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Figure 18.1: pesce1s.jpg
Mark Pesce


An Interview with Mark Pesce, The Father of VRML

our future in digital space

Mark Pesce is an Internet visionary and co-creator of VRML. What stared as a vision of 3D information on the Internet has blossomed into the reality of a true Cyberspace under his guidance. He has presented his vision of VRML on numerous occasions to the international World Wide Web community. Pesce is the co-recipient of Meckler's Market Impact Award for Virtual Reality, and was recently named one of Network Computing's Most Influential People in Networking. During their 1996 competition, Mr. Pesce received an Honorable Mention from the Ars Electronica Foundation for WebEarth, which creates a fully-interactive real-time model of the planet from space, on the desktop. Mr. Pesce is the author of two books, "VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace", and "VRML: Flying Through the Web", both published by New Riders Publishing. His latest project, "VRML University", a twenty-four week course on VRML, will be freely availble through Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds Web site later this fall.

Find the Home Page of Mark Pesce at: http://www.hyperreal.com/~mpesce

Bruce Damer interviewed Mark Pesce in the Lower Fortress in the City of Florence, Italy, June 1996 for inclusion in this book.

Mark Pesce is one of the original visionaries (the Father in truth) behind VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a standard way of describing a three dimensional Cyberspace world. Mark is a published author and an accomplished speaker. In this interview, Mark casts a wide net over the issues of living in a virtual world, questioning why we should see real space and Cyberspace as different.

Mark Pesce

So what is the book about?

Bruce Damer

The book is a starter kit for worlds, that will have a CD in it, and guides, social guides, social etiquette, the events that happen, a companion website that will be updated all the time on what is going on any world, even the 2D worlds like the Palace, the VRML worlds, Moos, although more focus on graphical worlds.

Mark Pesce

So what's on the score?

Bruce Damer

The score is that the chapter that I am putting together on visionaries which is "what is our future in digital space", what will life be like, what will people do there, what will they do that's good, that's bad, that's creative, that's crazy, the kinds of things you see will start happening?

Mark Pesce

Well, there's big theory here. My current big theory.. one reason I propose theories is to get them out there so that people will start talking about them and establish discourse because this field does not have nearly enough discourse yet.

Lets talk about something called structural coupling. When you have an informational relationship with another entity, you enter into what the informational biologists call structural coupling. One way of thinking about it is we have a relationship, say, with a teacher, you have an information relationship and in fact one of the things teachers never talk about but is quite true, teachers learn just as much from you as you do from them. Its a structural coupling. Information, in terms of learning, is always a two way street or always a multi-way street, there is no such thing as one way learning.

That is not learning, its not programming, it can't happen that way. This is probably one reason why fascists eventually fail. Because the whole idea behind fascism is an utter top down form of government, its not physically possible.

So, all of these mediations are going to lead to all of these structural couplings which are now no longer based on proximity, which people would say has been true ever since the beginning of the electric media, but the electric media, with the exception of the telephone, have not been multi-lateral and the telephone is at best bi-lateral, it is not even multi-lateral. So, I am going to have all of these couplings that are multi-lateral that are proximally confused. The difference between what is near and what is far is inverted or reverted or perverted or its changed utterly. This means that certain people, entities, activities can become very close even if they are very far away physically and that means that our entire concept of space and the organization of space is going to be dramatically changed as a result of this.

I tend to focus when I think and I prognosticate, on our children, because, we are at best the midpoints of the revolution and that's at best, we might be the starting points and James Watt and Faraday and Michaelson were at the beginning for instance of the electric revolution, of the power revolution. They I don't think in their wildest dreams would have thought about the computer and yet the computer revolution results from their work, as is superconductivity, as is high energy physics, solar power satellites or lasers.

I think in some ways we have that kind of relationships with our technologies. We are busily creating them and perhaps future generations will remember that, I don't know, but we aren't ever going to be fully aware of what their affect is going to be. Remember, there is two things, there is effect and affect. Effect is the inventory of things, affect is the way it changes the way you feel. I tend to focus more on affect, because when you use the word affect, you specifically mean changing the way it makes you able to feel.

Bruce Damer

The experience that I had in the recent virtual wedding [in AlphaWorld, May 8, 1996, see http://www.ccon.org/events/wedding.html] with the people that I was on speakerphone with running avatars, there was a great nervous tension because they knew there was a social scene happening and they did not want to disrupt it by accidentally crashing through the ceremony and they were intent on being able to communicate and not be seen to ignore anyone or snub anyone was difficult in the medium..

