Death to Meatspace, Long Live Flowerworld

What the hell is up. So, I believe strongly that there is a significant uptick in people’s interest in de-technofying their lives, in prioritising physical objects and human connection. The purpose of this piece is not to propose that this feeling is something novel, or that I’ve come up with a silver bullet solution or model for understanding it. The purpose of this is to attempt to put new language and understanding to ideas that have become incredibly pervasive. The core premise is this: language regarding humanity’s relationship to technology is currently dictated by technocrats - I believe this is due for a change.

I will be going through the origin of the words we currently have, the history and usage of such words and then I’ll describe the words that I have come to use and the ethos that dictates them. If any of these themes interest you, I strongly encourage you to reach out to me.

Email me at hello@flowerworld.systems

Pre-Digital Dooming, Meatspace is born

In the years preceding the 1990s a technological life was intensely hypothetical; the value of computers, email or a “world-wide-web” were all only discussed by academics and science-fiction writers. Take a guess who did a better job of collecting the collective imagination of the technologists that would end up controlling technology.

I know we as a society have done a great job of destigmatising passionate niche interests by pushing back against and even reappropriating terms “dweeb” and “nerd”, however, the first linguistic proclamation I’m going to make here is this: some people deserve. I will elaborate on which people and why alter, but for now, I thought I’d leave it at this.

So, anyway, the dweebs who would end up being responsible for the world we see today, read a lot of science fiction of the 80s, right around the boom of personal computers. The most influential of which being Neuromancer by William Gibson coming out in 1984. This book is responsible for giving us the term “Cyberspace” - which in the book is regularly positioned as heaven to the hell of the real world, the world of “flesh”. As you might be able to tell from this one fact alone, this book is a dystopia. It paints a deliberately hellish picture of a future ruled by computers - often considered the birth of the “cyberpunk” aesthetic.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson would release “Snow Crash”, another dystopia painting a picture of a harsh reality that technology provides escape from. Interestingly, Stephenson himself sees it as somewhat parodying all the tech dystopias that came before it. However, this is the book that is responsible for giving us the term “Metaverse” and is in turn responsible for Facebook’s parent company being renamed “Meta”.

Theme emerging! Why do Silicon Valley Dweebs and Nerds and Fuckheads (I don’t hold technologists in too high a regard, as you might have noticed) keep using terms coined in dystopias? My theory isn’t that these founders are trying to hide their nefarious intentions in plain sight, but more that they’re inept. They think the aesthetic of sci-fi is cool and that them being responsible for bringing that future to fruition now is even cooler. They just forgot the part where, in these works of fiction they’re drawing from, people are experiencing some of the most bleak depictions of human life imaginable. But empathy has never been their strong suit.

If you think these two books are not enough, I’ll rattle off a few more. Several tech products have been named after Skynet, the AI that wipes out humanity in the Terminator Franchise. Soylent the meal replacement drink is named after Soylent Green which is a dystopia where people realise that their made food source is boiled-down other people. Most recently, Sam Altman, Founder and CEO of OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT) tweeted “her” after releasing a demo of an (illegal) recreation of Scarlett Johansson’s voice in a demo of their new AI model; an obvious allusion to the dystopian film in which she stars as an AI lover.

These people are scum.

Anyway, I’m not even at the worst part. Because of the work done by Gibson, the opposition between “flesh” and “Cyberspace” posed a solution to a new problem. That problem being - how can we refer to “base reality” if “Cyberspace” has started become as important and as real as what we see outside? Well, using the logic of Gibson’s terms we can say that reality is flesh-y, maybe even meaty - so using the same -space suffix as Cyberspace, we get: meatspace.

I am not making this up. Amongst those who are technologically involved, the term “meatspace” is actually pretty commonplace. It is used to refer to things that occur in “real life”. I’m not just meaning dweebs who code for a living or sci-fi writers, I mean people who frequented forums in the 90s and 00s, people who continue to write and describe our relationship with technology - people who matter, for better or for worse.

Now, if you compare it to Cyberspace on Google Trends, it barely makes a blip. On the Google Ngram which focuses on publications rather than search terms, it puts Meatspace at its all time how right now, however.

Regardless of its relevance or obscurity, my point is this. Meatspace being used to describe “real life” is disgusting. It makes real life sound gross and unpleasant when compared to “cyberspace”, which I think is far from the truth. This is why - when I learned of the term “meatspace” and its meaning - I coined the term “Flowerworld”.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Digital Zooming, Cyberspace is Born

I’ve described in detail the language that was developing in the lead-up to the widespread adoption of technology, but I am yet to describe its ability to accurately describe the world around us. I think because we don’t live in a fully-rendered photo realistic simulation like one might find in The Matrix or Ready Player One, it might seem like these terms and these works of fiction don’t yet apply to us. I argue, that’s wrong.

Neal Stephenson, who I referenced before as the creator of the term Metaverse,

Post-Digital Blooming, Flowerworld is Born

Nothing New Under The Sun

I would like to say while all of this language and conceptualisation is idiosyncratic to me and me alone, the underlying principles and tendencies have become very obviously worldwide post-COVID. People joke that the best dating app of 2024 is Strava (an app for going on jogs); the bar across the street from my place advertises Contact Humain alongside Burgers, Jukebox and Pool as one of its main selling points; and there are apps, gadgets and programs aplenty to artificially impede your access to social media.

All of these things imply one simple thing - people are starting reject the idea that technology can solve any of their spiritual, emotional or social problems.

Strava wouldn’t be conceptualised as a better way to meet people if the worse way to meet people didn’t exist first (you should be very grateful that this essay isn’t a rant about dating apps, it would be 3 times as long and roughly 10 times more bleak). Contact Humain would not make sense on a sign for a bar if there wasn’t first a world were human contact was scarce. The gizmos to stop you using Instagram don’t require me to say anything, plus I think it’s a way for social media to commodify its own dissent, but I digress.

Buying Media

If currency is a rough indicator of how much you back something, then currently we’re in a boom of backing art and media. People are more willing than ever to pay for merch to support artists they like; sometimes not even that they like - artists that they want to continue making art.

To do my due diligence here and not just going off vibes, I’ll provide some statistics. Vinyl sales have increased year on year for the last seventeen years in a row, now significantly outselling CDs, something that hasn’t happened since 1987. Don’t get it twisted though, CDs are making a comeback too, they’ve increased in sales year on year for the last two years.

I think this suggests something interesting about the way we interface and engage with art, it is not merely the consumption of the piece or the enjoyment borne from such consumption; we regularly interface or engage in particular ways because it feels like the right thing to do, what we ought to do. There’s nothing particularly thrilling about listening to an album on CD versus listening to it on streaming (a vastly simpler option, logistically speaking); however the experience of supporting and owning a symbol of such support is enough to justify the order of magnitude price difference.

Efficiency in Recreation

Something that I’m staunchly opposed to, and you might be as well after you get this chance to stop to think about it, is efficiency in recreation. Particularly brought on in the digital space, I think in the last 5-10 years there has been an endless