Metaphor: Nature in Cyberspace

Regular readers of this blog will know that metaphor is a recurring theme in the way that I view the world, and particularly the online communities that we shape and inhabit. I tend to take a fairly hard-edged cyberpunk position with respect to the potentiality of the web, which ties in with my views of urban futurism and social reformation. I’m also an admirer of Bruce Sterling, and he posted a very interesting link to an item on Windows Vista: dreaming nature in cyberspace.

The crux of the article by Sue Thomas is that Microsoft would have us believe that using Vista is somehow an organic experience, an online immersion grounded in Romantic notions of an idealised English countryside of yesteryear. The reality is that Vista is just an OS, and a particularly inflexible one to boot, where attempts to subvert, extend, or change, the ‘natural order of things’ are penalised, rather than rewarded. Be that as it may, the interesting thing here is the apparent dichotomy of a rural/organic metaphor versus an urban/artifical one.

This dichotomy is false. As Sue Thomas says, the words we use to frame our digital experience are littered with references to the organisms and morphology of the natural world:

Consider the traditional organisation of data into fields, strings, webs, streams, rivers, trails, paths, torrents, islands, and even walled gardens; and then there are the flora – apples, apricots, trees, roots, and branches; and the fauna – spiders, viruses, worms, pythons, lynxes, gophers, not to mention the ubiquitous bug and mouse.

We draw metaphors from the natural world because we ourselves are products of it, despite our urban heritage. We can identify with the plants and animals because we, at heart, are part of the same ecosystem. The next 50 years is likely to challenge that pre-internet paradigm in ways we cannot yet comprehend. Already, the first internet-native generation is changing the way we view the idea of ‘environment’, and of our interaction with it. Open source software and hardware, Second Life, social networking, semantic tagging: hacking the natural world for beneficial evolution.

Everyone should read Jeff Noon. He is best known for his novel Vurt, wherein the hook of his protagonists’ experiences is entry into another world, a true Gibsonian cyberspace, by means of ‘feathers’ inserted into the mouth. His second novel, Pollen, takes this idea still further, and it is Pollen that runs with the idea of a hybrid environment – natural and virtual – through use of extended metaphors drawn from the world of plants. I have no idea if Noon ever read Deleuze and Guattari, but their post-Jungian theory of rhizomes is directly relevant to Noon’s own vision of an online existence where mutation, selection, aggregation and division are real processes that shape our experience. And, like the natural world, not everything is benign.

It’s not quite the extremist position of Deathworld, but there are things in there that bite, that make you bleed, that you have to kill to survive. It’s also a beautiful, confusing vision, where serpentine tendrils wrap themselves around you, drawing you into claustrophobic thickets of mythic archetype. It is dense and powerful, headily scented, verdant, lush, a jungle. Bruce Sterling likes to use the metaphor of the miasmic swamp to describe the experimental meme-pool in which we are all evolving. Both Noon and Sterling would agree that the metaphor of the natural world is a powerful, seductive one, in which we are all complicit. We want the web to be like those natural powerhouses of invention, the jungle, the primordial marsh.

The language we use to describe the tools of our online environment directly reflect – at the moment, anyway – this deep-seated identification with the natural world. Radically, William Gibson tried to move away from these pre-industrial tropes, but they persist, and are likely to do so for some time yet. It is hard to imagine how else we would describe our new world, except in terms of the old one. Bruce Sterling has spoken often about neologism, and how most new words die on the vine, only to be replaced by something that actually fits, that really works for people, that makes sense.

One thing’s for sure: Vista is not the future, and neither is Microsoft. Nor is the Tyrell Corporation Google. Something else will happen that will totally and irrevocably alter our relationship with nature. When that happens, our language will change again, and it will reflect a new paradigm, where we dwell in unforeseen ways in a digital world of our own making.