Virtual Virtue

The previous post shares my vision of virtual pastoring under a mystical religion. Contrary to the mythology of Western intellectual bias, this religion is intensely practical. It has to be; while anyone can absorb the teachings, the communion depends entirely on Internet technology. My books are ebooks and this blog is the sole earthly manifestation of the parish (at least for now).

And in the post before that, I made it clear that we simply cannot make the most of our shared faith without recognizing that there is first a firm necessity for engaging the Law Covenants of the Bible as the Laws of God for humanity, and that these Laws apply differently between meat space and virtual space. If the fundamental nature of all Creation is revelation of God’s character, then it stands to reason that His character comes across differently between these two parallel realms of existence.

I assert that virtual space is a thing unto itself. It is not the result of the hardware and software upon which it is manifest to us. Rather, what we can know of virtual space is revealed through the hardware and software. Virtual space is a reflection of God’s character, same as meat space is.

Just as men flagrantly reject God’s revealed will for us in meat space, we see men trying to force their own fallen will on virtual space. Perhaps you and I aren’t confused about the Internet being the network versus virtual space as the indefinable thing that we can touch through the Internet, but most Westerners don’t get that. They confuse the two. You can really mess up the Internet, but you can’t change virtual reality. What I’m getting at is the utter necessity of understanding that reality is fixed in God’s mind based on His divine character. Failure to understand it means your decisions and actions won’t pan out as you expect. This applies to both meat space and virtual space, though we would implement some elements of His Laws differently in each.

Now, the Internet has become a really huge thing that’s difficult to change because it comes so functionally close to virtual reality. You can hinder human connection to it, but actually changing the Internet is a monumental task simply because it crosses all the conceptual boundaries of government and business controls. Up to now, there have been standards of a sort, but some businesses have tried to ignore those standards for the sake of profit. Those businesses have come up with competing standards and tried to use market dominance to bypass the standards. If the actual users pay no attention to the standards, what difference do standards make? But while the users and clients might get blindly sucked into that trick, the folks who run the servers are another matter entirely. A significant portion of them tend act as if those independent standards were akin to canon law in a network religion. That their religion is closer to God’s moral character than the merchant’s worship of Mammon means geeks eventually win.

It is their independent streak of so very many system administrators that has given life to a growing geek culture among users. There are simply too many smart ways to undermine the attempt at monopoly, and the historical moment has passed. When the merchants tried to subvert the geek culture, the best they could do is rent some portion of geeks’ loyalty, and ended up giving them enough inside knowledge to eventually subvert the merchant controls. The merchants will be there as long as humans want or need more than they can produce on their own, but their dominance on the Net, at least in that shape, is currently fading. However, that is in part because the newer monster businesses are building on top of the independent standards so there’s not as much resistance.

This is where we are now, with things in a state of flux as newer businesses with some measure of geek influence are struggling to redefine the market. For each new idea, there is a golden mixture of merchant and geek and most don’t hit it right away. But what matters is that the kinds of things people regard as life essentials will tend to be at least network-aware, if not somehow embedded in the virtual realm. Should the current Internet hardware suffer a major loss, it would simply be the excuse to recreate something better with a stronger reliance on mesh networking. And it will tend to work on older hardware because the folks who build that kind of thing aren’t wealthy enough to chase the latest and greatest devices. Plan on seeing this thing outlast the civilization as we know it today.

Meanwhile, you should expect more computer technology chatter on this blog. You should expect to see it presume, if not discuss directly, what I understand to be divine moral imperatives of virtual space. The single biggest difference between meat and virtual space is that copyright is flat out evil in the latter. That is, while I can ask you to voluntarily honor the concept of attribution for my writing, I would be the last person to seek enforcement from anyone but God Himself. Once something is in a digital format, it becomes nobody’s property, in the sense of controlled access. It is totally voluntary, and it tends to work out pretty well.