On December 9th, 1981, Officer Daniel Faulkner, Philadelphia Police Department, was fatally
shot.
Mumia Abu Jamal was sentenced to death for murder.
Fifteen years later, Mumia Abu Jamal, one-time radical activist, award-winning journalist,
and part-time cab driver, sits on death row.
He was sufficiently coherent enough to say, yeah, I shot the MF, and I hope he dies.
Well, he got his wish, then he died.
I was with Jamal from within a moment or two of him being brought into the emergency room.
He neither made any confessions to me, nor did he say anything that would be even remotely
in the way of a confession to any other individuals.
No, I did not confess in any hospital.
Is he a political prisoner?
Is there a police and justice department cover-up?
It was Mumia's gun, it was licensed to him, but that gun was a .38 caliber, and the bullet
that was removed from Officer Faulkner, if you accept the word of the medical examiner,
was a .44 caliber.
I felt real bad about it, and I knew this other person was being wrongly, falsely accused
for something he didn't know, he never knew what happened.
Mumia Abu Jamal sits on death row with a new appeal pending, a new attorney, and new testimony.
In this real-life melodrama, was there a third man running from the scene?
They never pursued the third man that all the witnesses talked about.
Fifteen years on death row, political prisoner or cold-blooded murderer, you be the judge.
Murder is not a political act, it's a crime of violence, so we have no sympathy with it.
When you murder a police officer, anything else that you may be about, you've given that up.
He did everything he could to basically disrupt the proceedings, including not standing.
I still get the sense that you have some belief in justice, in American justice.
That sounds very naive, I know.
I have to.
Yes, that's the only way one can survive and persevere.
Mumia Abu Jamal, a case for reasonable doubt, from Fox Lover Home Video.
COMPUTER NOISES
Open your minds, your hearts, your very souls, good people,
to what you are going to see and hear.
COMPUTER NOISES
You know, I think the thing that sets human beings apart from other creatures
is a built-in dissatisfaction.
There's an itch that we have that can't be scratched.
Our efforts to scratch it have created civilization,
which is essentially the practice of trying to adapt the environment to us
rather than adapting ourselves to the environment.
COMPUTER NOISES
We decided long ago that we were terrified by nature
and that we needed to be more powerful so that we weren't threatened by nature so much.
Technology means power to us.
It symbolizes potentially immortality.
This is the fantasy that somehow we can transcend our horrible condition
of being human through these shiny black boxes.
You become a god. You have the power to change reality.
You have the power to create reality.
When you look on the TV, is anything you see real?
Nobody knows anymore.
With some of the digital imagery, with some of the retouching,
some of the 3D animation, what you see, it isn't real.
And with this technology, it lets me be a god.
It lets me create my reality.
I'm only getting what is rightfully mine, Mac.
COMPUTER NOISES
We like the idea of a controlled environment only because
you can control whether there's pollution, you can control what's in the ocean,
control what's on the sand, the beach.
It's just a cleaner environment.
They've had a lot of experience to change things.
In a sense, tourism begins as a kind of controlled environment.
Middle-class people could now travel and see the world.
It used to be that going to exotic places required a certain heartiness of spirit,
and now it was a more controlled experience, less random, with guides to take you.
And now that's been brought home.
I mean, you don't have to go to the pyramids anymore.
The pyramids can come to you.
COMPUTER NOISES
You know, I worked so hard all the week, you know,
and last Sunday was such a busy day.
At Epcot Center, at Disney World, or in Las Vegas,
you can see reproductions of all those things,
and they're ever so much nicer than what you can see in the real world.
MUSIC
That you can have a nice sort of dinner in a Mexican pyramid
and watch the volcano explode at just the right time,
and, you know, you're guaranteed of having the experience that you were expecting.
It seems to me that now what we have is the capacity
to literally create the environment that we want to be in.
That is, to make available environments
that would not be normally available to most people.
I mean, it's an extension of something like a shopping mall
or something like the Metrodome.
MUSIC
CHATTER
We create a microcosmic representation of nature,
optimized and sanitized so that it is precisely as we want it,
and it becomes exceedingly available.
It's all packaged for me. My world is packaged for me.
I just have to consume it.
MUSIC
CHATTER
MUSIC
CHATTER
In a sense, what you've done is filtered all the hazards
out of the natural experience
and just distill those parts of the experience,
which are pleasant, positive, danger-free.
I guess the next step is literally to sit in a booth
and not be on skis at all, not wear a pocket.
