all the blocks fitting together as nicely as soap-bubbles. It’s interesting to me to see a transition between rectangular and hexagonal grid arrays, as this relates to a problem connected with the electronic ant farm program I’ve been working on recently.

We find a lovely green field in the palace park. It is deserted and Japan is so crowded. Maybe Japanese always do the same thing at the same time, so that either they
all
go to the park or
none
do? Or maybe they have too much respect for the Emperor to enter his park. The hedges are trimmed with a peak running lengthwise along the hedge tops, like the tops of a roofs. We hear someone playing or practicing a flute, it sounds Zen and spacey. Hearing that and looking at the pleasing meadow with a few trees and its low ridged hedges I think, “Of course it looks nice, it’s arranged according to some transcendental holistic Japanese vision,”…then wonder if maybe I’m reading more into it than is there. The beautiful swooping catenary lines of the stone moat walls going down to the water are certainly by design.

We went to a museum with an art nouveau exhibit; all the other museum-visitors were young women. They look so goody-goody and tidy and sweet. Sylvia says that sex is not viewed as sinful in Japan, maybe that’s why the women can be so clean and good, with nothing dirty about sex or the prospect of it to sully them? The women and children are in the shops and museums, and all the men are in the office buildings. After work the men drink and sing in the street and walk funny and go home and start over. Seems like a simple kind of life for either side.

Then we found the main art museum and saw an interesting show on “The Best of Bunten 1905–1917.” Turns out Bunten is an acronym for a national art show/contest they had in Japan for awhile, till the artists quarreled so much the shows stopped. The pieces we saw were really interesting. Lots of them were straight copies of impressionist style. Cézanne and Degas and Manet copped composition ideas from Japanese prints, fans, and kimonos—and then the Japanese turned around and copped back impressionist lighting tricks for their own pics. Mirrors of mirrors. There were some wonderful big traditional-style scrolls and screens, too. Some of the screen paintings are done, if you look closely, in a fast loose brush style almost like cartooning, but at a slight distance they look formal and dreamily real. I noticed one beautiful woman guard in the museum, slightly plump—I keep trying to fix mental images of people I can use for Japanese characters in future books.

In the park, there’s a woman kneeling, taking a picture of her toddler coming towards her saying “Mama,” glancing over at us with such a shy happy look on her Asian secretary’s face, not that she was a secretary, she had lipstick and a silk suit. With “Asian secretary” I’m thinking of the weak-chinned long-toothed look that kind of goes with the idea of a gossiping office-girl, a pretty fair number of the women here have that look, with a bright lipstick mouth stuck on like a mouth on Mr. Potato Head, only using a chinless yellow parsnip instead of a potato. In the primo examples of this look, the lips won’t quite meet and an asymmetric bit of front tooth is always visible. But
regardless
of what anyone might think of her looks, there she is, the woman in the park, a mother getting her pictures of her toddler, having the nicest kind of simple fun. These people are so alien to me, I see them in a clearer way than the people back home—kind of like the thing with their writing: since I can’t read it, I notice its pattern and semiotic weight, like
there
is an advertisement, right on the handle of the subway strap (Sylvia noticed that one), and not be caught up in reading the message. Thus with the woman in the park, I have no ability to “read” her appearance and surmise her life (what kind of house, what kind of husband, kinds of opinions, etc.—and one can, or at least thinks one can, surmise all this easily and automatically from people back home), so instead of saying, like, “Oh, there’s a yuppie woman with her baby,” I just see the ideograph, the form, the woman, the mother getting a picture of her baby’s early steps. “Mama,” he said, same as us. I could push this further, of course, to get a concept of being around real aliens, though to do that I’d have to imagine not having mothers and children. Much is readable even here in Japan; I know for instance that letters are for expressing words, and I know what a mother is.

We found our way to the subway next, also interesting, two women walking past talking, one of them smiling almost crazily while talking to her friend, pausing to clear throat or wet lips and the smile is completely gone, it’s simply part of talking. Sylvia figured out the kanji sign for in it’s a picture of lambda and a box: walking person + hole. And out is a picture of like a double psi and a box: cheering person + hole. You walk in the hole and then you cheer when you get out.

May 30, 1990. Cyberspace, interviews, pachinko.

Yesterday was the big work day. In the morning I went to the building that the Ministry of Information uses for their Hightech Art Planning (HARP). These are the guys who paid my plane fare and hotel and gave me righteous bucks to come give a twenty minute talk on the topic of cyberspace.

