In essence, our generation is writing the constitution for the future of history. We are creating many things that cannot be undone and yet we have no choice. There is no such thing as standing still. We are too in love with technology to retreat from it...
-- Jaron Lanier

All interviewees voice a concern with over-indulgence in the transformative powers of technology, insisting that we promote an awareness of the dangers rapid change could present to our society. All tend to agree that technology is a tool which can be used in either productive or destructive ways, and that now is the time to start developing an ethical frame for our technological agenda.

Of paramount concern is the idea that digital and bio-technology could slip out of our hands and be usurped by both government agencies and corporate powers. These technologies are only liberating if we maintain control over them. Otherwise, they will only be used for surveillance and control over us.

The point of everything is unity. Technology in all of its manifestations can amplify both separation and connection. VR is so inclusive of everything that we have tried to do before that it's especially amplifying of both connections and separations. The thing that concerns me most about society moving into virtuality is that it will become pretty easy to monitor both large numbers of people and abstract yourself from any personal responsibility for what you do with those lists.
-- John Barlow

Barlow, a longtime advocate of freedom of information in the digital world, is extremely vocal about protecting democracy on the Internet. Lanier extrapolates upon these ideas while remaining hopeful that virtual reality will allow us to re-capture aspects of our humanity which were suppressed in the industrial age. He insists that virtuality provides the route to our lost childhood through a liberation of the imagination,

With VR you can have a kind of technologically supported childhood where you have a world that is shared between people just like the physical world, but which can be different every day so that you don't have to control your imagination or limit yourself.
-- Jaron Lanier

Lanier continues to emphasize the revolutionary importance of digital technology in determining the future of human experience, celebrating the rediscovery of childhood while emphasizing the danger of childishness in regards to our responsiblity. Michio Kaku (author of Hyperspace and professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of the City of New York) imagines a world wired with inter-connected computers, "a thinking shell," insisting that scientific advancement is impossible without either the speed or the visualizing potential of digital technology,

We are not clever enough to solve the equation of Unified Field Theory.which summarizes all of physical knowledge. That is why we have to go to cyberspace. We have to use computers to model the instant of creation, the Big Bang, the inside of a black hole. We need computers to solve the theory of the universe. Our brains cannot visualize the fourth dimension without them.
-- Michio Kaku

Howard Rheingold examines the necessity, in a world which has negated the traditional notion of community, of nurturing "virtual communities" through computer networks. Steve Roberts (editor of High-Tech Nomadness) proposes the possibility of nomadic (yet connected) lifestyles in the digital age. We see him cruising natural landscapes on his Behemoth, a computerized, 105-speed bicycle which he designed himself. The on-board monitor displays a map, a virtual landscape, pin-pointed with blips representing his virtual friends spread out across the Internet/terrain.

Really, life-forms are trying to be born...noncarbon- based life. Technology, I've come to think, is a life-form quite independent of human beings. The best we can do is try to live with this thing. It all looks like Nature to me...
-- John Barlow