The virtual reality issue is tremendously seductive, fascinating.
You know, if you can create not only an indoor environment
that replicates this, but you have a kind of virtual reality
where you sit yourself down in a chair
and somehow or other you're strapped in
and you enjoy the experience of skiing without ever skiing.
You never master the techniques. You just gain the experience.
MUSIC
We're trying to figure out ways to reduce the sense of separation
that having bodies gives us.
If we start to inhabit an environment where we can't take our bodies,
I think the difference between mind starts to go away,
and I personally view that as being a positive development.
Virtual reality is defined to mean that thing that you could create
that would become immersive through the use of computers, iPhones
and some kind of physical mapping system
like a data glove or body suit.
I always tell people if they want to understand what virtual reality is,
they should take a look at Las Vegas.
Las Vegas is a real clear case of the map having gotten so substantial
that people can walk around in it and feel like they are in full,
immersive, three-dimensional reality even though the whole thing is created.
We're used in the mummification process of the king.
Underneath the middle bed...
MUSIC
Hello, my name is Charlotte Richards
here at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
I've been performing weddings for the last 35 years,
and as I see technology advancing,
I decided a drive-up wedding window would be a very up-to-date way of getting married.
My next step is by television,
where I will be sitting at a television monitor
and the couple will be monitored.
And I think television's great, don't you?
There's this odd blurring between the reality of marriage
and the simulation of Elvis impersonators
that sort of blends in some strange way and creates some sort of hyper-real environment.
MUSIC
Is this a natural thing?
Well, not much about our society is natural anymore.
MUSIC
Town Square has been replaced by the mall,
and the friendly neighborhood coffee shop has been replaced by the fast food outlet.
A lot of things have contributed to the kind of ruthless, alienated society we live in.
MUSIC
We are in an era in which the natural world is threatened by human activity.
We can't drink from our rivers.
The air is polluted. The food chain is suffering.
MUSIC
At the same time, we can retreat into a synthetic world
in which we have artificial trees and artificial skies and artificial animals.
I think the day might come when some of those worst science fiction fantasies come true.
The electricity goes off and you discover you're not living in paradise.
You're living in hell.
MUSIC
I'd like to be able to get the sun on a beach and all that,
but not have any of the pollution and any of the bad things that are on there.
Not have to worry about the sharks or the jellyfish or anything like that.
MUSIC
I think there's been a long-standing dream of rediscovering paradise.
That if we have urban space, which has sort of separated us from nature,
then our dream of technology will be about technology giving us a pristine natural environment
again within the city that can incorporate parks and greenery and oxygen.
MUSIC
It's really a kind of manifestation of our capacity to control the world and to control nature.
Outside, we don't have that control.
Nature still shows that it can do us in at any moment.
Inside this encapsulated reality, we are in control.
I guess there are interesting questions that arise as a result of this.
I've always thought in some ways that the ecological problems,
problems of ecology, are essentially problems of transformation.
That is, we might in the end transform the world in such a way that we won't be able to adapt to it.
That is, we literally won't be able to live in the world that we create.
MUSIC
With IMAX films and computer databases and the unbelievable ability we have to store information,
in a sense we can set about cataloging nature.
My dark nightmare of that is that once we've cataloged it, we won't need nature anymore
because after all we can always summon up an image of these great extinct species
so that, you know, I will never miss them when they're gone.
I won't even know about it.
MUSIC
If we do get the ability to have complete control over the structure of matter,
will we in effect become omnipotent?
It sounds like this is true because if we can build anything that we want to build
then what is going to stop us from doing just absolutely anything at all?
MUSIC
But technology doesn't mean any one thing in that it's not giving us a flawless universe,
but it's allowing people to create what it is they want to create.
Some people may want to live in a space station in which everything is controlled down to the last molecule.
There'd be no bugs or rats, mice, anything.
There'd be nothing up there that you didn't want.
Not everyone is going to want to do that, however, I certainly wouldn't.
I tend to like planet Earth with all of its imperfections.
MUSIC
Well, boys, that's it. Hope this trip is as easy as your last one.
Thanks. It should be.
Goodbye.
MUSIC
Fire pilot jets, there's a whole universe out there, Steve,
but hopefully, you aren't anyone's comprehension.
Over, over, over.
MUSIC
Commander, we've got Loki from Alpha Sector coming in fast.
MUSIC
Commander, we're detecting an energy surge.
It is charging weapons.
Ensign, notify the stellar command that we're under attack.
Get Gamma Squadron off the deck, pronto.
