Can Sci Fi Shape the Interface of Our Afterlives?
Science fiction and emerging media evolve in tandem, with authors and filmmakers positing new communication modes for decades before innovators bring them to life. Author Neal Stephenson has long worked on both sides of this equation — and his books have inspired a generation of engineers and digital storytellers. Currently the chief futurist at Magic Leap, he recently released his latest novel: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.
The narrative follows Dodge — the protagonist of Stephenson’s previous novel Reamde — from his death as the head of a globe-spanning gaming empire into his rebirth as the architect of a byzantine simulated “Bitworld” spawned from his digitized brain. Along the way it takes readers through a United States, riven by weaponized filter bubbles, where only the rich can afford real-time editors to interpret and temper reality. As the novel goes on, the society grows increasingly obsessed with preparing for the next life in favor of living this one.
At key moments, characters do encounter the real world directly — a red autumn leaf, an imperfect apple, a moldy rubber daisy anchored to a shower floor. But for the most part, their experiences are mediated through an augmented reality interface. Or — as in the case of Dodge and his nemesis billionaire Elmo Shephard — their simulated consciousnesses shape an interface through which others experience one possible version of the afterlife.
Crammed with ideas, the novel bogs down as the characters in Bitworld multiply and begin to fight for dominance in a myth-inspired fantasy epic. At 883 pages, I had some trouble slogging through Fall , but persevered because Caitlin Burns had posted a request for people to discuss the novel. Burns has written previously for Immerse about her experience as a transmedia producer and her efforts to build a marketplace for XR narratives, and I knew she’d have some fascinating insights. So, in this issue, I’m sharing our conversation about it, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with what you’re doing now
I’m currently strategy director at Future Colossal, an experiential innovation lab based here in New York City. We do everything from themed entertainment installations for amusement parks globally, all the way through to bespoke laser mazes for escape rooms and interactive pieces for big corporate events. We come out of the fine arts space.
But my personal background is as a transmedia producer for massive franchises. And part of that was building really big storyworlds so that they’d work across platforms. If you were doing something novel and didn’t know how to make it, I would be the one to put that team together, organize the budgets, make it sustainable, and bring it to life.
One of the questions I get asked most often by people who are familiar with my work across multiple platforms is: What do you like most?
When I go home, I read books. Books are my favorite platform. They have the most sort of imaginative densities. You’d get so many big ideas — the only limitation is the imagination of the author and the reader of how they come to life.
I’ve been a bookworm my whole life and one of my very favorite science fiction authors is Neal Stephenson. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is an interesting coda on a really big storyworld he’s been building for ages.
I’ve been reading and writing about science fiction and emerging technology since the early nineties when I did my master’s thesis on cyberpunk literature and the role of women in the emerging public sphere. And now, I work in that emerging public sphere to help build it and critique it. So there’s been this back-and-forth in my life between the fictional perceptions of what all this might mean and be and what we’re having to now grapple with as civilization.
Absolutely. I’m thrilled to geek out on cyberpunk with you because I think its role is important for a lot of the technologies that I’m utilizing now. I was first introduced to these through literature — a fair enough amount actually through Neal Stephenson. But other sci-fi authors like Charles Stross are also able to communicate about hard science and tech in ways that are based on the human experience. The stories are about characters using technology — and it becomes a lot more comprehensible to the reader because you’re seeing it in practice rather than hearing about it in a more engineering or programming-centered display of information.
I’m always coming at new interfaces, new technologies, new experiences from the perspective of the human audience member. This is both because selfishly I want to enjoy whatever I’m engaging with, but also because I consider that throughline the single greatest indicator of a successful program, whether it’s artistic or commercial.
When we’re seeing these characters either living amidst a speculative fiction cyberpunk environment or we’re thinking about them in our own practice, and it helps to build those narratives: How are they going to use it? What are their reactions going to be like? How’s it going to react to their reactions? But even more critically: Why does it exist?
Right. So, like you said, there’s this entire story world that this book is a part of…
Stephenson is a very interesting author to me because he does have this sort of “Stephenson world” that goes as far back as the Isaac Newton era, and as far forward as gaming out a few centuries into our future. It follows family lines rather than individual characterization. You see these institutions, these families, these dynasties existing throughout his books as well as characters who echo different themes.
I think as a caveat to readers who are approaching Stephenson’ work — a lot of the reviews don’t consider this book very good. I enjoyed it, but I also viewed this like the last chronological episode in a really long book series.
