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Contemplating Cyberspace and Beyond
Contemplating Cyberspace and Beyond
Back in the day when computing was an alien concept and offices were abuzz with whirring machines that had just learnt to convert human thought into binary code, a parallel universe seemed fantastic and far-fetched. Yet here we are, decades later, willingly inhabiting ‘cyberspace’ – a consensual hallucination shared by billions of us – for most of our waking hours. What was essentially a very human, sensory experience in the physical realm – for example, the unfurling of a flower – is increasingly experienced completely digitally, today.
The question arises from a simple fact: computers cannot directly perceive or interact with the physical realm. Unlike biological beings that evolved over millions of years to process and adapt to environmental changes, the machines cannot operate outside their mathematical orbits – They can only process information that has been translated into their native language of ones and zeros.
Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of scientific revolutions shines more light on the limitations of the digital realm as we know it today. According to him, “scientific progress isn’t a smooth accumulation of knowledge but rather a series of revolutionary shifts between different frameworks for understanding reality.” Seen in this light, digital revolution is more than technological progress – it is also a fundamental shift in how we handle our relationship with reality.
Ironically, instead of solving the computer’s shortcomings in direct physical interactions, we’ve progressively adapted human society to accommodate these limitations. In doing so, we have set a new paradigm — one where the human experience is increasingly filtered through digital concepts. This is not a technological choice but a radical upheaval in the way humans interact with their environment. Karl Popper offers another interesting dimension to our reading of the digital realm, arguing that scientific theories must make predictions that could be proven false.
This is an assumption which is becoming more and more difficult to disprove. The current architecture of cyberspace lends itself to self-fulfilling prophecies. The more we invest in digital infrastructure, the more necessary it becomes – a loop justifying its own existence.
Consider the situation we are in owing to our current implementation of computing technology: the digital tools we use to understand and analyse the problems of digital technology are themselves part of the problem.
Have we become too unbending in accepting the digital paradigm? It would be good to recall Paul Feyerabend’s words “anything goes”, which challenged the rigid methodologies that he believed inhibited scientific progress. With this in mind, we should be more willing to imagine and experiment using what may seem like radically different approaches to human-computer interaction.
The manifestations of the bug are everywhere. Social media platforms were expected to promote and elevate human connection. But, more often than not, these produce one-sided interactions that simulate intimacy while actually maintaining distance. Video conferencing – once seen as a transformative tool for remote collaboration – simply reduces the richness of human interactions into a grid of rectangular screens. Even the most advanced virtual reality systems are elaborate workarounds to make up for the computer’s inability to directly engage with the physical world.
This perspective challenges the traditional narrative of technological progress. Have we, in trying to patch over one bug — the computer’s disconnection from physical reality — created a much larger bug that we’ve now institutionalized as a feature? Rather than considering cyberspace as the inevitable result of advancing technology, should we not think of it as a temporary hack that has taken on a life of its own?
This realization has far-reaching implications. At present, we are on a path of deepening investments in this bug-turned-feature through technologies like the metaverse – It proposes to solve the problems of cyberspace by creating even more cyberspace. This puts us in danger of falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy — we continue down a suboptimal path simply because we’ve already invested so much in it.
The everyday practice is to solve problems within an established paradigm, rather than questioning the paradigm itself. However, the path ahead calls for a fundamental change in how we think about human-computer interaction. This does not imply abandoning digital technology altogether but is about reimagining it in a way that we need not create an artificial parallel universe to function.
Instead of creating increasingly complex digital constructs, we could focus on developing computers that can interact more directly with physical reality. This might take shape with quantum computing, biological computing, or completely different paradigms that are yet to be imagined. But our goal is clear – to eliminate the need for the artificial construct of cyberspace altogether.
This is easier said than done because we have built entire economies and social structures on the premise of cyberspace. Billions of dollars in market value, millions of jobs, and countless facets of modern life now depend on maintaining and expanding cyberspace. At this crucial juncture, let’s again draw from Feyerabend’s suggestions – his emphasis on theoretical pluralism. Perhaps the solution isn’t to seek a single, unified approach to human-computer interaction, but to embrace multiple modalities – some of which might look very different from our current implementation of cyberspace.
The next great innovation in computing need not be another layer of digital abstraction but the opposite — a return to direct engagement with physical reality, facilitated by computers that have evolved beyond their current limitations. Until then, let’s continue to inhabit our favourite yet ‘buggy’ digital universe, like characters in a program who have forgotten they’re living in a simulation.