MUSIC
Life on Earth has always been very boring for me.
I started going to the clubs because it gives me a chance to be whatever I want,
and that's why I hope in the near future there will be colonies on other planets
where hopefully there will be other people like me,
where everyone is accepted no matter what they are.
MUSIC
I think we need a new enlightenment, a new humanism, or a transhumanism,
as I prefer to call it, a humanism which looks beyond current human abilities and limits
and applies reason and science and objective truth and research to improving humans' possibilities.
Seven, six, five.
I personally think we're going to have to wait until we have cheap base transportation
so we can get off the planet and into space where there's plenty of room,
and then we can start whole new societies.
MUSIC
Not having the physical bands of the Earth and the excuse of limited space,
people will want to try all kinds of different social experiments.
MUSIC
In the absence of geography, since we've explored the world,
now there's a construction of new geographies through the computer or through simulation
or through digitalization or through replacement of the body.
MUSIC
My work is really a struggle against nature, the idea of God,
the inexorable, the programmed, the DNA which is in charge of representation.
MUSIC
And that's why I went into surgery, aesthetic surgery,
not for an improvement or a rejuvenation,
but for a total change of image, even to a total change of identity.
MUSIC
The most avant-garde thing that I did for Olan was to put implants in her forehead, temple area.
This is not something that's described anywhere, it's something that she and I devised.
She wanted to have a prominence there that looks like the forehead of the Mona Lisa.
And they look actually very interesting, and not quite anatomically like anything,
but it was part of this sort of work in progress that she and I devised.
Olan, we have facts for the first question, is what will the body be in the future?
MUSIC
I said that I gave my body to art, but the idea is really to pose the problem
of the body, of the body's status in our society,
and in future generations, through genetic manipulation,
to mentally prepare for this problem.
MUSIC
I think a lot of the questions that she asks are very troubling.
You know, what exactly is the body, how much can you change it,
what is the relationship between the mind and the body?
I think that these things upset people and disturb them,
and so people say, oh, this is nonsense, you shouldn't be doing it.
But without advocating that everyone should go out and do performance art,
I think that it plays an important role.
MUSIC
One of the issues here is turning the body into a controlled environment,
and of course the ethical questions become massive.
If we can control the body, does it necessarily mean that we should?
In a way it becomes a new point, if we can, we will, but where does that stop?
MUSIC
And of course this has found a massive popularity with adolescents
who are casting themselves as mutants who somehow need to control their own bodies
through mutant stigmata of piercings and tattooings
and ways of turning the body into a sign.
MUSIC
I guess I'm a body artist because I always change the way I look
and the way I, like, whatever I do to myself I just change all the time.
I do get bored with how I look, like one day I look in the mirror
and I'm like, oh, I looked like that yesterday, so then I change.
Change is an art form, I guess.
This is my art, I live it every day, I'm a walking work of art.
If someone I really look like, you'd agree.
I'm actually completely plastic.
Here's my battery pack.
But as long as someone replaces the batteries once in a while, I'll be okay.
My favorite piercing, by the way, in case you were wondering, is my tongue.
I have it pierced twice.
And my most hideable face piercing is my nose.
It's right there, it's all sneaky hideaway.
But I usually actually wear a big silver ring in it, but I'm job hunting today.
MUSIC
It's the cyborgization of humanity.
We're taking the machine inside us and uniting with it.
And on some level we would all like to have replaceable parts.
We already do, we have artificial hearts, kidneys and stuff like that.
We're waiting for the time when those things are actually improvements over the original.
And you'll be able to put your parts in and take your parts out at leisure.
MUSIC
Perhaps they experience being the opposite sex without making permanent surgical changes and so forth.
Yes, love of technology, love of the hyperreal is a major theme of these times.
It's a love-hate relationship.
MUSIC
The skin is disappointing.
In life, we only have our skin.
But there is malice in human relationships.
Because we are never what we are.
We always have a feeling of strangeness when we look at ourselves in the mirror.
But there are times when suddenly this feeling of strangeness is much greater.
So try that in front of the mirror, there is less and less this feeling of strangeness.
MUSIC
When I was very young, I started on female hormones.
And that changed my body to what my mind thought it should be.
I all along wanted to become a woman.
And I had a boyfriend pay for my sex change operation.
And I had that done and I've been happy ever since.
It's very important for transsexuals and people of gender confusion
to have a way of escaping being trapped in a body.
But I personally would like to remain as natural as possible and be gorgeous.
