<nettime> Dead Futures No.1 "Virtual Tourism"

["Dr. Future" <richard@dig-lgu.demon.co.uk>]

Check this,


    recently there was an item on a news programme about global warming.
The reporter was saying that a lot of holiday resorts were going to get
too hot for tourists as a result of climate changes - a lot of places in
North Africa were already getting too warm for many people. So a lot of
tourism was going to move to places in Northern Europe, but these areas
were ill prepared ecologically and economically for a sudden increase in
visitors. The prospect was not looking very peachy. 

    But then - a man dressed in a smart suit appreared and was introduced
as an "expert". He explained that "in the future" none of this would
matter because "in the future" people would have holidays on space
stations and on moon bases and things (yes, he said this). And also,
people would have virtual holidays using virtual reality equipment where
they could virtually travel to anywhere they virtually wanted without
leaving their own homes (it's true). 

    Suddenly I felt as though I was being wrenched back in time to the
early nineties when you could go to VR conferences on the west coast and
listen to John Perry Barlow and Jaron Lanier sitting on couches and
chatting about all the cool things you would be able to do when everyone
had VR. But nowadays nobody wants VR holidays anymore. People are so
stressed out by using computers in their jobs that the best holiday they
can think of is to get as far away from one as possible, or any technology
come to that matter. Nowadays holidays are used in order to try to recover
the body from its prolonged exposure to information technology, not in
order to see what foreign countries look like (that's called a "business
trip"). 

But there was that guy talking as though there was this alternative future
still just waiting to happen... 



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