The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World

Laurence Scott

Introduction: The Reverse Peephole

I was glad that the visit to the mock-castle had been a success, since I'm a mock-tourist. My friend and I were sitting on the terrace of our bed-and-breakfast near Sintra, Portugal. It was the spring of 2008, which means that there were perhaps Couchsurfers down in the valley, but Airbnb was several months shy of its founding. We had just been on a trip to Quinta da Regaleira, the imitation palace, which in the early twentieth century a set designer had built for a coffee and gem merchant. Although I had enjoyed crawling through the watery tunnels on the castle's estate, I was happier still to be back on the terrace, writing a postcard.

The card was a thank-you note to an acquaintance who, a month or so previously, had lent me his empty house. He hadn't known I was coming, since he was already abroad when I emailed to ask him. His Georgian dwelling on a lonely terrace was not without its Gothic qualities. Every other chandelier worked, through the barred windows in the dining room lay a forgotten garden, and all the internal doors opened except one, on the second-floor landing. As I turned and shook the handle, it rattled in its frame. I wondered what he kept locked in there, even when no guests were expected. Elsewhere there were touching signs of the absence into which I'd intruded: a bowl and spoon on the desk, smeared with dried yoghurt, maybe, or ice cream, a magazine left on the floor by the bath, folded to an article titled 'The Loveliest Doors'. During my stay I had the recurring dream that he came back suddenly to turn me out, full of a mysterious and inarguable anger.

Nevertheless, thank were due. I finished the postcard and set it aside. My friend, the good traveller, put down her book and we started chatting: As we spoke, I noticed that I kept glancing at the postcard. Its presence on the table was a sort of agitation, gathering around it a subdued but recognisable cluster of feelings. There was a general nervousness and sense of waiting. For a few moments on the warm terrace, with the forested valley below, life was somehow incomplete, as though a bite had been taken from it. Towards my hospitable acquaintance with the broken chandeliers I felt both impatient and afraid of having offended him, a blend that settled itself into a mild strain of resentment. The card was belly-up on the table, drying its ink in the sun. All this wordless agitation, taking me away from my friend and our jokes, voiced itself suddenly in the thought: 'Why hasn't he answered it yet?'

In retrospect it seemed as though, in that deranged moment, I had wakened to a process that had been quietly rewiring my life for-a decade, more or less since I chose my first, cryptic email address (imagine broadcasting my real name on 'the internet').

Well known, by the day of the postcard, were the phantom buzzings in our pockets and bags; hadn't we all, by then, seen a butter knife glinting in the corner of our eyes and wondered who was calling? But my unconscious transposing of digital communication onto a much older form was a revelation. This postcard from the edge of reason came to feel like a developmental milestone, an instant of self-consciousness in which it became clear that I was undergoing a transformation. I was being freshly coded with certain expectations of the world, one of which seemed to be an unflagging belief in the responsiveness of others and which never seemed to learn from its disappointments. Digital technology was reshaping my responses, collaborating with my instincts, creating in me, its subject, all kinds of new sensitivities. In that sideways glance at the postcard, l could feel my place in history by the peculiar register of my uneasiness.

The Fourth Dimension

Over a century ago, as Queen Victoria transformed into King Edward, 'the fourth dimension' became an everyday concept. It was postulated in many ways: as ether, as the unconscious, as a duration in time, or as time itself. But most popularly it was a space into which one might travel, a world that could be reached if only the right conduit or portal could be found. The prospect of discovering this dimension was so appetising that it belonged to everyone. It was the intellectual and creative province of mathematicians, physicists, chemists, psychologists, philosophers and theosophers, psychic mediums, sculptors, painters and writers.

The fiction of this period reflects a der fascination with the idea of other dimensions reachable from our own - worlds that appear as enigmatic glimmers, or else are unreliably accessible, through doorways that don't always open, or which refuse to stay fixed in one place. In Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's co-authored novel The Inheritors (1901), a man called Granger meets a visitor from the Fourth Dimension. The novel begins in Canterbury, where Granger and the Dimensionist are crossing through 'the old gateway'. They gaze down at the Gothic city, when suddenly the visitor utters a strange sound and the buildings below them start to change: 'One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster - vaster than the cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, unrelisable infinity of space.'