Nothing is natural. Nothing is naturally occurring.
Everything deals with the chemicals in your body and the way you are programmed from the time you were a child.
Everything you saw, everything you heard programmed you, just like a computer.
That programming can be undone.
MUSIC
The mind is changing. Through computers, they're artificial.
The mind itself is expanding.
Like through virtual reality, through other projects, you are experiencing new experiences.
It's not drugs. It's just genius.
And people like us understand that.
We're so far beyond.
We try to expand other people.
MUSIC
If I was, say, to become a woman in some sort of virtual reality,
then I could perhaps bring some of that experience back with me
so that I would be a more full individual, if you will.
And I think the whole thing about light is to be illuminated,
to see what's really going on around you and to illuminate others as well.
MUSIC
Extropians are people who want to push back limits of all kinds.
So we tend to challenge not just things that other people challenge, like political limits
or the limits we can see today, but we're interested in any kind of limits that humans have traditionally accepted.
One big one, of course, is human lifespan.
We want to push back the limits to human life so we can live indefinitely long,
which will mean removing, getting rid of these human bodies and becoming post-human, as we call it.
MUSIC
I don't think there are any liberations from reality.
I mean, the only liberation from reality that I'm familiar with is death.
And even that, you know, it's just that we don't have any reports from the field there.
Just think of how long it takes to learn what you need in order to get by in life.
It takes a process of primary school education, which is 10 or 12 years,
and high school and college and graduate school.
So finally, at the age of 40, you have what you need to go through life.
And you may have 20 years in which you plow your trade and practice whatever it is you've learned
for the first 40 years, and then you're dead.
It's not the way to go.
MUSIC
What we're asking people to do is to change their worldview,
to change their whole outlook on life.
People grow up expecting that they will die,
and their children will then grow up, and they will die,
and their children will grow up and die.
But suppose it suddenly dawns on you that your children may not die.
And they may not.
MUSIC
Altogether, there are about 50 people frozen now, I believe.
Here at the Cryonics Institute, we have 11.
And who were they?
As I said, one was my mother, one was my first wife.
MUSIC
I'm very interested in immortality, and I'm much older than I look.
And the way I stay that way is I take some of the substances
that have been discovered for long life.
MUSIC
When it's time for me to go, I'll be all taken care of.
I'm looking forward to being brought back,
and I don't know exactly what's going to be there,
but whatever it is, I'll be glad of it as better than rotten.
MUSIC
We have at the present time two cats and one dog at the Cryonics Institute.
The other organizations also have pets in suspension.
And of course, the prices are proportionately lower.
Price goes more or less according to size.
A lot of people are interested in saving their dogs and cats.
I like Cryonics because I'm dating a 17-year-old boy.
I'm 28, and I want to, like, wait for him.
I want to wake up when he's 25.
I guess you could say if he's in somebody's body,
we'd be able to preserve it, but...
Waking him back up is the problem.
Yeah, because when you wake somebody back up,
the age is going to come at them harder.
They've got to watch out for the age difference.
MUSIC
Like Walt Disney, look how old he is now, you know what I'm saying?
And if they ever do find a way to unfreeze him
and bring him back to life, he's just going to die.
Because how old is, you know what I'm saying?
MUSIC
Obviously, patients who have suffered considerable damage,
whether by freezing or through old age
or through some terminal disease or injury,
will need considerable repair
before they can be made young and healthy,
and this means that we will need detailed control over human biology.
One way of looking at this is that all you have to do
to make a person healthy or young or both
is to rearrange his atoms and molecules a little bit.
There is a word that has come into use recently
referring to molecular engineering
or the manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level,
and that word is nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology is this plan for gaining complete control
over the structure of matter.
So if you have a person with a damaged heart, for example,
you could have little robots stream through the bloodstream
under computer control or under some kind of human control,
and they could affect the repairs that were necessary.
So in a sense, you have a sort of type of omnipotence.
I myself don't worry about whether this is last semester
or we're trying to play God.
We're simply trying to gain the control that we are able to
over nature and over our own selves.
This is the new improved Santa.
Plug him in.
Merry Christmas.
People who are most offended
by the results of mechanistic technology
are also the ones who most vehemently oppose
biotechnology and nanotechnology,
which are really the options,
which are really nature-based technologies.
We are moving from the industrial model to the biological model.
Well, there are individuals who think that cyberspace is unnatural
and that computers in some sense are artificial,
but you have to realize that our brain is in some sense
a tremendous computer.
