dead and gone.
Picture it, George instructs, in a noisy East Village bar, over pints at a dark booth with a sticky table. Their own world. On the Internet.
Fred and Sam try. It’s the summer of 1997.
“You mean, like, with graphics?” Sam says.
Not just a world, a utopia, any number of them, George is saying. He makes a magician’s hand-sweep over the beers, a faded friendship bracelet sliding on his forearm. He’s just in from California, radiates sun and sea spray, his skin burnished, his hair a shade lighter than Fred’s, even a bit wavy. Players could strike out on their own or form larger groups, he’s saying, and everything in one’s borders would be customizable—flora and fauna, tech levels, forms of government, the very laws of physics. Sam rubs his smudged pint glass with a Handi Wipe. Fred turns his cigarette on the ashtray rim, sharpening the ember.
A purer existence, George goes on. The avatars wouldn’t get hungry or thirsty, wouldn’t freeze or get heatstroke, couldn’t be injured or killed. Postmaterial life, he proclaims with a smile. George himself could exemplify “Postmaterial life” right now, Fred thinks, with his yoga, macrobiotic food, loose linen shirt, crazy-bright future. George sits back in the wooden booth, hands behind his head, lounging as if on some beach chair, oblivious to the smoke, the college mob, the Jersey girls at the bar eyeing him—not Fred, not even glancing back and forth between them, Fred observes, torn in the usual way between envy and amazed pride. Weird how Fred’s always been the slacker, at least from the world’s point of view, but somehow George has always been the freer one. Chasing his goals with the grace and absolute devotion of a dog leaping at Frisbees. Whereas Fred, wanting to get real but never quite figuring out what real is, has been so leery of every rainbow he can barely follow them a step. From high school, he floundered from part-time programming gigs to community college stints, interspersed with desperate, footloose jaunts across the country. For the last three years, thanks more to the rising tide of dot-commism than his résumé, he’s been treading water in a low-level position overseeing tweaks to an algorithm designed to predict profitable tech stocks—a dull job, and he suspects the product is working so far only because the NASDAQ is only going up. Sam is in roughly the same occupational hamster wheel as Fred is, slogging away as a system administrator for a stripling city government website; he may be a harder worker than Fred is, but he’s intense and exudes stress and hasn’t risen far.
As for George, after rocketing out of college near the top of his class, he’s done well for himself out West, if maybe not quite so well as the family expected. He was highly paid for his programming and design work at three different game companies, but didn’t stay at any of them long enough to get vested, never finding a project he felt was worthwhile. Anyway, the era is throwing off twentysomething billionaires like sparks from a forge; it’s too much for George to sit at a desk working on someone else’s dream. Because here, finally, is his own. And just think how evolutionary it could be, he’s saying, how the avatars’ immaterial nature could rub off on players over time, temper their baser desires, coax their mindsets up the pyramid steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from physiological and safety needs all the way up to beauty, truth, self-actualization.
As if pulled by the same string, Sam lifts his glass to his lips as Fred lifts his cigarette. To be sure, George’s vision is starry-eyed. Yet in the nineties, at least for those residing in the valleys and alleys of silicon under the expanding bubble of the boom, it isn’t all that hard to imagine that even the real world is headed this way, that science and peace and the increase of wealth and trade are all ineluctably leading humanity to a not-too-distant future in
Picture it, George instructs, in a noisy East Village bar, over pints at a dark booth with a sticky table. Their own world. On the Internet.
Fred and Sam try. It’s the summer of 1997.
“You mean, like, with graphics?” Sam says.
Not just a world, a utopia, any number of them, George is saying. He makes a magician’s hand-sweep over the beers, a faded friendship bracelet sliding on his forearm. He’s just in from California, radiates sun and sea spray, his skin burnished, his hair a shade lighter than Fred’s, even a bit wavy. Players could strike out on their own or form larger groups, he’s saying, and everything in one’s borders would be customizable—flora and fauna, tech levels, forms of government, the very laws of physics. Sam rubs his smudged pint glass with a Handi Wipe. Fred turns his cigarette on the ashtray rim, sharpening the ember.
A purer existence, George goes on. The avatars wouldn’t get hungry or thirsty, wouldn’t freeze or get heatstroke, couldn’t be injured or killed. Postmaterial life, he proclaims with a smile. George himself could exemplify “Postmaterial life” right now, Fred thinks, with his yoga, macrobiotic food, loose linen shirt, crazy-bright future. George sits back in the wooden booth, hands behind his head, lounging as if on some beach chair, oblivious to the smoke, the college mob, the Jersey girls at the bar eyeing him—not Fred, not even glancing back and forth between them, Fred observes, torn in the usual way between envy and amazed pride. Weird how Fred’s always been the slacker, at least from the world’s point of view, but somehow George has always been the freer one. Chasing his goals with the grace and absolute devotion of a dog leaping at Frisbees. Whereas Fred, wanting to get real but never quite figuring out what real is, has been so leery of every rainbow he can barely follow them a step. From high school, he floundered from part-time programming gigs to community college stints, interspersed with desperate, footloose jaunts across the country. For the last three years, thanks more to the rising tide of dot-commism than his résumé, he’s been treading water in a low-level position overseeing tweaks to an algorithm designed to predict profitable tech stocks—a dull job, and he suspects the product is working so far only because the NASDAQ is only going up. Sam is in roughly the same occupational hamster wheel as Fred is, slogging away as a system administrator for a stripling city government website; he may be a harder worker than Fred is, but he’s intense and exudes stress and hasn’t risen far.
As for George, after rocketing out of college near the top of his class, he’s done well for himself out West, if maybe not quite so well as the family expected. He was highly paid for his programming and design work at three different game companies, but didn’t stay at any of them long enough to get vested, never finding a project he felt was worthwhile. Anyway, the era is throwing off twentysomething billionaires like sparks from a forge; it’s too much for George to sit at a desk working on someone else’s dream. Because here, finally, is his own. And just think how evolutionary it could be, he’s saying, how the avatars’ immaterial nature could rub off on players over time, temper their baser desires, coax their mindsets up the pyramid steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from physiological and safety needs all the way up to beauty, truth, self-actualization.
As if pulled by the same string, Sam lifts his glass to his lips as Fred lifts his cigarette. To be sure, George’s vision is starry-eyed. Yet in the nineties, at least for those residing in the valleys and alleys of silicon under the expanding bubble of the boom, it isn’t all that hard to imagine that even the real world is headed this way, that science and peace and the increase of wealth and trade are all ineluctably leading humanity to a not-too-distant future in
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