So, I would recommend for people who are considering Stephenson: Reamde is required reading volume one, Fall is volume two. But I would say start with the Baroque Cycle, then work your way through the, Cryptonomicon, Reamde, and Fall. And think of it as being part of this bigger story world that’s taken place in novelization but looking at a much more historical, chronological perspective of industrial development, of technology development — because they’re all intertwined. And there are characters and throughlines across history that you’ll see echoed in that work.
On a personal level, my favorite stories are ones where legitimately intelligent people are coming up against legitimately difficult challenges and have to figure it out. When we talk about technology, it is a bit magical in the way that we use it to solve problems. But I love when someone in a book or a show or a film is smart and has to deal with a very challenging problem.
There are definitely characters that are more or less swashbuckling. But it’s an interesting balance between the more cerebral, and dare I say it, nerdy characters who are much more on the intellectual plane of development and the real active, real sort of chaotic utilizers of technology who are on the opposite end of that spectrum. And you find those throughout his books.
Let’s hone in on Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. Is the book really about what it means to build a world that has consequences for other people?
Yeah, I mean that’s one of the biggies. It also deals a lot with issues of mortality. I mean, all of his works have a bit of autobiography, but this one feels personal and intimate in a very deep way. That, I think, is the author grappling with these existential questions of life: what happens after our deaths and keying into technologies that enable longevity — cryogenics, uploading brains and uploading your neurology — but also virtual worlds.
What does it mean to cohabitate with artificial intelligence? When does artificial intelligence become just another kind of intelligence. Are these intelligences more or less real than we are? Because that’s a big sort of theme throughout. When we are completely consumed by high technology and are able to customize our universe around ourselves, how real is our reality and does it matter?
You see this echoed throughout the different sorts of cultures that are examined in the book. There’s this persistent, real-world human culture of people who are working through family dynamics and real personal grief. And also corporate intrigue and diplomacy because that becomes a really big question. There are these international conglomerates and philanthropic institutions versus ancient fiefdoms in Europe. And then, there’s what’s actually going on with the technologies themselves inside a world where — spoiler alert — people are uploading their brain scans and taking on “lives” as “artificial intelligences.”
There’s a whole expansive fantasy world that emerges. And in that world, those characters can create their afterlife — but then they don’t really have a memory of having a life before. So it’s sort of this wonderful questioning and merging of some of the ideas of massively multiplayer online (MMO) storyworlds that he examined in Reamde. The characters were MMO creators who pioneered the construction of this new AI afterlife. All of it is dealing with big questions of free will versus determinism, with agency and independence versus the needs of having a community — individual responsibility and control versus network skill sets and how teams can work together, and how you give up personal autonomy to work together with teams.
Really interesting stuff and often viewed through the lens of family. People feel more comfortable giving major root control to family members versus to institutions or people that they don’t have the same level of connection with.
Another interesting throughline is about problems with privacy and surveillance.
There’s a specific character in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell who is sort of an avatar for the idea that all clothing and all technology are prosthetics — and that everything about how we aesthetically represent ourselves or tools that we use on or with our body are part of this technological footprint, like fingerprints.
If you’re scared of facial recognition, just wait until you learn about gait recognition or biometric recognition from the patterns of your typing — because these are all creating this physical prosthetic digital fingerprint. And in this book all of that is how the identity of real-world humans get translated into the artificial world.
So, people who have a much more expansive view of that sort of personal prosthetic and aesthetic environment have a very different opportunity and a very different sort of openness with the strangeness of their virtual worlds and their afterlife than people who are more conservative and contained in how they engage with those devices. You also see this becoming a cultural nuance in the real world in the book.
It’s definitely one of those things where it makes you think about how they’re using technology, including clothing and jewelry, in the real world. Because some of the things that Stephenson’s talking about are how different rural cultures self-customize as groups to have very specific information identities — bubbles that become technologically enhanced. So you end up with a closed information system that’s based on a totally different cultural paradigm than someone that might be driving past on the highway. You see different things, you’re utilizing different technologies. Your range of movement in the real geographic world is similarly constrained.
But we have the ability to create these entirely technologically separate lives for ourselves in the real world now. And that capability is only going to expand. I think novels give us a great opportunity to explore these ideas.
So, think about how you’re approaching the world in this different way. What is your technology use? How do you express yourself on a day-to-day level and how does that fit into these cultural subgroups?
This is even before we talk about things like cybernetics and implantation. I fully believe that the vast majority of people are not going to be aiming at getting a chip in their hand anytime soon, but they’ll be no less recognizable in the next five to ten years because gait typing, tracking, eye movement, and emotional AI will be creating an image of you that’s going to be utilized not just by the Amazons and Googles of the world, but by everyone.