Mark Pesce

That's because the medium is just not good enough for it yet.

Bruce Damer

It lasted four hours and it was completely mentally exhausting.

Mark Pesce

I am not surprised, because you are maintaining most of that construct in your forebrain. There is not that much of it going on the screen.

Bruce Damer

That's right, that is an interesting point. The rest of the body is sitting there and you want to move your body to interact but you can't and everything is like a laser focused up here [pointing to his forebrain].

Mark Pesce

Exactly

Bruce Damer

Do you think there will be millions of people using this medium to interact socially?

Mark Pesce

Yeah, how can there be any question to that? It's subsuming the telephone and the television and the computer and the radio. I am not sure it is going to converge as neatly as some people might think into a single device. I think that it will converge briefly and then explode again into an array of different things.

Bruce Damer

Sort of like Stephen Jay Gould's vision of evolution?

Mark Pesce

There is punctuated equilibria. Or even more like what we think of when we think of the Cambrian explosion. Which is really where I think we are in the information age right, now, in the Cambrian explosion period, the web being the thing that kicked it off.

Bruce Damer

Do you think that in these world environments there will be synthetic organisms evolving, bots?

Mark Pesce

There are already! Tom Ray's Tierra project. I don't think there is going to be much choice about that, plus we will grow them in order to be the most effective knowledge seekers. The best agents are the agents that are the most independent from you. Unfortunately they are also the most dangerous. That was one of the subplots in "ghost in the shell" and they had to get rid of this entity that had gotten too smart at being able to forage for its own information.

Bruce Damer

The old classic HAL 9000.. [from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey]

Mark Pesce

No, HAL had a conscience, and that is what got him. He had a conscience and he had to lie to everyone, so he had a nervous breakdown and started killing people. Hey, you know it happens!

Bruce Damer

Do you think that nation states will emerge within, say, a visual Cyberspace?

Mark Pesce

Communities! I think that nation states are a dreadfully Cartesian concept and that's not particularly Cartesian space. Communities absolutely will emerge, have already and will continue to. It is kind of funny, because this whole issue of smut on the Internet smacks of a fundamental misapprehension that in fact the way we deal with it in the real world is by zoning the real world. Well, hello! The only difference between real space and Cyberspace is in the fact that we think they are different. Because we zone the real world artificially, its a construct in our heads, we do things certain things hear and there. Well, I cant see, taste, hear any difference between that and having an area of AlphaWorld or whatever as the smut area!

Bruce Damer

I recently asked John Perry Barlow what he felt about the 3D VRML and other worlds where people were constructing "stuff" and his comment was that there should be no ownership, no stuff in the Internet, it should be all interaction, it should be all communication.

Mark Pesce

That's sort of like saying the whole universe should be energy and not matter. And we will leave that there.

Bruce Damer

Here is a basic question for you: what motivated you to create and drive VRML, to bring VRML to the world?

Mark Pesce

Hmm, I am a radical ecologist. As I say on the first page of my book, Cyberspace is the preeminent environment for planetary management, it is the way that our children will tend the planet, because it gives them a reach that we did not have for our parents. I can stop you from polluting if I can see you doing it in Cyberspace, dammit! Which our parents could not do. PCBs get dumped into the environment because we cannot watch.

This is interesting because on one side this is the panoptic mechanism of Jeremy Bentham which is a mechanism of totalitarianism. On the other side it is also a mechanism for tending. Our job lies in finding the balance. That's the thing we leave for the kids. I don't want to get Marxist about it but the technology has a momentum but no direction.

Bruce Damer

Momentum but no direction, sounds like any revolution.

Mark Pesce

Our responsibility is to give that momentum a direction, to give it a vector. Because it would take any vector. Some of those vectors are very pathological.

Bruce Damer

So, for instance, in the beginning establishing some basic social mores?

