The prediction, in brief:

For blind bards as for nearsighted whiz kids, cyberspace will feel like Paradise! Of course donÕt expect to keep your old identity: one name, one country, one clock. For be it through medical reconstruction or through fantasy, multiplied versions of yourself are going to blossom up everywhere. Ideal, statistical, ironical. A springtime for schizophrenia!

Predictor: Stenger, Nicole

Prediction, in context:

In her early 1990s essay, “Mind is a Leaking Rainbow,” which was published in the collection “Cyberspace: First Steps,” Nicole Stenger, a computer animation artist and director of the Group for the Study of Virtual Systems at the University of California at Santa Cruz, writes:”Isn’t it exciting … to experience in cyberspace the life of all creatures? To let them come one by one in their cyberspace outfits and be named by you? O the naivete of the first days of creation when you will set the clock for the independent animation of objects that will wink at each other, play tricks on each other, learn from each other. In this primeval garden where a synthetic sun will rise, inner voices will whisper, immaterial kisses hover in the air, and you will lie in the reconstructed sense of fur. For blind bards as for nearsighted whiz kids, cyberspace will feel like Paradise! Of course donÕt expect to keep your old identity: one name, one country, one clock. For be it through medical reconstruction or through fantasy, multiplied versions of yourself are going to blossom up everywhere. Ideal, statistical, ironical. A springtime for schizophrenia! And to make it worse, as Randy Walser puts it, there wonÕt be any possibility in cyberspace to distinguish between a dumb object, and ‘intelligent’ one, and a human being. We will all be the same: half alive, half dead, ready to be stored and tagged forever in a Mormon Mountain.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1992

Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information

Subtopic: Virtual Reality

Name of publication: Cyberspace: First Steps

Title, headline, chapter name: Mind is a Leaking Rainbow

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 52-3

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Garrison, Betty