In case anyone's curious about the post I mentioned in class

It's from Border House Blog (a site I love love love) and a relevant section is excerpted here.

It was because the game offered me the opportunity to stand in the shoes of a
woman character I had created, a thoughtful, strong woman modeled after my
newfound role models and representing a potential vision of myself. The
scholarly Night Elven Priestess who became my main character in WoW was how I explored womanhood, became a woman, and how I learned to take pride in being a woman. She taught me how to stand up for myself, how to fight back, and
eventually how to take control of my life.

--Quinnae, "Clicks on a Keyboard: Dungeons, Dragons, and Trans-Feminism"

Afraid of extending reality

I’m still reading the last quarter of Snow Crash, but I’m finding myself curious about a minor aspect of the novel: what’s wrong with being a gargoyle? Hiro defines gargoyles (p123-4) with slight disgust: “Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies… They serve as human surveillance devices… Nothing looks stupider these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society…. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.” So, aside from the obvious alignment to a “class” of “geeks” who in the past may have accessorized with fanny packs and pocket protectors and toted around graphing calculators, etc., I want to know what’s so “embarrassing” about a gargoyle. It seems that gargoyles are more than embarrassing; they’re ostracized and othered. For example, Y.T. notices very quickly that Hiro has turned into a gargoyle, and Hiro becomes very defensive, claiming that his device is the smallest belt pack machine ever made, which I guess makes him less obviously marked as a gargoyle (p.265).

And I wondered why this even caught my attention - I think it’s because this struck me as an inevitable part of Snow Crash’s future: if there’s a “Real World” and a “Metaverse,” and people are starting to collapse those two worlds by becoming gargoyles, it’s only a matter of time before that becomes the norm. Perhaps gargoyles are stigmatized in Snow Crash because, as Hiro mentions early in the novel, it’s possible to be very wealthy in one world and inconsequential in the other (although, of course, he also explains that only about 1% of people have enough funds to access the Metaverse regularly, so that’s already skewing the dichotomy of “superstar in the Metaverse/ pizza delivery boy in the Real Word”). If everyone became gargoyles, I bet this disparity between the Real World identity and the Metaverse would collapse (or at least become much more narrow), and the potentiality of creating a “new” virtual identity of “higher value” would also be less promising. So gargoyles are ostracized not because they’re nerdy, but they’re a threat to the higher ups in both the Real World and the Metaverse. (I could definitely be wrong here; I’m just speculating.)

The gargoyles, as well as Stephenson’s description of the Metaverse in general, both strongly remind me of Existenz and “A Rape in Cyberspace.” With gargoyles come the difficulties of discerning virtual reality from reality; virtual reality really just becomes an expansion pack of real life (for those who can afford it and feel pressured to buy into it). The virtual reality of Existenz is ultimately so convincing that it’s difficult to know where the game ends and where “real life” and “true agency” begin - and I’m not convinced that it even matters at that point. (And at one point in the movie, Jude Law agrees with me; he doesn’t want to kill people because it’s impossible to tell whether they’re in real time or the game.) I’m also afraid to ever play The Sims again. Similarly, “A Rape in Cyberspace” collapses “virtual reality” and “reality,” expanding the scope of where/how rape can occur. And becoming a gargoyle resists the separation of these terms.

On a related note - I just saw this on a blog today.
I’m not going to weigh in on the issue here, but it’s definitely an example of how “the real world” is expanding in ways that make Stephenson’s 1991 Metaverse seem almost prophetic: let’s think of online dating sites like Match.com as places where people are creating avatars that may or may not accurately reflect who they are in “real life.” If a person is a registered sex offender in real life, should that record follow them into the Metaverse? How about in Carole Markin’s case, where I’d argue that the avatar extended into reality, and she (like many other people on dating sites) decided to collapse the worlds, and was sexually assaulted?

Speed is God

In a book that starts with the most epic pizza delivery ever, speed is critical. The energy of the opening scene is finger-bitingly frenetic, as the time ticks down and Hiro’s car zooms to its final resting place in a Burbclave swimming pool. Everything rockets along, and some things move too quickly for their motion to even register. This reminded me of the limited flicker-fusion rate (the speed with which our eyes perceive) of the human eye, which makes what happens very quickly either very vague or totally invisible. To us, hummingbirds’ wings are just an indistinct blur and fluorescent lights do not drive us all insane because we cannot see them flickering. With a higher flicker-fusion threshold, we would actually see each distinct beat of the hummingbird’s wings.

For all the technology zooming around in Snow Crash, we are still limited by the range of our senses. For example, besides Hiro and Y.T., no one has ever seen a Rat Thing because they move too fast (94). A few pages later, Y.T. is perplexed by the appearance of a Mafia Town Car: “How do they do it? You see these Town Cars everywhere, but you never see them move, never see them get anyplace. She’s not even sure they have engines in them” (100). The omnipresent yet insidious Mafia manages to elude perception with ease. Even with all of Lagos’ technological enhancements—he can see visual light, infrared, radar, and ultrasound simultaneously—he still ends up getting “slit open like a salmon” (138).

In addition to the ability of the senses to gather information, speed is also crucial in transferring information digitally and connecting to the Metaverse. Many of us can remember the infuriatingly slow dial-up internet connections of days of yore and even today, e-mailing large attachments can be a time-consuming process. In Snow Crash, a fiberoptic cable enables a transfer of information swift enough to create a detailed, high-resolution experience of the Metaverse. The richness and complexity of the digital world in Snow Crash offers a striking contrast to the minimalism and comparatively low-fi vibe of LamdaMOO in “A Rape in Cyberspace.” The speed with which events unfold in LamdaMOO are on par with our flicker-fusion rates, while Snow Crash flies by at an almost supersonic speed, like a hummingbird on steroids.

The virtual reality of LamdaMOO is, as far as I can tell from the article, solely text-based—no flashy graphics or life-like avatars yet. This simplicity permits a great deal of freedom among the users. In the colorful Metaverse of Snow Crash, where the most carefully crafted avatars look just like real people, it is far more difficult to envision the living human being behind the overwhelmingly realistic avatar. But in LamdaMOO, nothing is “real” in the sense that it could be mistaken for real life. It’s just words on a screen. For example, the fact that evangeline describes her room as “infinite in expanse and fluid in form” does not stop the writer of the article from feeling that her room is “claustrophobic” instead, “dank and overheated by virtual bodies, pressing against your skin” (8). Given a text, we are all free to envision it however we wish. But as technology advances, the transfer of information becomes ever swifter and we gain greater and greater control over how our digital selves are presented, leaving less to the imagination. I know nothing about what virtual reality or avatars look like today, but based on animation in movies and commercials for video games, the digital can be incredibly real. Our senses are all too fallible, and can easily be seduced by technology into, if not mistaking the virtual for the real, than into preferring digital perfection to real imperfection.