“If only we could, we would wander the earth and never leave home, we would enjoy triumphs without risks, we would eat from the Tree and not be punished, consort with angels, enter Heaven now and not die.”
Michael Benedikt- Cyberspace: First Steps
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| 'Congregations of the Virtual': Left, Giotto's 'Last Judgement'. Right, contestants at a Games tournament. |
Where early Christians conceived of Heaven as a realm in which their souls would be freed from the failings of the flesh, so today’s champions of cyberspace promote their realm as a place where we would be liberated from what cybernetic pioneer Marvin Minsky has derisively called “the bloody mess of organic matter.” …Like Heaven, cyberspace is a disembodied paradise for souls.
"Today’s proselytisers of cyberspace proffer their domain as an idealised realm 'above' and 'beyond' the problems of a troubled material world."
-Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
Virtual Reality pioneers have consistently hailed the ability of the internet to ossify the binary distinction of Virtual/Real, much like the Heaven/Earth paradigm of Western religion, in order to 'escape the ballast of materiality':
- Hans Moravec's 'Mind Children' hailed the promise of “downloading minds into computers so that we might transcend the flesh and live forever in the digital domain”; As the Book of Revelations promised Eternity for virtuous Christians.
- William Gibson’s 'Neuromancer' (which saw the first use of the term, Cyberspace) heralded "the bodiless exaltation of cyberspace".
- "This technology holds the promise of transcending the body." -Jaron Lanier, VR pioneer
- "We will finally find ourselves freed from the bondage to a material body." -Moravec
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| Growth of Internet 1995 - 2010 |
The 'canny invention' of Christianity was its promise of salvation to all. Cyberspace is not the product of any formal theological system, yet for many of its champions its appeal is decidedly religious. Not being an overtly religious construct is in fact a crucial point in its favour; for in this scientific age, overt expressions of traditional forms of religion make many people uncomfortable. The religious appeal, and thus the success, of Cyberspace lies then in a paradox: here we have a repackaging of 'an old idea of heaven, but in a secular, and technologically sanctioned format'.