There was an exhibit of some computers on one floor. I played with one for quite a while. It was a realtime graphics supercomputer called a Titan. It had a simulation of a flag which was made of a grid of points connected by imaginary springs, and with two of the points attached to a flag pole. You could crank up the wind, or change the wind’s direction, and see the flag start to ripple and flap. I kept thinking of the Zen story about three monks looking at a flag flapping in the wind. A: “What is moving?” B: “The flag is moving.” C: “No, the wind is moving.” A: “Ah no, the mind is moving.” To keep the flag from looking like a bunch of triangles they used a cool computer-graphics trick called “Gouraud shading.” You could rotate the flag too, and as a last touch you could cut one or both of the flag’s tethers to the pole and see it blow away, a crumpling wind-carried shape.

We all did presentations on our work, Scott Fisher on work he did at NASA with headmounted displays with one screen for each eye (immersion in Virtual Reality), in which the view changes as you move your head (realtime controllable viewpoint), and in which you can move an image of your DataGloved hand and do things (user entry into the image). He feels all three features are essential for creating the feeling of being in the artificial world. He used sound instead of tactile feedback, meaning that if you are manipulating, say, a robot arm, there is a sound whose pitch grows as the arm gets nearer to a wall. He spoke of a “3-D window” as a clipped volume containing a different viewpoint; you can reach out and resize a 3-D window. It would be nice to have several 3-D windows to other worlds in the room with me, even better than the old 2-D magic doors of SF.

I missed most of the other presentations because the HARP organizers led me off to do interviews, but another significant flash I got was from Susumu Tachi, who is into telepresence robots. He had a robot like a tricycle with a pair of binoculars sticking up out of the seat, able to swivel back and forth. A user drives the tricycle by wearing goggles and a head mount and using a brake and accelerator pedal. So you see the tricycle going along, turning its pair of eyes this way and that and stopping if someone is in the way. This is an interesting way of separating the problem of hardware and software. You can postpone getting pattern-recognition and judgment programs by letting the control go to a telepresent operator, and meanwhile just get a robot which can mechanically move around and, for instance, pick up objects the way you want it to.

I also got to hear part of Jaron Lanier’s talk. Jaron is the hero of Virtual Reality; his company, VPL, is the first to sell DataGloves and the EyePhones with the two little screens. Jaron is a plump, substance-free hippie with Rasta-style dreadlocks. I sat next to him at the dinner day before yesterday and talked a lot; I ended up defending him when the waitress incredibly started harassing Jaron for having long hair. She’s all, “You are woman?” Jaron took it in stride, calmly saying, “She only acts this way to promote a feeling of rowdiness.” Two of Jaron’s beliefs are, “It’s not really a Virtual Reality unless there’re at least two people in it,” and, “Sex in cyberspace is a dumb idea: polygons aren’t sexy.”

In the morning we rehearsed the talks by talking to our translators and seeing if the video stuff worked. For lunch they brought us Styrofoam boxes of Japanese food. My lunch consisted of a
single
shrimp and
two
beans. Really
large
ones though, each bean a kind of giant lima that you squeeze out of its husk, and the shrimp a hefty little dude the size of a thumb. There was also a table full of soft drinks. The first one I tried, nothing came out, it was a “soft drink” of grape jelly. I had some Pocari Sweat instead. Who is Pocari and why are we drinking his sweat?

My talk went well, I had a video of my
CA Lab
cellular automata software showing behind me, and I talked about Artificial Life, about robot evolution, and about growing Artificial Life in cyberspace. It was an easy, painless talk. Doing a bunch of interviews was part of the gig, too.

One of my interviews was by a skin magazine called
Goro
, all their questions were about sex and drugs, like, “Do you feel pornography is a driving force for high tech?” I played along, “Of course. The same human thrill-seeking which makes sex and drugs important is a big factor in seeking out astonishing computer graphics.” I asked about the “soapland” sex places I’d read of in the guidebook, places where, it says, a woman soaps you all over,
using parts of her own body to soap you with
(I assume soapy boobs and soapy pubic hair), they were surprised I knew of it. They asked what I and my fellow Americans thought of the Japanese, and first I said, “Cool and strange,” and they were happy, and then I said, “In the USA, many think of Japan as an anthill,” and they looked upset. I was sorry I’d said that—over here I’m quickly getting into the concept of “
wa
,” the common happiness and agreement. One aspect of
wa
is that whether or not I thought we had time to squeeze in yet another interview, they always said, “Yes we must do it.”