Virtual shenanigans

My head is stuffed full of virtuality these days. It's another part of those different scales, sloshing and grinding against one another, depending in part on how sober I am at the moment I think about them. When sober, they grind. Sometimes that feels good, as right now.

Paul Virilio says that space is dead. All that is has contracted to a single point and everything is happening right now. I'm not sure how literally he means this, but he's a French philosopher, so anything could be true. I'm learning this again as I try to crack my mind into Gaston Bachelard's book the Poetics of Space (featured in my Librarything right now because I'm trying to read it). I note with great interest that I share this book with more users than almost any other book I've entered so far. Yet no reviews. I think I know why.

I've ventured into Second Life a few times. I've learned that less savoury and more experienced characters ('sketchy' types, as a student in my seminar class would have called them) know how to do nasty things like mess with your appearance (I have a butterfly carved into my head -- or maybe it's a cross-section of my spinal cord). I also gather that it is possible to entrap other visitors inside cages. You have no choice but to wait until a security guard volunteer comes along to rescue you. I've heard it fills them with a sense of empowerment. All of this may be deeply metaphysical or it may be, as more hardened and cynical types suspect, yet another marketing tool. Either way, I can tell you that as I entered the building where my office is this morning, I imagined the people I passed to be peering out at me from some remote physical space --- as if the fleshy parts I could see were really just the avatars for a consciousness residing elsewhere. It was easy.