The World in 2030

The World in 2030 243
arbitrary sounds that a community agreed to bestow with
meaning. Painting, writing, money and music are all virtual
technologies for expressing the world around us, for the
generation of pleasure, for the storing of knowledge and the
storing of value. Even the colours around us don’t exist in
their own right; it is our brains that provide the hues of
red, green and blue and all of the subtle combinations that
we perceive. Outside of our heads there are only varying
wavelengths of light.
We are so virtual that I believe our species would be better
described as homo virtualis rather than homo sapiens and it is
precisely for this evolutionary reason that I am so sure that
we will all spend much of our lives in parallel virtual worlds;
it is our natural habitat.
Writing in 2002 Jeremy Rifkin clearly saw this trend
emerging amongst the young:
Whereas previous generations defined freedom in
terms of autonomy and exclusivity – each person is a
self-contained island – the children of the Web have
grown up in a very different technological environment,
in which autonomy is thought of (if at all) as
isolation and death, and in which freedom is more
likely to be viewed as the right to be included in
multiple relationships. Their identities are far more
bound up in the networks to which they affiliate. For
them, time is virtually simultaneous, and distances
hardly matter. They are increasingly connected to
everyone and everything by way of an electronically
mediated central nervous system that spans the