Space and Virtual Worlds: Why We’re Not Mainstream

Reading a smart set of predictions (which I happen to disagree with nearly completely) for “next year in virtual worlds,” [EDIT: that should read "the future of," not "next year in'] I was struck clearly by something I’ve long known, but never seen in such a pure form. The technology-advocacy community I came from – space exploration – and the technology-advocacy community I’m active in now – virtual worlds – suffer from the same set of delusions.

For nearly a lifetime, space advocates have grappled – largely badly – with the question,”why don’t we have widespread space exploration and settlement?” Lately, virtual worlds advocates, the excellent Wagner James Au prominent among them, have been asking, “what will it take for virtual worlds to go mainstream?”

Both groups see the revolutionary potential of their field, and are largely baffled by the lack of widespread adoption. They tend to near-identical solutions, most of which are proven failures, but continue, year after year, to hold deep appeal.

Let’s look at some of those, and then in a next post, I’ll deal with the specifics of virtual worlds predictions.

1. It’s not the technology, stupid. Yes, if we had magic dust, all our problems would go away. And yes, one of those problems is that we’re trying to do hard things with early-stage tech. And that doesn’t matter one bit. We use lots of shitty tech all the time to solve problems that we think are truly important. Most of our medical tech kind of sucks and is ridiculously overpriced. We use it because it’s a good-enough solution to an important problem, our health. Cars suck: they kill 40,000 Americans every year in accidents, countless more in the effects of pollution. They’re badly designed and largely ugly. And everybody in the world wants one, because it’s a good-enough solution to personal transportation. Yes, both rocket technology and current virtual worlds kind of suck. And that’s completely irrelevant to the question of their widespread adoption. The problem is, both are solutions to problems few people think they have.
2. Dreams of global unity are folly. “If we all just pooled our resources,” “If we all had one common standard,” “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Forget about it. You’ll get your magic unicorn dust technology first. Not only won’t this happen, it’s a bad idea! Unitary standards foreclose innovation. You won’t get your magic-tech breakthrough if everyone’s locked into a standard, by definition.
3. You’re not in today’s market. You’re in tomorrow’s market. I saw this one around the turn of the century, when people were pitching “…in SPACE!” ideas. Reality TV in SPACE! Driving games in SPACE! Write your name on something IN SPACE! Virtual worlds pundits are all over this trope now: No downloads! Web-based! Augmented reality!  Nope. You’ve got a revolutionary, transformative, deeply radical product. You know that: it’s the source of your passion for the field. People are not so stupid as to suddenly start buying your wolf because you zipped it into a sheep suit. That radicalism is a problem, but it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Richard Branson knows it. Philip Rosedale once knew it. Raph Koster knows it. Suck it up and face it head on.
4. Which leads to the bottom line, for both space and virtual worlds. You can’t get there from here. There are two ways forward.
   1. One is grinding, incremental progress from a tiny niche up to a small one. The entrepreneurial space companies have spent a decade in Mojave, New Mexico, West Texas, doing the hard, ugly work of incremental progress. Same with the virtual worlds teams whose wreckages litter the digital roadside. It needs doing, the slow, tiny steps forward, the people evangelized in ones and tens, the faithful revitalized and hit up for funds for one more try.
   2. The other way forward is the discontinuity. The storming of the Winter Palace that catches Lenin in Zurich, predicting the revolution is decades away. The 9/11 response that showed that the state wasn’t going to wither away in favor of the network anytime soon. The Sixties. The PC revolution. If you’re sitting in meetings discussing standards and interoperability and infinitesimal progress, you will miss these moments. On the other hand, by definition, you can’t plan for the discontinuity (see magic unicorn technology, above). You just need to be able to toss aside your incrementalism and small thinking when the opportunity presents itself.

Of course, all this is just a gloss on the question we all have: Why haven’t we seen mass adoption with space exploration or virtual worlds?

I’ve been thinking hard about this question since 1996. I’ve read 500+ books and countless articles on everything from software engineering to economic history to postmodernist critiques of formal education. I blogged about it for years, have given talks, have asked and engaged hundreds of people on the issue.

My very best insight?

Beats the fuck out of me.

Push at all, and you end up circling the drain of sociotechnical determinism – which is just a scholarly way of saying “Just because! Shut up, momma’s busy!” Or you drill down into micro-level policy decisions, investment choices, and lose the forest for the trees.

But I tell you this: just because I don’t understand why, does’t mean it ain’t so. Barring a discontinuity- magic unicorn technology or the storming of the Winter Palace – neither alien worlds nor virtual worlds will become a matter of mass interest, large scale funding and mainstream cultural activity. It ain’t gonna happen: you can’t get there from here.

Back to toiling in the desert, and making individual converts on streetcorners. Or, just say screw it, and enjoy your life. Either one’s better than chasing the pie-in-the-sky of the big mainstream breakout.