And it may take many centuries before we have true robots
that can simulate the functions of the brain,
but there is a continuum.
We will get to the point where we can simulate a person
and their reactions so well
because we'll understand the chemical,
the formulation of the body and all that so well
that maybe we will have computers that are basically people.
Music
The reason why we don't have mechanical butlers
and mechanical maids,
the reason is pattern recognition.
Computers can see, but they don't recognize.
They don't understand.
I don't think robots are going to replace human beings.
I think what we're going to see is more of a merger of human beings
and robots to become some kind of combined organism.
In the next few years, we're going to start seeing household robots appear.
They have to be fairly sophisticated.
They have to be able to move around a house without bumping into things
and knocking things over, and they have to learn their surroundings.
So we're going to see a spectrum from very stupid to very smart.
I definitely think that artificial intelligence is already starting.
It's already happening, and it will take over.
It definitely will take over.
And I don't think that man is really ready to accept that.
Music
Now that you're transferring human consciousness from the brain
to a machine of some kind, it puzzles many people
because they tend to think of themselves because of religious ideas.
It's essentially a soul.
They think there's a non-physical, spiritual matter inside this human body.
And so if you talk about transferring personality from the brain to a computer,
they don't see how that's possible.
The brain is a combination.
Unless you're a deeply religious person
and you believe that the spirit is something other than the human existence,
it's biology, chemistry, and electronics combined in a very unique way.
The brain is a finite system of neurons.
Once you figure it out, once you've got a template for it,
it's just a question of running the map.
Piece of cake.
Music
Obviously in a human life, there's too much information to fully assimilate,
but you can make a good, educated guess.
That's what artificial life's all about, too.
A good, educated guess.
So can we download our personalities?
Yeah, maybe.
Uploading them is a different story, though.
Downloading them, I think so.
We'll get there eventually.
Music
Right now, we're not in very good control of our impulses.
We tend to get angry and envious and jealous and have wars all the time.
We've made some changes to our genetics and our neurochemistry.
We might be able to control those things.
And we're beginning to see just the bare beginnings of that
and some of the chemicals people are using.
Like Prozac is a very crude example.
It's something which moderates personality.
But I think we'll see far more sophisticated chemical control of our brains,
which we can choose ourselves as individuals and choose who we want to be.
At the edge of our culture, people are starting to view drugs as inflammation.
You take a particular combination of chemicals to create a particular response
in your brain and your nervous system.
And you find that response perhaps useful in getting a different view of reality.
These people no longer feel constrained by the social rules of the past.
If you take ecstasy, it takes your ego away.
So you have a better time relating with people
and understanding what people have to say or do.
Even if it's just for a little while, that experience can change your whole life.
The first time I took ecstasy, I saw people in a whole different light.
I saw them all as good.
And everybody else was on ecstasy too, so they were all good.
I like optical machines that tap into the visual cortex and stimulate your brain.
When you high, it's like your mind all of a sudden, it plays.
What you see, you exaggerate. Everything you see is exaggerated.
Chocolate, butter chocolate, sugar, white synthetic sugar, MDMA ecstasy.
The key to a human psychology is to know how to operate your brain,
and that means being able to expand consciousness.
In the past, they, the psychiatrists and the ministers and priests,
that were either sane or you're crazy.
And throughout human history, they, the controllers, want to scare us.
There's sanity in what's real, and that's what we're in charge of.
And anything else is sinful, psychotic, evil, daft, hallucinatory.
And the mind itself becomes a controlled environment as we move in
and begin to understand it more and map it.
This terrain becomes something we can handle.
We're just beginning to understand the human brain.
Brain chemistry started in the late 1970s, and it's moving very quickly
thanks to computer modeling and so forth.
There are new synthetic drugs being made, both psychedelic and intelligence drugs.
Hello. Hi.
We're Mike. And DMT.
And we're the bartenders. Smart drinks.
Smart drinks are us. We make these drinks.
Which have vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.
Out of juice and fresh fruits, and we put them in cups.
And we also offer ginseng, and we do a lot of experiments.
Yeah, we like mix around them.
Fructose, choline, chromium.
This has ginkgo in it, which is a chemical that, like, clears the mind and focuses it.
This has choline in it.
It's good if you smoke a lot of pot. It works very well.
Yeah, if you do.
No alcohol.
We have no alcohol at the bar. Alcohol is a sin.
And that's our job.
That's what we do.
And we do that at every single rave in America. Every day.
Mike DMT Worldwide. Yep.