Such data is already used to try and anticipate your behavior on platforms like Google. They’re developing this sort of holistic fingerprint for you. We can talk about individual communities or municipalities banning facial recognition, but that’s nothing compared to the rest of the biometric data that’s captured
This is one of the big concerns of the first half of the novel: What’s happened to personal privacy. What can people do to protect themselves? And then how does that bubble creation affect reality itself? There’s this insane storyline where basically it’s understood by a large part of the population that Moab has been decimated.
Yeah, someone simulates a massive international disaster by wiping the digital footprint of an entire city in Utah off the map. One set of people believe fully that this happened and their whole information paradigm is built around that. And the rest of people believe it didn’t. It’s a major schism in the intellectual world, and in the digital communication world because there are so many customizable algorithmic methods to deliver exactly what you believe to yourself or what the rest of the community of interest believes you should be believing. It just becomes these real whirlpools where you’re not going to necessarily be able to escape that momentum unless you have real assistance.
Stephenson also posits this entire layer of editorial staff of people who are monitoring individual feeds to moderate information per your preference. Obviously, the very wealthy people have very high-end editors filtering their information feed. But people who have less access to resources are getting a lot more scurrilous stuff.
It’s like the junk food of the information world. If you have the means to buy organic and go to farmer’s markets, you would do the same with your information diet. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of what can be provided as a tool that’s accessible.
Fall is very much a story about people dying off in the real world. Once you’re in that afterlife, you don’t really care what goes on in the real world. And I think that resonates pretty deeply with a lot of the challenges that people face in the real world now. Outside of the novel, the reality is that a lot of people who had been leading these types of technological innovation and discussions about regulation, legislation, and implementation are in a cohort of people who are not going to be around to see their results.
In the book, once people have passed into the afterlife in the real world by dying in their physical bodies, there’s a whole different storyworld of conflict and the way that these ideologies play out — but the people left in the real world still have to deal with that mess. And you see a lot of the wider population really disconnecting from the problems of the real world in favor of having everything buttoned up for their afterlife, which is potentially limitless in this digital space. It becomes increasingly problematic for the people who are trying to implement legislative control.
It’s a very sad story of grief. While I see a great level of optimism for the story, I also find it to be extremely dark. It’s not the most depressing Neal Stephenson book. That goes to Seveneves. But I also know that Stephenson himself doesn’t believe that humanity is going to be able to expand beyond the solar system or even to the near planetoids.
If you read his storylines, he really thinks that the digital innovation space is going to take over the possibility for that with humanity. So: are we coming up against our limitations as a species and are the technologies we’re pursuing? Or, maybe even more critically, is what a very small minority of very high-resource individuals are pursuing limiting our potential for exploration and innovation as a wider species?
I think the question of what’s to be done about that, it’s kind of left to the audience. We explore these speculative ways that we could trap ourselves forever in digital spaces or on earth alone. But realistically we don’t have to follow that path if we think about it and act on it. But it takes the thinking and work of a lot more people to be able to make that future come to life for any of us.
Yeah, it was interesting reading the book because there were so many meta-layers. For example, there’s a layer about gamers creating the worlds that millions of people now inhabit on a regular basis, and the power that they have. There’s an aesthetic argument: What kind of world do we want to be inhabiting and whose taste gets to rule?
Yeah. This is a core theme that I see throughout Stephenson’s work: Who gets root control of these massive technologies? In the Baroque Cycle, it’s at the early age of automation and of computing. So the people in control are the people who can have the capability to make it. But a lot of those stories are about monarchy and aristocracy-based control versus these emerging democratic ideals. And when we look at his more modern-era books — Cryptonomicon, Reamde and Fall — we see a lot more power consolidation.
I think this is a really important warning and insight. The Alphabets, the Bezoses, these very high-powered, high-wealth individuals already have control of these technologies. Their decisions are the ones guiding their development. A Google or a Facebook have higher GDPs than many countries, and their ability to project power into the world is at least as substantial as many national institutions.
As somebody who herself creates interfaces and designs worlds, what are some of the technological ideas in this book that you think might come out into reality?
I love things that exist in my physical world a lot more than I personally love going inside a simulation space. So I think I was a lot more interested in how people were approaching the ideas of how they would prepare themselves to enter into this digital afterlife space — how they were trying to adapt to express themselves in a way that would map onto their own neurology.
