As we officially abandon the larger world of wind, rain, sun, and sand for the 2D flicker of the high speed realm, how will we represent gravity? Has this intrinsic force, which once governed our actions across tarmacs and savannahs alike, been outsourced? The virtual realm has representations of everything else: sex, money, shopping, and according to Facebook, a whole slew of cheaply animated farm animals, whose lives generate more postings than most flesh and blood members. So what, in this IP address governed world, stands in for gravity?

Perhaps the internet providers themselves are the new unavoidable force of reality; Verizon as a pivot point for your existence. Or maybe the social networking sites, the triumph of rapid misspelled banality, now control how one virtually moves. A part of me (perhaps the part of me not bothering to wear corrective lenses) has always thought of Facebook as ‘FoodSafing.’ If some sort of apocalypse happens in the 3D resource-based world, like a massive water shortage, what is the most efficient way of rationing those resources? Do you want to provide it to the unknown neighborhood dwellers, or the people with the most partisan-friendly INFO boxes? And what about email addresses? If you have no email, are you like an astronaut floating free in the void, unencumbered, but really, really fucked?

Gravity as an abstract concept is a little weird, I know. But I believe that each representation of a larger system invariably has to represent each part of that system, like scale in architecture. On a 40th scale model, the pool deck on floor 22 is just a blue dot; on a 1/2 scale model, you have to glue together some damn lawn chairs and scatter them convincingly around the simulated tile periphery. If the internet is a scale model of the human universe, what holds the virtual world together? Our faith in humanity? The promise of shiny things?

Or is it being held together at all?

Photo: Phillie Casablanca