![]() As a teenager, I would play Civilization, SimCity, and The Sims to cope with a dawning feeling of disempowerment. There’s something bewitching about this reality compression: a taste of power and omniscience interlaced with the lack of stakes. They are miniaturized simulations of life - constructor sets, with players given tools to create, destroy, and manipulate an alternate world history, a model of a city, or tiny families in tiny houses. ![]() While we might not be at that point yet, many of us do indeed play with toy versions of ourselves in toy versions of reality - engrossing miniature worlds in games like Civilization and SimCity and all the other “god games” that have come in their wake. God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm In his 1985 essay “ To Shrink ,” philosopher Vilém Flusser attributes the interest in the discovery of worlds within the infinitesimal to a kind of revulsion for the body, a contempt for physical size that, he argues, “represents a regression, a distancing.” It was a sign of how we were becoming “less solid,” diminishing the importance of the corporeal “to the level of a toy” and turning toward “calculation and computation of minutiae to produce information.” In his view, this anticipated a disembodied future in which we’re divorced from flesh and earth, with humans isolated in cells, Matrix-like, communicating as a superorganism - “a unique sort of ant colony.” The internet: 1969 the outbreak of social media: the early 2000s. Claude Shannon’s dissertation and his theory of “bits” in 1948 the invention of the microchip in 1958 The Blue Marble in 1972. The electron was discovered in 1897 Bohr’s planetary model was presented in 1913 the onset of the Atomic Age began in the 1930s. Georg Cantor’s set theory - his finding the infinite in the space between one and zero - went to press in 1874. In 1839 the Royal Microscopical Society was founded. On the arc of the shift to the small, one could plot many points: In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, the first great work of microscopy.
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