Smart drugs, sometimes called nootropics, from the Greek noos in mind,
are drugs which are able to increase human intelligence, concentration,
and other cognitive abilities without unpleasant side effects.
It's not getting high.
Smart drugs are not about that. It's giving you an edge.
And a 10% edge when I'm sitting down at the keyboard, when I'm making animation,
or when I'm writing or something, the edge that I get from that is very much worth it.
Although it's not very safe to prescribe them to yourself.
I do anyway. I've used myself as a pharmaceutical guinea pig quite a bit.
And I've never, with the exception of one time where I was a little nauseated by hydrogen,
as a matter of fact, it's never hurt me yet.
There's a whole paradigm in medicine which says that what doctors are there to do
is to cure disease, to remedy problems, to fix things.
They don't have any idea that medicine should be there to increase human abilities beyond the norm.
Therefore, the FDA won't approve drugs for increasing human intelligence,
increasing concentration or memory,
only for giving those people with cognitive deficits, people with senility,
to try and remove those problems and bring them back to normal.
But you can't get drugs approved to make you better than normal.
The last person in the world you want giving you drugs
that will change your opinion and your mind is a government authorized scientist.
It's a nightmare.
So we've, glorious victory of the sixties,
and we've got to be careful about that.
We've got to be careful about that.
We've, glorious victory of the sixties.
We took the power to change your consciousness away from the medical.
And even today with Prozac, you know,
it's no longer a psychiatrist to do it.
It's a general practitioner, you know.
And even the idea of self-medication, you know, sure,
get a friendly doctor, but yeah.
You hear these people talk about Prozac.
I'm not pushing Prozac, I've never had it,
but it's interesting that they're saying now,
they're saying about LSD and the sixties.
You have to learn your own rhythm and how it affects you.
It raises your self-esteem.
It confuses you.
But it's got to be you in charge of your brain.
The people who change, the people who make the difference are reprogrammed.
You can do that through drugs.
You can do that through meditation.
You can do that now through virtual reality.
Computers are helping us with that.
To assimilate another existence,
to become somebody else somewhere else,
is a fantastic experience.
Hi, my name is Sarah.
I'm twelve years old.
And I'm blonde.
Five feet four.
And really, really cute.
What do you look like?
When you're dealing with people in this environment,
you're just dealing with their words.
In essence, you're just dealing with pure abstracted mind.
And the impression that you receive from that
is really quite different from the one you get
when it's being projected against a face and a body.
I mean, I talk to people on the phone,
and when I meet them physically, I'm not particularly surprised.
I am always surprised by physical encounters
with people I've previously met virtually.
This thing makes it possible for me to be everywhere, in a sense.
I mean, I have communications with people
that I've never met all over the world.
I mean, we are together in this virtual place called cyberspace,
where there isn't any time and there isn't any distance.
Of course, when you're in a place where there isn't any time
and there isn't any distance, it's kind of like being nowhere at all.
You know, it's allowed me to redefine home as something virtual.
In the old days, before I lived on the net,
I had homes in places like Louisville, Kentucky, and Columbus, Ohio,
and the thought of moving and wandering
involved a tremendous amount of disruption in life.
That whole issue has just disappeared
because I treat the network as home.
So my physical location is irrelevant.
This is the control console here.
The main screen is a Macintosh, and that's where I do most of my work.
All my electronic mail and writing and things like that take place there.
Mapping software, I use a program called GeoQuery
that brings up a map of the area that I'm in.
If I was ever stuck on an island someplace,
the one most important thing I would want
would be a computer with a net connection.
I don't want to be in a non-space.
I want to be in a public, physical space
with nice people around having nice drinks.
I think I need that kind of environment far more
than the kind of disembodied, online, cyberspace community.
Well, coffee shops, they tend to draw in people
who are not that familiar with computers,
are not so technologically oriented.
I think it's really great that they position the terminals actually in cafes.
Often it's very shy people who use this.
Not entirely, it tends to be the very shy people are very, very vigorous.
People will come out of their shells a lot more
because they're not forced to represent themselves in a physical form,
and they know that people will be forgiving.
They have a few more seconds to think out what they type.
It's just not as intimidating and not as immediate of a situation
when you're really just on a tech space universe.
Is it any more unusual to meet someone through a computer system
than to go to a public place where alcohol is served
and strike up a conversation with a stranger?
Of course, people are not always what they represent themselves to be,
whether that's in a bar or on a computer bulletin board system.
