Is Our Life Being Mapped? What Can We Do about It?
Dystopian sci-fi movies from the 80s imagined futures in which human actions were bound to the interests of immense institutions. While some depicted those institutions as bureaucratic, all-powerful states, like in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, most of them emphasized the power of corporations. A couple of examples are Blade Runner or even the anime Bubblegum Crisis (incidentally, the companies in both films are in the business of creating human-like cyborgs). All three movies were massive hits. What was humankind talking about then? What issues were being explored in the 1980s? It turns out they’re more relevant than ever in today’s world.
Some fifty years ago, these films featured people whose lives are transformed by institutions. Today, the tense relationship between nations and corporations is in the spotlight again. We are all living in a Digital Environment that is being formed, the spaces of which are being built even as you read this article. Charging ahead at a dizzying pace, the initiatives reshaping the landscape of our day-to-day interactions are truly mesmerizing.
Digital explorers
What we’re talking about here are digital coordinates for human interaction. Do nations want to restrain digital space? Are companies free to shape them? Which of the two is more trustworthy? Which type of institution can we rely on? Who ought to be making the rules? Let’s not forget that it’s our very way of life that’s being mapped out. We can’t know any of these answers for certain, but we can at least think about the direction we’d prefer things to go.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has everyone talking. The most audacious aspect of this move is that Twitter will no longer be a public company. But we can’t talk about digital coordinates without bringing up Nvidia. With unprecedented computational power, this leading GPU company claimed to have the technology to perform “ultra-high-resolution climate modeling”, involving their own new IA and the power to simulate the entire planet and countless future possibilities. These could quite literally be the digital coordinates of our planet: they’ve named it Earth 2, “the digital twin of Earth in the Omniverse.” NVidia set a significant precedent in September when they developed an Omniverse version of a German train system to aid in infrastructure planning. Here we see a partnership between nations and corporations.
We can also cite some advances in daily human interaction. Meta may be losing market value because of its Multiverse Project, but it’s one of the only companies investing in research and development of something that isn’t currently too profitable. The company has said it’s money in the process of building its universe. Still, the partnership between Zuckerberg’s company and Microsoft is a clear statement: “we want you to both work and play with us.” Our work and personal lives might be melting together in new ways.
Our uncertainty about what’s going to happen is perhaps greater now than at any other point in history. What we can say for sure is that new governance is on the rise. Do we know which direction we’d like it to go?
We don’t need answers, only questions
What will these companies need once they achieve their goals? What will nations ask of them? So far, every tech company has avoided the discussion of the digital world as a Digital Environment. They’ve chosen words associated with “universe:” Metaverse, Omniverse, and so on. The universe is limitless. Do we need boundaries? Are we freer with or without them?
We are not here to give answers but to ask challenging questions. The answer can only emerge from a debate in which all of us must participate. The Digital Environment has the tools to make that happen; all we need to do is take part.
