One memorable encounter I had with the term ‘the real world’ was at a conference of the trades union I’m a member of, which represents a mix of workers in the public and private sectors. In an obvious dig at the public sector workers present, a motion was presented to conference with the phrase “the real world of profit and loss”. In a similar vein, the Oxford English dictionary offers “we live in the real world of limited financial resources” as an example of a sentence containing “real world”. The kinds of people who don’t live in the real world include academics, actors, artists, celebrities (unless they’ve come from Humble Beginnings), dreamers, environmentalists, intellectuals, politicians, teachers, vegetarians, vicars, and young people. The question of what is real has occupied philosophers for millennia, which is ironic, because those fond of using “the real world” in the manner indicated would probably assert that philosophers don’t live there.
What’s odd is that I’ve never heard people talking about hunter-gatherer societies living in the real world, yet arguably they are better placed to survive in the landscape than I am. (As I said earlier, I live on the landscape, not in it…) Nor indeed have I heard of hunter-gatherers telling others to live in the real world. (But then again, I don’t hang out with them much…) I think it’s fair to say that “the real world” is about money (with overtones of there not being enough of it for the silly thing you want to spend it on). But money is the one thing we can be absolutely sure is not real. If there’s any reality that’s socially constructed rather than empirical, it’s money.
The ecocyborg, however, is not for hunter-gatherers, but for technically augmented post-humans to sustain their existence in. Like it or not, the “real world” will become what we construct: the boundary between social construction and empiricism will thereby be blurred. For those with the power to make it so, reality will be what they want it to be, and they might even be able to alter themselves in ways that will make the reality they want work somehow. Is this world a place finally fit for dreamers, idealists and the various pariahs listed earlier to live in? Or will it be one that more severely reinforces the exhortations to “live in the real world”?
In computer games, the laws of physics do not need to apply. We can fly, cast spells, shoot laser beams at aliens, and cross interstellar and intergalactic space in seconds. A purely digital existence, then, sounds like one that truly allows us to create the realities we want and inhabit them. But the memory and CPU cycles needed to store and process our consciousness will surely be no less a limitation on a digital existence than sunlight, fresh water, and edible plants are on our physical existence. Our virtual selves would then compete for RAM and clock ticks, and end up divising some sort of system to distribute them in a way that is somehow agreed to be fair. (Or have a system imposed oppressively by those with more power and privilege.)
Whether the ecocyborg is physical or virtual, then, we can expect there to exist a scarcity of one resource or another, and social norms to emerge (or be carried in from earlier cultures) to help decide how those resources should be distributed. Maybe that’s what’s real about the real world.
The Ecocyborg Manifesto 