So I think the same warnings apply,
but that doesn't preclude the possibility that they could become a friend
or a lover or even a spouse.
Netters tend to move in together and live in the same houses,
and they call the houses that they live in shacks.
There's Nerd Shack.
Nerd Shacks are great.
The first place I moved into in San Jose was in Nerd Shack,
and it was really a blast because there were seven people moved into this house,
and they'd all met each other over BBSs.
So every one of them had a phone line and a computer,
and whenever Domino's Pizza or something would come by to deliver us a pizza,
we had set up all of the machines in the living room.
They were all set up.
I mean, the guy thought he'd walked into, like, NORAD Center or something.
It is to meet this threat that the Air Force has been developing SAGE,
the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment System,
a network of geographical defense sectors
covering the continental United States and extending into Canada.
Now we begin to essentially think of the whole Earth
as one shell all hooked up by Internet,
a living, thinking shell that may eventually solve
what happened at the instant of creation.
What's interesting about the Internet
or the so-called information superhighway
really is the fact that it's been a broad and lawless terrain.
This was the Wild West in virtual form for a period of time.
It will still continue to be pretty wild
just because of its largeness and its intensity
and the amount of people and the amount of information flying around in there.
We're seeing, with the increasing realism of the computer networks,
instead of just words on a screen,
we're going to see images, we're going to see three-dimensional images,
the electronic world becoming more and more realistic.
We already hear a lot about the energy-intensive,
the power-intensive,
the energy-invasive,
the electronic world becoming more and more realistic.
We already have billions of people around the world
sitting in their rooms looking at little television boxes all day,
passively receiving the entertainment that's fed to them.
Now that people have an opportunity to look at a little box
and communicate through it,
I ask you, is that more alienating or is that connecting people?
More of our social interaction, of course, takes place inside of media
and inside of information space,
and many of us are just as ticklish and just as playful in that area
and just as sexual in that area as we are in our physical bodies.
The brain is already the primary erotic organ.
It just sends messages to our genitals and so forth.
So the way to eroticize the brain is to explore sexuality through media.
It's nothing new that the human race is obsessed with sex.
Therefore, when a new communication technology comes along,
there will be a form of sexual expression
that will come along very quickly and use that technology.
I'm quite sure that very soon after the invention of the printing press,
people were printing dirty books.
People have been doing this for years through pornography, of course.
Now we're going to have all kinds of other different forms
of mediated sexual intercourse,
including online, virtual reality, and so forth.
I think that everybody will become much more experimental in these areas.
The Internet was developed by the U.S. military
to be a command and control center,
and it could not be shut down.
In the event of a nuclear attack, the Internet would still be standing.
I doubt that they thought people would be talking about sex on the Internet someday,
but now we are, and nobody can shut us up.
With online communication, if you put an image up on a BBS,
within an hour there could be a thousand duplicates of that image.
And how are you going to go back and say,
okay, everybody turn in their picture of, you know, that dog sex photo?
People have said, oh, what's your hottest VR fantasy?
What's your hottest virtual reality fantasy?
I would really like to experience sexuality from a man's point of view,
from a genetic male point of view.
Historically, people have taken drugs to induce states of ecstasy.
And then some people say, hey, the computer is a way to induce that state of ecstasy
only without the high price of having some dealer around.
In terms of sex and machines, I guess my Hitachi magic wand, you know, is my favorite toy.
And beyond that, I guess maybe my power book.
But I don't really have sex with my power book.
You know, I just use it to have sex with somebody else.
Hi, I'm back.
You've got the credits now, so let's get busy.
How do you ask for a date?
What about this?
Uh, Ann?
Well, uh, how about a date?
I, uh, well, I mean...
Well, really, no thanks for it.
I'm sorry.
The most sort of enticing notion of all
is to be able to experience sex within the context of a virtual reality.
There's no rejection.
You don't have to go through the whole wooing process.
Any fantasy object from Mel Gibson to Michelle Pfeiffer becomes available to you.
Hi, baby. We know what you want.
Yeah, we're gonna make you explode.
Come on, baby. Do it close now.
Which one do you wanna try first?
Uh...
It's okay.
What are you doing?
You're supposed to be working, not fooling around on the job.
You know I'm gonna have to do something about this.
Well, what should I do?
Good idea.
It is safe sex in every way.
I mean, no AIDS, no HIV positive.
You can just sort of sit back in the chair and strap on your helmet.
Put on your helmet, strap on your jacket, and away you go.
