Light-hearted thought-experiment: Teledildonics
Howard Rheingold
Here's something I wrote recently for fun. I posted a draft on the
WELL, and now it seems to be getting around on its own. Although I
think it's an interesting little speculation, and I don't believe in
censoring my own or anybody else's speculation, I am wary of the
recent wave of sensational journalism (swiftly becoming known as the
"Electronic LSD?" school of VR coverage). Too much hysteria about
lurid possibilities might cause problems for the serious research that
is being conducted into virtual reality technologies as tools for
creating new medicines, medical imaging techniques, and other useful
applications. If you reproduce it, please keep the disclaimer
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**Teledildonics: A Thought-Experiment on the Far Side of Cyberspace**
By Howard Rheingold
[NOTE: This is an electronic version of an essay I wrote in a
light-hearted mood. It will be published by Mondo 2000 magazine and
will end up as part of a chapter in the book I am writing about
virtual reality. I believe there are many other more important social
issues to discuss in this realm, but I do think this little
thought-experiment is a good way to provoke interesting thoughts about
the implications of VR technologies. I'm not going to post an All
Rights Reserved notice on this. My print publishers will do that. All
I ask is that you keep this note and my byline attached to the essay
if you distribute it to others in any form.]
There was a young man named Kleene,
who invented a fucking machine.
Concave or convex, it fit either sex,
and was exceedingly easy to clean.
The first fully functional teledildonics system will be a
communication device, not a fucking machine. You probably will not use
erotic telepresence technology in order to have sexual experiences with
machines. Twenty years from now, when portable telediddlers will be
ubiquitous, most people will use them to have sexual experiences with
other people, at a distance, in combinations and configurations
undreamed of by precybernetic voluptuaries. Through a marriage of
virtual reality technology and telecommunication networks, you will be
able to reach out and touch someone -- or an entire population -- in
ways humans have never before experienced.
The word "dildonics" was coined by that zany computer visionary
Ted Nelson (inventor of hypertext and designer of the world's oldest
unfinished software project, appropriately named "Xanadu") in 1974, to
describe a machine (Patent #3,875,932) invented by a San Francisco
hardware hacker by the name of How Wachspress -- a device capable of
converting sound into tactile sensations. The sexual effect depends
upon where you, the consumer, decide to interface your anatomy with the
tactile stimulator.
Picture yourself a couple decades hence, getting dressed for a
hot night in the virtual village. Before you climb into a suitably
padded chamber and put on your headmounted display, you slip into a
lightweight (eventually, one would hope diaphanous) bodysuit, something
like a body stocking, but with the kind of intimate snugness of a
condom. Embedded in the inner surface of the suit, using a technology
that does not yet exist, is an array of intelligent effectors --
ultra-tiny vibrators of varying degrees of hardness, hundreds of them
per square inch, that can receive and transmit a realistic sense of
presence in terms of touch, the way the visual and audio displays
transmit a realistic sense of visual and auditory presence. You can
reach out your virtual hand, pick up a virtual block, and by running
your fingers over the object, feel the surfaces and edges, by means of
the effectors that exert counterforces against your skin. The
counterforces, correspond to the kinds of forces you would encounter
when handling a non-virtual object of the specified shape, weight, and
texture. You can run your cheek over (virtual) satin, and feel the
difference when you encounter (virtual) human flesh. Or you can gently
squeeze something soft and pliable and feel it stiffen under your
touch.
Now, imagine plugging your whole sound-sight-touch telepresence
system into the telephone network. You see a lifelike but totally
artificial visual representation of your own body, and of your
partner's. Depending on where you go and where you are allowed and what
you are willing to pay or trade or do, you can find one partner, a
dozen, a thousand, in various cyberspaces that are no further than a
telephone number. Your partner(s) can move independently in the
cyberspace, and your representations (aka "puppets") are able to touch
each other, even though your physical bodies might be continents
apart. Fiber optic networks already can handle the very high bandwidth
that telepresence requires. The technical delays that make
teledildonics a twenty first century technology are in the development
of the extremely powerful computers needed to perform the enormous
number of added calculations required to monitor and control hundreds
of thousands of sensors and effectors (because very nook and
protuberance, every plane and valley and knob of your body's surface,
will require its own processor). It will take decades to develop the
mesh of tiny, high-speed, safe but powerful tactile effectors: today's
vibrators are in the ENIAC era.
The tool I am suggesting is much more than fancy vibrator, but
I suggest we keep the archaic name. A more sober formal description of
the technology would be "tactile telepresence," and it is much more
than a gleam in the eye of a horny hardware hacker. The infrastructure
for a dildonic system exists today, in the form of computerized
clothing and head-mounted displays that permit people to enter the
fully three-dimensional illusion of an artificial reality.
Teledildonics is inevitable, given the rates of progress in the
enabling technologies, and the enormous market-driven forces that will
be unleashed when sex at a distance becomes possible. Now is the time
to tackle questions of morality, privacy, personal identity, and even
the prospect of a fundamental change in human nature. Because we are
likely to be too busy turning into whatever we are turning into to
analyze or debate the consequences.
If everybody can look as beautiful, sound as sexy, and feel as
nubile and virile as everybody else, then what will become the new
semiotics of mating? What will have erotic meaning?
If you can map your hands to your puppet's legs, and let your
fingers do the walking through cyberspace, as it is possible to do with
today's technology, there is no reason to believe you won't be able to
map your genital effectors to your manual sensors and have direct
genital contact by shaking hands. What will happen to social touching
when nobody knows where anybody else's erogenous zones are located?
Privacy and identity and intimacy will become tightly coupled
into something we don't have a name for yet. In Unix systems, files and
programs and groups of users can be grouped into nested hierarchies by
a system of "permissions." In cyberspace, your most public persona --
the way you want the world to see you -- will be "universally
readable," in Unix terms. If you decide to join a group at a collegial
or peer level, or decide to become informationally intimate with an
individual or group of individuals, you will share the public keys to
your identity permission access codes. It might be that the physical
commingling of genital sensations will come to be regarded as a less
intimate act than the sharing of your innermost self-representations.
With all those layers of restricted access to
self-representations that may differ radically from layer to layer,
what happens to the self? Where does identity lie? And with our
information-machines so deeply intertwingled with our bodily
sensations, as Ted Nelson might say, will our communication devices be
regarded as "it"s or will they be part of "us?"
Nelson Minar,(???)
Interesting idea. However, you assume that your other partner will be human.
Why not a machine, with suitable biomonitoring mechanism? You could even start
up a sexware (written in O no doubt) which would be the program to manage the
computer..
of course, the Freudian implications of this idea are a little scary.
Compunerds such as myself would NEVER have to leave the keyboard..
just an idea..