Mark Pesce

Establishing the fact that the social mores that exist in the real world persist in Cyberspace! That all the pathologies present in the real world are present in Cyberspace by virtue of the fact that we are the agents of the pathologies! And when I say "we" I mean the part of us that can squeeze through the keyhole into Cyberspace. That's the very interesting point, that Cyberspace, I call it the mirror of the third eye, because boy does it show us what you really are! Because if you look in there and you see dragons and demons and devils then I know what you are full of, because what you are doing is you are seeing yourself. I don't see dragons and demons and devils when I go into Cyberspace, I generally see angels, nominist things, choirs, not always, no one is perfect but to that degree it is a mirror of what is inside of you. That's not utopian its not just the only thing that's in there but it is to say that in the same way you shape your own life by what you feel and what you do and what you choose to feel and do, the same thing is true in Cyberspace only its slightly more visible to everyone else.

Bruce Damer

And you have the benefit of sometimes being anonymous but perhaps ultimately not.

Mark Pesce

Well, you have the benefit of being anonymous in the real world as long as no-one knows who you are! The Japanese have a proverb that a man away from home has no neighbors, which is often used the explain the rape of Nanking.

Bruce Damer

For people who are entering the worlds we are going to feature and talk about in the book, what advice would you have for them?

Mark Pesce

First off, don't place your technical expectations too high. This is an evolution, we are in the middle of the evolution. Second, to be social is part and parcel of being human. The drive to communicate is so basic in human beings. We have to understand that culture is communication. That's what semiotics is, that's what postmodernism is. So that when you are in any environment is communicating with you and how you choose to communicate through that environment. Third, don't be afraid of the dark! Don't be afraid of space that hasn't been filled yet.

Bruce Damer

It may be filled but it may be very weird and unfamiliar!

Mark Pesce

That's another side of it! And as always, mind your own business and treat others as you would have them treat you. That's one of the reasons San Francisco is such a fabulous place to live, in general those two rules are observes, amazing!

Bruce Damer

So we would really want to have a civil society like a San Francisco, instead of a..

Mark Pesce

New York!

Bruce Damer

..a New York of Cyberspace or at least the freedom to go between communities.

Mark Pesce

And again this is not a Pollyanna, it is clear that Cyberspace is going to undergo a differentiation just as the real world does. The beautiful thing about Cyberspace is that it is somewhat easier to move between communities. I do think communities will arise that will purposely not let other people in. I think that is to be expected. You'll get Shaker type communities, Amish type communities, Mormon type communities.

Bruce Damer

One thing we've seen which caused a lot of deep emotion was the question of whether one avatar should be able to block you from seeing or talking to them. So that you could be standing next to another avatar and you can't see the person because they don't want to talk to you and your compatriot can talk to that person and how that would make you feel that someone has "blacked your out".

Mark Pesce

You read the Scarlet Letter, that's what that is isn't it? Socrates drank poison rather than to suffer that banishment.

Bruce Damer

It's a terrible thing to be cast out of a community!

Mark Pesce

Well, its a thing anyway. In a sense, communities probably have the right to do that.. because there is no other practical way. If you remember the rape in Cyberspace, that was the punishment, it was death, in terms of banishment, it was the only thing they could do.

Bruce Damer

So perhaps in the Twenty First Century humanity is going to get a whole new look at itself, its world and what we are doing to the world? And we are going to have to deal with what we see. We're not going to be able to say "I'm here in my cubicle and you are in your cubicle". We are going to be able to see all the cubicles and the machine and what the monster is doing.

Mark Pesce

It's not going to be, if you have read Ian Forster's "the Machine Stops". Brilliant story by a man who didn't write science fiction who was just a great writer. Very chilling, very much way pre Gibsonian cyberpunk. Very advanced society where people are utterly insulated from each other and only view each other over screens. It's beautiful and over the whole course of it the infrastructure starts breaking. But everyone is so removed from it that they can't really work up more than a sense that things are going wrong but nobody really knows. So.. that's what we want to avoid.

Bruce Damer

Any closing thoughts?

Mark Pesce

I don't think our children are going to have the same ego boundaries that we do because the technologies that we have are causing the apprehension of those boundaries to mutate. Ego boundaries are always maintained in the psyche, not in the physiology. And ego boundaries which were impermanent at best are very easily refigured. I think that we will have as much trouble understanding our grandchildren as our parents had understanding feudal society. Because there were as many constrictions on feudal society that were mentally enforced as we have in our own society. I am not saying that society of the future will be perfect, I don't expect that, but I do think that the boundaries of Personhood will be drawn very very differently. In some ways I think they will expand to fill the whole volume of the planet. In some ways I think they will narrow down to a point which will be nonexistent. And I think both are going to be simultaneously true.

End.



© Copyright Bruce Damer, 1997, All rights reserved.

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