Financial Times FT.com

Virtue and virtual reality
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: September 1 2007 03:00

The basic question about virtual reality is whether it is an exciting new world that cool people are "migrating" to or a cheesy mock-up of the world we already know. For the nearly 1,000 members of the "Second Life community" who held their third annual convention in Chicago last weekend, it is getting less virtual every day. There are a lot of three-dimensional graphic interfaces, but Second Life, created by Linden Labs in California, has been the most popular and the most studied. It has 9m members, who create "avatars", or alternative online selves. Avatars interact, form relationships and spend money. They can be equipped with a sex, age, occupation and identity of members' own choosing - although genitalia cost extra. A hard core of enthusiasts use virtual reality to explore a world without geographic (or other) borders.
But there is another way to look at virtual reality: as a vaguely onanistic hobby that serves as a retreat for those who can find no purchase in real life. In an article that appeared in the Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica this summer, Antonio Spadaro urged Catholics to learn about virtual reality and concluded that "the digital world might even be considered, in its way, 'mission territory'". The church's interest in Second Life is not surprising. Since Nicodemus visited Jesus (John 3:1-7), second lives have been the church's stock in trade. What is surprising is how much Fr Spadaro's assessment of the online landscape resembles that of businessmen. Our culture is coming to a consensus on the question of whether virtual reality is something new or a jazzed-up version of something old. It is the latter.
The great service Fr Spadaro's essay performs is to get us to think about the distinction between identities and roles, a distinction that gets blurred in much propaganda about virtual reality. Online avatars are not autonomous. They are not related to their creators the way Mr Hyde is related to Dr Jekyll. They are related to their creators the way Mr Hyde and Dr Jekyll are related to Robert Louis Stevenson.
This is how businessmen understand virtual reality. If avatars were really the free spirits that internet boosters claim they are, then trademarks would lose their value in "alternative" worlds - and they don't. The enterprises that have set up shop in Second Life are varied: IBM, Reuters, Toyota, the pop band Duran Duran, Adidas, Sweden (which has a virtual embassy) and cultural representatives of the Italian foreign ministry. This month, the Liverpool Philharmonic will broadcast (if that is the word) its opening night to 100 Second Lifers. Such innovations, true, could change our physical world. Restaurants will not disappear from your neighbourhood, but bookstores might, if Amazon.com or Waterstone's can figure out how to replicate online the experience of walking through them. But this is familiar territory. Corporate marketers consider avatars mostly as "eyes" that can be drawn in a non-shopping but fantasy-susceptible situation - as in a football stadium, or in front of a TV screen. Virtual reality is a new form of advertising. It is not a new world.
Businesses, of course, may pretend it is a new world and invest in that pretence. Companies generally play along with the culture in which they are advertising. There is no inherent relationship between baseball and Chevrolet trucks, but you will forget that if you watch enough baseball games. Clothiers and car dealers will do something similar if they want to appeal to the "herd of independent minds" (in the critic Harold Rosenberg's phrase) who roam the internet. They will not just invest in snazzy avatars and catchy jingles; they will also mouth all the hoo-hah about the power of imagination to create virtual worlds, and so on.
That hardly exhausts the corporate applications of virtual worlds. Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have used them as sites for training programmes. Rather than have a number of highly paid trainers on staff it is easier to make a presentation that can be accessed by a hundred branch offices. (One can see the appeal of such efficiencies to the priest-strapped Catholic church.) But this is not a new way of interacting. It is a more efficient system for producing and distributing videos.
Virtual reality may be overrated as an economic phenomenon, but it is an important spiritual one. While not offering anything particularly new, it may still manage to devalue the old, posing dangers to a person's inmost character - his "real" character or, if you prefer, his soul. It does this mostly through what Fr Spadaro calls "the temptation towards the cancellation of experience". More and more of life can be "rewound", undone and treated as an "experiment" that has no moral meaning.
One result is that the gap between a person's (simulated, reversible) imagination and the (serious, irreversible) world widens dangerously. Technology always tends to cause this widening and Fr Spadaro uses Marx's word for it: alienation. But when the object supposedly being manufactured is not pig iron or shoes but identity, the moral dangers are bigger. There are reportedly few children in the world of Second Life avatars and few members of the working class. The virtual world makes it clear that there are identities nobody wants. "Simulation beats reality on the grounds of its broader potential and its lower level of risk," Fr Spadaro writes. "Today people are afraid of naked reality." And because we grow addicted to this illusory control, Fr Spadaro shows, pauses taken from life exhaust more and more of life.
Virtual reality can be an exciting place, but certain real realities of the human condition are inescapable. That remains true no matter who your avatar is or how much you paid for its genitalia.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard