This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Toddler logic
A couple of years ago, my son suggested that perhaps one day, “we can all be butterflies together.”
He was four.
And I think we was right.
Even given the current state of VR tools, he and I could probably hook ourselves up with a shared experience that felt much being butterflies together. And with VR’s ever increasing experiential fidelity, his toddler-logic suggestion only becomes more and more plausible.
If you are privileged enough to at least be making ends meet in the modern world, most of your needs and many of the common comforts can be gratified almost instantaneously. I’ve already written about this a lot.
But we are also fast approaching a time when every experience is accessible to anyone with VR technology that is falling in price and rising in sophistication at the exponential rate to which we’ve grown accustomed. We can imagine a time (though we might disagree on how far away it is) when going to a virtual beach mediated by a sensory apparatus built of metal and plastic is indistinguishable from carrying your brain to an actual beach using a nervous system supported by meat and bones.
It’s been trendy for a while now to advocate for the spending of one’s resources on experiences instead of things. But what if our experiences become just as commodified as our things? What will we have to look forward to, if we can press a button to swim in a mountain lake before sunrise, or catch a fresh fish at Pike’s Place?
The supremacy of experience seems to be one more answer to the question of what it means to be human that is collapsing under the relentless march of technology.
This has, of course, happened before, and it will keep happening. All it means is that we have to keep asking the question, and we have to keep finding new answers.
But maybe that’s OK, because I’m not sure there’s anything more human than asking the question of what it means to be human.
And in an infinite array of potential answers, at least one of them is that we all get to be butterflies together.
Click at least one of these or else…
…I won’t ever haunt your dreams as a butterfly.
Let’s all be butterflies together