I read a fairly interesting article by Douglas Rushkoff earlier this week about the psychological impact of virtual reality. It’s approved by the FDA as a breakthrough therapy for PTSD. People are using it to develop habits and reduce intimidation to psychological issues. And corporations are using simulation therapy to train people and habituate them to certain responses and corporate environments.
We’re really looking at not only training of physical habits, but developing our own neurology in ways that would map if you were to scan it afterwards. All the time, we are using art as a model to create our own physical body, whether that’s the neurology of our brain, the pathways that we instinctually, habitually follow to stimuluses.
So I’m really, really fascinated by the impact of what experiences we choose on our personalities, and the way we live our lives. That was my favorite part of this book: Who were you and how did that map afterwards?
I think that’s one of the questions that I always ask from a creative perspective, whether I’m talking about a feature film or a holographic experience that people are going to be able to walk around: Where are they coming from? What is this giving them?
I’m not going to suggest that everything has to have an earthshaking consequence. But everything that you’re choosing is teaching you something on some level, whether that’s a comedy that’s allowing you to relax, or giving you a new quote to share with your friends and everyone giggles.
Those are tools that are helping you develop your personality and your social cues. When we talk about technological interfaces, these are tools that we can use to shortcut to emotional reactions, so that we can use this toolkit as a bigger canvas to work through those responses with our audiences — whether you’re making a purpose-oriented documentary or a philanthropic event or a Transformers movie.
People in academia are more accustomed to thinking through learning objectives and the physical and intellectual framework to get someone there. That’s the same kind of process we have to think about and design in our work, whether it is comedic novelty or serious psychological drama.
If we’re not examining what we’re doing, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist for our audiences. At the end of the day that’s sort of the thing that we can look back on around work that we remember and say, “Oh, that really made me think about this.”
When we’re talking about persistent story worlds that we can experience as gamers, we’re not just looking at how we create these moments that can impact people. But the scope and breadth of all of those moments combined into a realistic world is maybe the biggest artistic expression of all of this. And whether one person gets to control that and define all of those moments for people.
There’s one character in Fall that is highly controlled, highly organized — “Everything is my vision for this world” — versus another character, a creator who has control but shares a lot more of it. Both of these are fairly patriarchal models of creative hierarchies where there’s one male creator at the center of this environment. They’re both the sort of first pioneer patriarchal figures. And they’re the ones who define this next space. If we look at who has root control of a lot of these technologies, it’s not inaccurate to suggest that these patriarchal structures, whether they’re networked or purely hierarchical, are being reflected in that.
Right. I think that was one of the things that made reading this uncomfortable for me. I mean, I’ve been reading Stephenson for 25 years, and so it’s nice to revisit a voice and a frame that you have been engaging with over the course of your lifetime. But a while back, I made a decision after majoring in English and reading all the so-called classics that I was just going to mostly read things written by women. That’s what I do for relaxation. So, forcing myself not only through this very long book, but into the idea that he gets to create reality, was intense the whole time. Maybe this is just a function of my own psychology—but it also, maybe it’s half the point. We’re supposed to be made uncomfortable by this, that this guy and his weird psyche set the stage for evolution to the next phase.
I think that there are reasonable critiques of gender equity in Neal Stephenson’s novels. There are some phenomenal female characters, but there’s often one phenomenal female character. And I would say in his later books, you see more. I do think that it’s unapologetic in the perspective of an older white male, North American. Even when I talk about this stuff I can’t help but feeling weird. Both strange and W-E-I-R-D: a Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic country perspective.
Those are real observations and insights that have to be taken into account. But I also am all of those things and I think that for Stephenson, he is all of those things — he’s male, he’s Western, he’s educated, industrialized, democratic and quite wealthy.
But at the same time I don’t have a problem with having that perspective represented. I do love seeing more women represented in the cyberpunk genre and getting more notoriety in publishing in general. I’m excited to see more female perspectives.
I also think it’s important to have a diversity of voices in it, and I’m really fascinated as we see more work coming out of the global South, and more pieces like The Three Body Problem and other work coming out of Asia.
I think it’s been a long time coming that W-E-I-R-D perspectives get challenged. When we look at popular cyberpunk fiction in North America of the past 20 years, it has largely been led by male authors. And if we look further back at science fiction and speculative futurism, it’s still very male and Western-educated, I think more European-led in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s than ’90s and ’00s. But I’m really excited by seeing the global publishing market take all of this into perspective — what that does for the reading audience and what it means to the next generation of people coming to implement these technologies, or use them, or their approach to the design and experience of it.
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