In thinking about virtual reality and synthetic experience and synthetic pleasures,
there's a neat little thought experiment that goes into the heading of experience machine.
This would be a machine which you'd attach yourself to by planting electrodes on your brain
and you'd receive certain stimuli from this machine.
And in fact, you'd be able to receive any sort of stimuli that you desired.
You'd be able to have a very vivid experience of having sex with the person of your choice
and this would be the best sex you've ever had in your life.
That'd be absolutely guaranteed.
You'd have this wonderful sex experience.
And the question is, would you want to be hooked up to this machine
for the rest of your natural life, your entire life?
Interestingly, Oscar Wilde said there are two calamities in sex.
Interestingly, Oscar Wilde said there are two calamities in this life.
One is that you get none of the things that you've dreamed for
and the other is that you get absolutely everything that you've dreamed for.
We pleasure ourselves to death.
Maybe too much pleasure can be boring.
What makes orgasm exciting is that it's not perpetual.
People would like to believe that technology
is going to change their dull, boring sex life into this really fabulous one
and that the rules of reality don't apply in the virtual world
or the technological realm.
But I don't really view technology as a replacement for sex as we know it.
Just take something like a kiss,
which is the most fundamental little building block of a neurotic experience.
How can we possibly simulate that with technology?
And why would we want to?
Say you and I have been married for 40, 50 years.
We are still very much in love with each other.
We have a lot of experiences.
We've been spending a lot of time together,
but we can't have the great sex that we used to have.
However, if there's a data from your brain,
you can still have the intense love and affection and physical feelings
that you had before even though your sensors have broken down
because it still exists in a map in your brain.
So you and I can plug into something together.
It sounds like the orgasmatron in Barbarella,
but in actuality it takes the technology.
We can share those loving experiences that we had for years and years and years.
We may even keep records of them and be able to share them.
Experiences will be bought and sold like commodities,
like they are in the music business and the movie business now.
You will plug whatever the RX1000D interface
into the medulla oblongata of your brain,
and you will experience what I experienced in 1975
on stage with the Doobie Brothers in New Orleans.
You'll experience a downhill ski race.
People get so caught up in simulation
and those aspects of VR that they lose sight of what I think is the real point,
which is the use of VR as a place where you can achieve greater contact.
The kind of VR that I think most people are familiar with was the war in the Gulf.
I mean, here we managed to create something like reality,
but we abstracted out of it the people that we were killing.
Here we managed to create something like reality,
but we abstracted out of it the people that we were killing.
So it was like a giant video game, and all we were aware of was that we were winning
and that we were zapping the opponent.
These are not blips on the screen.
They're people.
I mean, I look for a VR where I can hug my daughter
and have her feel it, even though she might be in Wyoming
and I might be in New York.
That's what I want.
I want a VR where people who can't stand up and walk
can dance with the people they love.
Science and technology is a sword.
On one hand, if it's wielded by people who are concerned about other people,
the sword could cut against ignorance, poverty, disease, and liberate humanity.
Or if it is wielded by the Pentagon and by the aerospace industry,
then perhaps we will have weapons of incredible destructive power,
like cruise missiles that have pattern recognition abilities
that can recognize objects and drop bombs on them.
So I think it's a question that technology itself is neither evil nor saint-like.
It's a question of who wields the sword.
The key to the future is whether we will have a culture that celebrates imagination,
that celebrates play, that is adventurous and fun,
or whether we'll have a future in which we continue to seek greater and greater power.
What I do think we need is adventures that last centuries,
and that's why virtual reality is so interesting to me,
because it really will take centuries to figure out what it means to communicate with other people
by directly creating the shared world between us without any limitation.
The key to this new generation, nobody knows what to call,
is they're hippies with beepers, they're high-tech hippies.
And then of course the real powerhouse are kids between the ages of four and 14.
And they'll be teaching.
And that is more important than I think because they are going to be running the world in 20 years.
Someday there will be a generation of kids that grows up that's really good at making up what's inside a virtual world,
at making up all of the plants and buildings and things that we have no words for that aren't plants or buildings.
And when they grow up together they're going to have a new way to communicate with one another.
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In essence, our generation is writing the constitution for the future of history.
We're creating many things that cannot be undone, and yet we have no choice.
There's no such thing as standing still.
We're too in love with technology to retreat from it, so we must do it well.
And of course I can become stressed out and I worry, I wonder if we will succeed in doing it as well as we can.
But I really believe we will.
I believe that there's a certain kind of process and the tension we have with one another that makes things better and that we will come through.
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