Engaging in the art of life

Like a cask of “premium” wine, virtual reality is for many of us as good as it is ever going to get.

A recent Four Corners report on the 3-D Internet website Second Life provided an insight into the growing popularity and profitability of virtual environments. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people, it seems, now spend time in these computer-generated spaces, transcending geography and nationality for the citizenship of One Digital World.

At any given moment, Second Life alone plays host to about 20,000 individuals who have swapped their corporeal for a virtual self - known as an “avatar” - in order to engage with similarly disposed cyber-intimates in whatever exotic pursuits their imagination takes them: principally to shopping, real estate speculation, gambling and perfectly programmed sex.

Indeed, perfection is more or less mandatory in Second Life. Any given avatar is not a pixellated reproduction of its physically and emotionally defective creator, but a “personalised” version of how she or he would like to appear and behave. Perkier breasts, a bodybuilder’s torso, no unsightly hair or blotches.

Once the physical makeover is complete, the avatar is “teleported” to one of hundreds of “social areas”, to interact live with other avatars controlled by other people sitting at a computer desk somewhere, anywhere else in the world. Participants’ average age, we’re told, is 32, the ratio of women to men being 45 to 55.

It goes without saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch, even in a virtual world. You can participate for nothing, but only to a very limited extent. To look good and be a real player - especially when trading in real estate - you need a credit card.

Second Life’s currency is the Linden Dollar and the going exchange rate is US$1 for 270 Lindens. It all adds up. As explained by an academic on the program: “If you want to know what the typical productivity is of a person in these environments, it seems to be about $2,000 per person, per year. So, that's a per capita GDP number. And it's roughly equivalent to countries like, I don't know, Bulgaria …”

For some reason, this harmless pastime attracts ungracious criticism, exemplified by the suggestion of one correspondent to Four Corners to “get a life, a real one. Virtual reality games like these are for people who don't have what it takes to lead a real one, who want to live in a delusion.”

Such detractors raise as many questions as they beg. The most obvious is why anyone should not prefer a virtual to what is ominously called the “real” world. Idealism, discernment or progress of any kind begins with an active imagination, a dissatisfaction with the “real” status quo; it is not in itself delusional. At the same time, it is evident that the vast majority of Second Lifers are not budding Einsteins, so perhaps we need a somewhat more prosaic justification for their activity.

In the first place, as just intimated, virtual socialising and commerce can be seen as essentially entertainment, no better, worse or more expensive than many other diversions that do not attract such rabid censure. In one respect, it may be a solitary activity (which is obviously suspect); but in another, it involves much more human intercourse than, say, attendance at a sporting event where human solidarity is expressed in a mob chorus of “C’mon Aussie, c’mon!” or its less genteel variants. At the very least, computer-generated futility is a lot less anti-social.

A second consideration is that “virtual” reality is something to which our species has always been drawn. Only the technology has changed, and with it the extent of our personal involvement. A recording, for instance, whether audio, visual or both, is a virtual reproduction of an actual performance - these days enhanced by studio paraphernalia to issue as near flawless a creation as possible. Voices are upgraded, instruments mixed through innumerable channels, computers themselves an increasingly integral part of the artistic process, especially in film. It is difficult to see how this departs qualitatively from what goes on in Second Life, with its drop-dead gorgeous skin, clothing and hedonism.

Much the same holds for all art, at all times, from Michelangelo’s proto-avatars of God and His saints in the Sistine Chapel to the daubs of a frustrated caveman.

What, in short, is the difference between being “transported” by a concert, painting or play, and being teleported to Shopping or Estate Agent Heaven? Solipsism, while taking many forms, has but one rationale.

It is, however, the third element of the defence which is decisive: that full-blown participation in the economy of a virtual society is a totally rational way in which to keep body and soul together in our current version of the real world.

One does not have to inhabit the wilder shores of postmodernism to appreciate that the distinction between appearance and reality is ever more negotiable. (Postmodernism, in any case, is a crude rehash of arguments that have been in circulation for centuries.) Futures and options traders, developers, consultants of every conceivable variety all deal basically in abstractions, to which there may or may not correspond some tangible entity, but which nonetheless have a substantial impact on the behaviour of those who take them seriously.

Or to use the terminology of John Maynard Keynes in his percipient essay from several decades ago, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren: in developed countries the “economic problem” - of securing food, shelter and necessities - has been solved. Technological innovation and industrial management are so advanced that the amount of work necessary to provide most people with a reasonable standard of living is in continuous decline, such that only a small amount of full-time labour is required to maintain a relatively prosperous order. Keynes thought it was possible most people could engage in “the art of life itself”: art, literature, philosophy, that sort of thing. Possible, but highly unlikely.

For the upshot, Keynes thought “with dread”, would be that, deprived of their normal purpose, the majority would be wholly unfit to occupy the potential leisure-time that science and financial surplus have made available. The consequence would instead be technological unemployment: “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”. Three-hour shifts or a 15-hour week, he suggested, might hold the problem off; but the “art of life itself” would be quite alien, if not positively threatening, to the self-image and values of most of the human race.

In practice, we have dealt with the problem by inventing a whole raft of utterly pointless jobs, producing and consuming superfluous goods and services, and “working” completely unnecessary hours: what amounts to a severe form of displacement behaviour.

Or, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued, we have turned pretty much the whole economy over to the entertainment industry. Wars aside - always a good way to keep people occupied - most of our economic progress consists in value-adding and devouring our way through a plethora of de facto amusements, of which gambling and pornography are the most lucrative sectors.

Given which, the case for virtual participation is highly persuasive. It certainly is possible to earn a living this way, even outdoing the Bulgarian GDP. Four Corners, for instance, highlighted the spectacular career of Anshe Chung, who has made the front cover of BusinessWeek as a millionaire property developer whose sales are of estates that exist only in the graphic images of Second Life. Her Linden to US Dollars may come in at 270 to 1; but that only requires inflating the fantasy price by the same ratio. Her millions in the bank are anything but virtual Greenbacks.

We may, of course, consider those who fork out (ultimately) good money to live in or copulate with electronic signals to be blithering idiots, but they are doing no harm and may in fact be displacing themselves from something far more pernicious.

As Keynes also wrote in the case of those who earn a living in the financial markets: many of the individuals attracted to the stock exchange and comparable money-making businesses are psychopaths. It is far better for society at large that they be thus occupied than perhaps exercising their talents in organised crime.

We should, in other words, be thankful that so many people prefer to go through their lives as avatars rather than impose on those who believe themselves to exist without delusions. After all, the critics’ injunction is to get a life. Does it really matter which one?