Should We Look Forward to Living in the Past?
Yesterday I read this tweet by Balaji Srinivasan, technologist and angel investor:
The plain meaning of the tweet is obvious, but the existential (and philosophical) meaning is anything but. I’m thinking here of Heidegger, who describes the past not as something objective, but as that which “throws us” into the present moment. On that operational definition, it is impossible to live in the past or even to visit it. Or Husserl, who compares the experience of memory to that of hearing the first note in a musical phrase. Once heard, it will never be the same. You would have to unlearn the subsequent notes to hear the first note as it transpired.
On the surface, Srinivasan’s claim would work just as well if we replaced the word VR with books, TV, video-games, or epic poems. If living in a previous time period just means escaping the present by immersing in a fantasy of the past, then, by all means!
But I'm assuming, by virtue of the future tense, that Srinivasan thinks VR will be different, that the “living” offered by VR will be something deeper than the momentary pleasure afforded by a beach read.
Perhaps we will one day rent not space per se, but time. We will take out yearly leases not on real estate, but “surreal estate”. We will gentrify the Ice Age. The first to arrive at the Italian Renaissance will eventually become NIMBys to keep out the latecomers. Regardless of what time period we choose to “explore” we will prefer to be anywhere but the present.
Questions:
1) Are there such a thing as “time periods” in any meaningful sense, to begin with?
2) What do you think you could learn—if anything—from a VR trip to another age, provided it were possible?
3) Given the contentiousness (and politicization) of history who will decide—and how—the past should look? Or will we build our own customized “pasts” to reflect our own revisionism? Will the past have to be “regulated” to prevent bad actors from tampering with it? Who should do so, and on what basis? Or will we simply up-vote or bid on what our favorite version of the past is, regardless of accuracy?
4) What would need to happen for a VR experience of the past to be anything more than the feeling of the present, but just with different wall paper?
5) How can the past be compelling if there are no people from the past in it? But will those people be living or dead? Will we need to create compelling Kafka bots and Charlemagne bots, etc. for the past to be livable? Does that not seem an impossibility, or something uncannily proximate to “resurrecting the dead”?