Since I’ve been asked to write a few words for the e-book edition of The Savage Girl, I thought it would be an appropriate use of the space to talk a little about the concept of Virtualism, a term which my trendspotters bandy about without ever actually defining.
While the novel isn’t specifically about consumerism in cyberspace, a lot of the trends depicted in the novel have everything to do with it. Thanks to the Web (as Javier begins to explain to Ursula before being distracted by a passerby), we can spend an ever-increasing percentage of our lives within communities entirely of our choosing. This is what trendspotters, both in my book and outside of it, mean when they use the term “elective affinities.” Thanks to which, if the peer group of our regular community doesn’t approve of our religion, sexual orientation, or music-genre preference, we can turn to the Web and with a few keystrokes be put in touch with a group of likeminded people for support and reinforcement.
Sounds like a good thing, right? Well, the issue becomes a little more interesting when we consider that we can also go online and bond with our fellow Satan worshippers, neo-Nazis, and child pornographers. Just today, someone told me about the existence of a “pro-ano” community on the Web: sites and newsgroups for a burgeoning culture of anorexics, who believe theirs is not an ailment but rather an aesthetically pleasing lifestyle choice.
So is this modern-day ability to create our own worlds and live more or less entirely within them a good thing or a bad thing? This, of course, is one of the central questions of the book. To the Candide-like Javier, the ability to do so will bring about the “Light Age,” a mystical, utopian era in which people will be able to live as gods within the self-created worlds of their all-powerful imaginations. To the Machiavellian Chas, it will bring about a “Lite Age,” a dystopian future in which consumers will retreat into virtual worlds to avoid confronting their powerlessness in the “real” one.
Virtualism is one step beyond the notion of elective affinities. If I gave my characters the chance (which I didn’t), they might define it as the psychological framework which will allow consumers in the coming era the freedom to try on an ever increasing array of new identities, to pass from one to the next with unprecedented ease, and even to experience multiple identities at once. Again, it’s on the Web that we see the potential for this cultural development most clearly. Through the anonymity cyberspace allows us, we may enter into any community we want and also assume the identity of any kind of person we want. Old men can experience the carefree dream of being young girls. Teenagers can enter heretofore restricted adult arenas and refashion themselves without discrimination into stock speculators and legal consultants.
In Javier’s view, Virtualism is a good thing: he believes it will let people experiment with systems of belief, customizing and mixing and matching beliefs as easily as they currently do their material purchases, and discarding one for the next whenever their happiness, spiritual growth, and general empowerment requires it. Moreover, Javier believes that this ability to experience many different lives at once will lead not only to greater personal fulfillment but also to greater tolerance and understanding for the rest of mankind.
For Chas, on the other hand, Virtualism has darker implications: according to his formulation, it will lead to what he calls “Radical Individualism,” or “the creation of multiple consumer-identities within a single individual.” While a potential boon for the savvy marketer, the consumer may find in the experience of Virtualism a perpetual lack of wholeness or centeredness, a kind of schizophrenia.
Well, what about schizophrenia, then? Is this an altogether bad thing? While I’m not currently aware of any “pro-schizo” newsgroups out there, who knows, maybe soon there will be. In the novel, Ivy’s schizophrenia gives her power as well as powerlessness, glamour as well as squalor, grandeur as well as persecution. And maybe, in a way, that’s what consumerism gives us all.
– Alex Shakar
August 1, 2001