A hundred years after its heyday, we're only now inhabiting space in a way that could be called four-dimensional. When the early, domestic internet appeared in the 1990s, there was a decisive separation between physical reality and that other place, which went by several aliases. The first household modems enforced this separation by acting as though they were grinding up against something hard, squealing and whirring like a drill hitting rock. Sitting next to them, perhaps wearing a t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt, we might have sighed or yawned, looking mildly around the room or prodding.at the squidge of the mousepad, but all the while feeling quickened somehow, as on the verge of arrival. The modem's faithful churn made it seem as if it were tunnelling through to somewhere else, opening up a space for us to inhabit. Once inside we followed our moods, web pages listlessly completing themselves in descending strips, producing all manner of suspense as the news story or piece of erotica toppled slowly into being. And then someone in the house would need the telephone, the ultimate, old-world trump card. A voice would rise up the stairs, and the tunnel would cave in, Pete Sampras's Australian Open fate hanging in the balance.

So the modems gave the sense of a journey. Through certain designated portals we could move into a specific way of being that felt like entering a new territory. By gaining access to this land­ scape on the other side of things, our hold fin de siecle achieved on its own terms a feat of which its predecessor dreamed. But the scene from The Inheritors suggests how discovering the fourth dimension isn't an experience that you can segregate from everyday life. The tower reeled, the mundane spaces warp and twist. The fourth dimension doesn't sit neatly above or on the other side of things. It isn't an attic extension. Rather, it contorts the old dimensions. And so it is with digitisation, which is no longer a space in and out of which we clamber, via the phone lines. The old world itself has taken on, in its essence, a four-dimensionality. Every moment, every object, has been imbued with the capacity for this extra aspect. Just as a geometrical net of squares can be folded into a cube, our daily lives are a series of nets, any of which could be scored and bent at the perpendicular, and thus extended into this other dimension. Increasingly, the moments of our lives audition for digitisation. A view from the window, a meeting with friends, a thought, an instance of leisure or exasperation - they are all candidates, contestants even, for a dimensional upgrade.

Social media, for example, makes a moment four-dimensional by scaffolding it with simultaneity, such that it exists in multiple places at once. A truth and cliche of digital life is that our comeliest meals occur both on our table and in the pockets and on the desks of our international 4D colleagues, a meal to be both eaten. and approved of. One quality of the fourth dimension is co-presence, life happening both locally and in the mind of someone elsewhere. With the prospect of this digital fourth dimension, a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself. Then again, to think of a moment as being 'flat' is really a throw­ back from· the three-dimensional days. Today, we live with the sense that un-tweeted, un-instagrammed moments might feel somehow cubic, as in boxed in, just these four walls, unless the walls can be contorted along invisible lines and a message smuggled out. Few people have trouble finding such a smuggler now; it's a mass industry, this smuggling of life into four dimensions.

Digitisation's warping and renting of old-fashioned space has inevitably affected our notions of domesticity, the architecture of our privacy. With walls not being what they once were, the home itself has become four-dimensional, with new ground plans to match its digital environment. Increasingly we are said to 'live' online, to create virtual habitations and communities for ourselves, but our physical homes have also been digitised. We can identify a common fitting on a 4D house by travelling back in time to the unlikely world of Seinfeld's last season. In an episode that first aired in I998, Kramer and Newman, two characters not known for their level-headedness, decide to reverse the peepholes in their apartment doors so as 'to· prevent an ambush'. The idea is that, on returning home, they can check if an assailant is waiting inside to 'clock them with a sock full of pennies'. Seinfeld himself is incredulous when he hears about the reverse peephole, pointing out that 'then anyone can just look in and see you', to which Kramer replies, 'Our policy is we're comfortable with our bodies. If somebody wants to help themselves to an eyeful, well, we say, "Enjoy the show!'"

What strikes me most about this scene now isn’t the craziness of the plan but the innocence of Seinfeld’s objections. He can’t conceive of anyone wanting to fold their homes inside out in this way. His ideas of doors and walls and windows, those ancient technologies of seclusion and revelation, through which we have historically negotiated the basic bounds of publicity and privacy, are thoroughly three-dimensional. The reverse peephole is, in this sense, visionary in its anticipation of the digital revolution, a definitive anxiety of which is that our peepholes have been reversed without our knowing. But an arguably more interesting phenomenon is t e voluntary reversal, for now we endorse and facilitate all sorts of peepholes into our domestic interiors. It is perhaps during our drowsy meanders of the deep night, alone in the glowing dark, that we most often find ourselves, through social media's chain of associations, in a kitchen full of strangers, caught in a moment of togetherness. One could rightly argue that these views are stage-managed, a show to be enjoyed, the opposite of an ambush. And yet there's always .an excess that can't be controlled, knowledge that slips around the sides of the spotlight. This is a new vision of our homes, with windows opening onto faraway rooms, and lights shining out into remote darknesses.

