The Cuckoo's Nest

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Second life

One of the intellectual heroes of this blog is the sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick. He had a habit of clipping weird headlines from the newspapers which mirrored the skewed fantasies of his writing: one of his favourites was "Scientists say that mice cannot be made to look like human beings".

Dick is dead, but the crazy headlines go on. One of the best I ever saw was about a plan to use virtual-reality helmets to subject people suffering from various manias and psychoses to simulated experiences of their fantasies, as a form of therapy. That would be one of the best stories he never wrote. (Though you could argue he did, in a story like "I hope I shall arrive soon".)

One of the few things about our crazy modern world which Dick didn't predict was the 'Second life' phenomenon: people acting out fantasy lives via real-time networked computer animations. Today's Dickian headline concerns the legal question as to whether people who perform actions in their second life, whose images are proscribed by law (I won't spell these out or link to the article, for good reasons), are guilty of a crime.

The legal question is not my main concern: despite the surface craziness of the question, the answer actually seems fairly straightforward, at least to this layman. What really intrigues me is the story that Dick could have made out of this. Surely he would have enjoyed writing a novel in which the Police create a second life squad, who enter the world of the avatars and bust the perps online. There must be at least a dozen scripts on this idea doing the rounds of Hollywood at the moment: 'Joe Avatar, SLPD'.


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