Interviewer
Tell us what you think exactly is virtual reality.
McKenna
Well, as most people understand it, virtual reality is a technology for experiencing worlds which don’t really exist; worlds which are sustained by electronic means as a virtual illusion.
Interviewer
And do you find this a particularly interesting facet for you to pursue, or is this enough to just come and explore and be very important?
McKenna
No, no. Virtual reality hasn’t even reached the level of the Wright Brothers’ flyer at this stage. My interest in it is as a vehicle for exploring the imagination, and then being able to take other people along on the trip. This is the promise that virtual reality holds out, but as yet it’s an extremely unfulfilled promise.
Interviewer
What facet have you been interested in particularly at this stage?
McKenna
Well, my interest is in slaving virtual realities to language, to make language something which is visually beheld. I don’t see virtual reality as an entertainment device so much as a way of perfecting the project of human communication. And the way to do this is to take the low-bandwidth signal represented by small mouth noises and turn it into a virtual topology of intentionality; make meaning something that people see rather than hear. This is what virtual reality holds out in my mind. That’s what I’m interested in.
Interviewer
Tell me, you are known for your time wave theory. Have you seen any major [???] of novelty on your scale which would either pinpoint to the discovery of virtual reality? Will it be a historical landmark in some way?
McKenna
Well, no, I can’t really pinpoint it on the time wave, because one of the interesting things about virtual reality is: it’s not a discovery in the ordinary sense, like the discovery of radium or radio. It’s an integration of already existing technologies. The only thing new in virtual reality is the glove. But the integration of computers, television, eye goggles and so forth—so what will allow virtual reality to develop fairly rapidly, I think, is the fact that no new technologies are necessary.
The other thing which gives virtual reality a tremendous advantage as an evolving or developing technology is the fact that the human optical system, the human information-processing system in the brain, is very forgiving of the kinds of errors and smudgy fuzziness that we get in these early virtual reality situations. So it’s almost as though our physiology makes virtual reality our destiny.
Interviewer
Well, we’ve now come to a place where Jaron has been here and he’s talking about the reality [???]. Have you experienced this particular dynamic [???]?
McKenna
I haven’t experienced that hardware. Obviously, this is a tremendous threshold to cross. A reality built for two can be built for two million. The difficulty is going from one to two.
Interviewer
You’re attached to [???] in many ways. One is your organization, and the other is the two are very fond of things of the Earth. Do you see this new type of technology as a threat or boon to the whole natural world?
McKenna
Well, virtual reality is not really defined. There are ways to think about it where it seems very destructive of the natural world—as a kind of super television and a super media addiction. On the other hand, there is talk of using navigation satellites to create a world where all advertising would be in virtual reality. My ordinary field of involvement is with psychedelic plants and shamanism. And since that is the original virtual reality tradition—in other words, the shaman makes a voyage into a virtual reality which is validated by mythology, but which only he can see and experience in his trance. Well, I think that kind of archaic notion of virtual reality has to be firmly in front of us as we design this new technology or it will simply be another force for our dehumanization, which is the last thing we need.
Interviewer
[???] theories you have had about the end of time, or the end of history [???] have sorts of scenarios going on that have you—at one time I heard you saying things like everyone will [???] or you will turn yourself inside out. Are we going to be able to [???] at the future. How does virtual reality make that interface [???]?
McKenna
Yeah, I think so, because all these apocalyptic scenarios or millenarian scenarios that you sketched out have as their common denominator that we, as a species, are going to live in the imagination. The imagination is the future frontier for humanity. So it may be a combination of drugs, techniques, technologies, attitude shifts, linguistic redesign of our language assumptions—all of this may be necessary to propel us into a world whose rules are not the laws of physics, but the laws of the human imagination. I think that’s what excites the people here who really care about this: is the belief that this is going to be a tool for communication and art and understanding among people.
Interviewer
And excitement breeds excitement.
McKenna
Excitement breeds excitement. That’s right.
Interviewer
And that’s really what [???] I go for.
McKenna
Well, this is the first non-lethal technology with a major commercial potential that we’ve seen in the United States in a long, long time. And it’s very exciting.
Interviewer
I think [???] the structure of our economy at some level where we can perfect [???] put the money that we put into weapons, et cetera, into this whole other field?
McKenna
No, I think the United States is largely irrelevant to the development of this technology, because this country is bankrupt—morally, spiritually, economically. This will all be developed in Germany, in Japan, possibly other people will have a role to play. But I think American technology will be largely imitative, in spite of the fact that we have an early lead. Early leads seem to be something we usually have only to squander when the race gets hot.
Interviewer
Now, this has unified us as Americans, too. Already there’s much going back and forth over this particular topic. Maybe it’s possible to unify everyone around this gain.
McKenna
Well, I think unifying is what this technology holds out as an ultimate possibility, although on what time scale this unity will arrive is hard to say. What an event like this is, is a meme shower. We’re having a shower for the new meme, and the new meme is this whole virtual reality interactive technology complex. What people can do is carry the meme back into their communities and their affinity groups and correctly represent it. You know, a few years ago, these same people who are here tonight, many of them were attending conferences on space colonization. This has not been mentioned for years. It’s dead in the water. The reason is: it was a technology oversold too quickly. There’s nothing worse for a technology than to be premature. And timing is everything in the launching of a new system. So it would be very good for this community to learn from the examples of space colonization, perhaps even psychedelic drugs. That may be a different issue. But it was also a situation where many people’s hopes clustered around something as being the kernel of the pearl of a new social order, and then it was not able to deliver. So this is the challenge of virtual reality. How many more of these opportunities will we have before famine, madness, overpopulation, and stupidity sweep over us? We might say virtual reality is the last straw.
Interviewer
Terence, are there any developments that you would like to express right now, before you go onto the stage, about this event, or something you’d like to see in the future, regarding this kind of a population or gathering or [???]?
McKenna
I think that the technical community deserves a huge amount of credit for creating virtual reality, but that the moment has now come to bring in the playwrights, the artists, the designers—the architects have already been involved. But people in the arts need both to be informed that this is going on, and they have to bring their insights into this community. Otherwise, as one of the speakers said tonight, we’re in danger of seeing it just be turned into three-dimensional computer games.