The Four-Dimensional Human

A dominant idea in the history of modem western personhood has been that we're fundamentally isolated from one another. Certain key figures, real and imagined, are gathered together, no doubt reluctantly, to make this argument: Descartes sitting in solitude at his fireside, sceptical of everything but his own mind; the fantasist Don Quixote, alone in his suspicion of windmills; the Princess of Cleves, moving between the seclusion of the boudoir and the convent; Robinson Crusoe on his island. That being an individual entails a sort of exile from others may be a story that we tell ourselves, but it is no less solid for that. Of course the irony here is that we also can't seem to get enough of the pack. We gather our lonesome selves together in groups by day, clinging together in warm, mealy huddles by night. Yet no matter how tight the clinch, we're still flung to different corners of the dreamscape.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens writes of 'A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.' An unnamed 'I' ponders the inscrutability of those closest to it, realising that 'No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.' The image of a person as an unreadable book also appears in Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Man of the Crowd', in which one man follows another through the streets of London. This tale's horror lies in the follower's conclusion that he can never know the stranger he is following: 'It will be in vain to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.' He imagines the stranger's heart as being larger than a medieval book of prayer, and thinks how it ultimately may be 'but one of the great mercies of God' that it 'does not permit itself to be read'.

If the ultimate solitariness of the modern person has been a well-told story, then how does this story contend with the spirit of the digital twenty first century? As I consider this question, I pause too often to do a lap of that standard-issue circuit of websites, turning the keys in those letterboxes and jogging past the lives of others, who stand smiling and telling me things as I go by. The year is ending, and people on Facebook are posting a prefab review of the past twelve months. 'It's been a great year!' the official script says. 'Thanks for being a: part of it.' I click on one of these retrospectives, posted by a friend on whom neither the corniness nor the irresistibility of this venture is lost. This friend, as represented.in her string of aggregated pictures and captions, is a collage of other people, a luxuriating pet, interspersed between picturesque landscapes. Social media is an advocate of this brand of comradeliness, and encourages us to narrate our lives as legibly as possible, as ongoing books that invite the selves to be read.

At the same time, the various and non-stop opportunities for communication are notable for highlighting our isolation, and it's perhaps this intensity of digital communicability that brings mythic proportions to mind. When the Olympian postman Hermes goes in search· of Odysseus during the latter's long confinement on Calypso's island, he looks for him in a cave, but 'Of Odysseus there was no sign, since he sat wretched as ever on the shore, troubling his heart with tears and sighs and grief. There he could gaze out over the rolling waves, with streaming eyes.' I think of this weeping Odysseus sometimes, when I'm waiting with indecorous zeal for an email or a text, or when I catch myself peering into the rolling blue of Facebook, unable to remember for whom or what I'm looking. I see his yearning in miniature, in the five seconds it takes for someone to bring a phone from their pocket and put it back again. These are ship-in-a-bottle feelings, which life can accommodate. The otherwise cheerful and productive of us have cheerful, productive lives amid digital longings and desolations: But it is certainly true that invoking the messenger god is one of the constitutive practices of our times. It has become part of the rhythms of almost every waking hour, to look for a word or a sign from elsewhere. We want to feel the wind in our faces, with the full, oxygenating sense that we're coursing along. Going online can feel like a step on a homeward journey, where it is the abstract promise of home, rather than any real sense of the home itself, which matters. We all know the pocket-sized shipwreck that occurs when an inbox shows us, with treacherous indifference, the pale, empty horizon of read emails.

