If Hell is other people, then what are you doing There?

In 1963, Melvin Webber looked into the future and saw that all the cities of the earth would soon vanish forever. Telephones, television and mass transit had already rendered them obsolete. It was no longer necessary for people to live in tangled metropolitan warrens; only habit was keeping them there. Webber believed that he saw the dawning of a new age, an age of "community without propinquity".

It wasn't exactly a new idea, but Webber's theory was perfectly timed to send shivers down the spine of the academic world: it had a certain naive cynicism that was well-suited to the 1960's. In a recent essay, he recanted his earlier prediction, and tried to explain why it was so important for people to communicate directly, even in a business situation:

...information received in one's physical presence continues to be more highly valued, more credible than either printed or electronically transmitted data appears to be. And then, the informality of the conversational situation is likely to encourage exchange of more content than one might gain from a programmed transmission. Conversation after an hour in the bar or exchanged over a pillow is likely to be far richer than any exchanged over a fax line.

No argument here.

But wouldn't you know it, just when Melvin started waving the white flag, it started to look like he might have been right after all. Maybe the cities will disappear, laid to waste by virtual places like There.

Where's There? you ask. In a server somewhere, I guess; nobody's really sure. In that sense it's literally a Utopia -- a place that is nowhere. But There has thousands of citizens, its inhabitants drive dune buggies, shop for clothes, attend parties and fall in love. And the citizens spend a lot of time doing things There that they aren't interested in doing here -- an average, it is said, of more than 20 hours a week. People are spending big chunks of their lives in these places, even though those places -- even There -- aren't there at all.

But in an indication of just how real the unreal can be, There and EverQuest are being visited by both anthropologists and lawyers. It doesn't get much more real than that, does it?

If I was a smarter and more ambitious fellow than I am in the real world, I would create a new virtual community. The community would offer citizenship all the disaffected Dems from the last election. We'd drive dune buggies and fly jet packs and play in the sun. And we would have a great sailing ship that we could use to cruise across the sea and explore other lands.

It would be a nice vacation, but I wouldn't allow anyone to stay too long. Soon we'll all have to get back to work on winning back the real world.