This Essay From ’99 Predicted the Virtual Reality Revolution

(Courtesy of Facebook)

“And I don’t seem to have a location exactly. In this pulsating new landscape, I’ve been reduced to a point of view. The whole subject of ‘me’ yawns into a chasm of interesting questions. It’s like Disneyland for epistemologists. ‘If a virtual tree falls in the computer-generated forest..?’ Or ‘How many cybernauts can dance on the head of a shaded solid?’ Gregory Bateson would have loved this. Wittgenstein, phone home.

At least I know where I left my body. It’s in a room called Cyberia in a building called Autodesk in a town called Sausalito, California. Planet Earth. Milky Way. So on and so forth. My body is cradled in its usual cozy node of space-time vectors.“

Read the John Perry Barlow’s 1999 seminal essay on virtual reality here.