MachineMachine /stream

by Bruno Latour

’Who would know how to love without having read novels?” This saying seems to take on a new meaning with the multiplication of virtual worlds, even though the adjective “virtual” may be greatly misleading. It would be very odd to say, when thinking of the young hero of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who spends whole days utterly absorbed in the fictional landscapes painted by his favourite novelists, that he resided in a “real” world, while a youngster of today who buys rather expensive equipment to play with buddies on the other side of the planet through wireless and satellite connections would be said to be living in a “virtual” landscape. It would be much more reasonable to argue that it was Proust’s narrator who lived his adventures “virtually” while his 21st-century counterparts have to embed their imagination in so much hardware and software paraphernalia that they clearly end up in a more real, more connected, more technical world. Or rather we