The shipwreck-in-a-bottle is one of many new digital phenomena that have become part of our daily experience, and which complicate age-old ideas of personh6od. It has long been the word on the street that, if you dabble in other realities, then you shouldn't expect to remain unchanged. Lazarus was never his old self again. Visiting fairyland has its chronic side effects and implications: unnatural youth, blindness, contraindicated with trips through the wardrobe. Our portals to the fourth dimension have been wedged open, and there it is, spread out across the everyday, indeed nestled inside the everyday, causing it to ripple and bend. And now that the silhouette of a figure is resolving in the doorway, fringed in ghost-light, we can begin to consider what might be on their minds, what it feels like to be flushed with the hormones of Web 2.0; What new senses are available to someone who.is such a concentrated blend of matter and media? What happens to the nervous system when it is exposed.to the delights and pressures and weird sorrows of networked life? How does time pass in this dimension? What dreams begin to prey on a four-dimensional mind? What. are the paradoxes and ironies of owning a four­dimensional body, with its marvellous new musculature?

A crucial tension of our times is that, although we can luxuriate in this gained dimension, stretching our lives into the world like never before, we are simultaneously asked to ignore, deny, accept, strategise or rail against the hypothesis that our physical planet is diminishing. Just as the fourth dimension is opening up before us, our old-world trio is, by all intuitive accounts, in crisis. The macabre package of images and arguments, grouped under the deceptively benign term 'climate change', ticks like a telltale heart beneath the fibre-optic cables. A discernible atmosphere has emerged in these times from the collision between the digital boom and the ecological bust; One prevailing style of online being suggests a tireless lust for life. Social media steers us into co-producing a catalogue of daily rapture. The tacit caption beneath uploaded photographs is, not infrequently, 'Behold!' There's a general intoxication over the well-framed moment, and we have a hunger for beautiful vistas that was not a pre-digital appetite. People younger than me look up at a building hit with late-afternoon light and think, 'That's 'grammable.' We say a new sort of grace with the click of a camera and give thanks for our loved ones, a scrum of more or less willing smiles. We share good songs and good writing; we like all manner of propositions arid support one another. Yet in between this digital fervour, we have little choice but to live with the apocalyptic sentiment in our water supply.

Looking back, those few weeks of house-sitting in 2008, with their memorable air of consent and trespass, now seem like a 3D rehearsal of a commonplace 4D pastime. Every morning I would walk by the locked door on my way to the office. The study where I worked could only be accessed through a tight passageway that connected it to the office. The study had bookshelves on three walls and a large window on the fourth; the urban bleakness of the view was ideal. Between bouts of writing I prowled the small room. My presence there was both invited and unexpected, and in such circumstances every movement hovers between snooping and entitlement: I made a rule for myself very quickly that I would read nothing on the cluttered desk that wasn't already visible, and that I would stop reading the moment it would be despicable not to. Inevitably, hidden things rose to the surface. Cards fell from books; books had personal inscriptions. I remember a wedding invitation being used as a place-mark, which described each course of the meal in detail. My absent landlord emailed me from abroad to ask me to look in his desk drawer for some paperwork. The drawer will have car keys in it, he said, and some private letters. Please do not read them. The certainty that nothing would compel me to open those letters made me warm with a sudden sense of my own goodness.

I didn't think too much about that locked room; since its mystery became entwined with my general unease in this grand, eerie house. The study's strange layout made it a sort of snare, and if I worked in there at night I waited for the sound of soft footsteps at the passage's mouth. In the mornings I was hard on myself, but not too hard. It was in these evening hours that the idea of the locked room would be most present, and occasionally I would sit in this trap of books and lamplight and wonder what inhabited that space, just across the way. A vague notion of' electrical goods' came to me, an unlikely bank of computers. I pictured exercise equipment, a Stairmaster, sets of dumb-bells and a mirrored wall, locked away as a rule, being too incongruous even for their owner to stumble upon freely. The prospect of a gimp's studio of course crossed my mind (live and. let live), but mainly the contents of the room existed as an amorphous blank, a gap in my knowledge of things. Then one morning I was at the desk in the study and something inchoate made me turn in my chair and run my hand across the wall of books behind me. I turned back to see the tame, daytime guise of that narrow little passageway, so inconvenient and improvised. My mind retraced the journey back through the

passage, into the office and out into the landing, where the locked door protected its secrets. I smiled at my idiocy, for it was suddenly clear that, all along, it had been me inside the forbidden room. The desk's disarray, my papers and his papers, the computer and the rows of books, even the white sky outside, became vivid with realisation. I had been chasing myself. During those evening hours I had been simultaneously inside and outside that room. In an instant, all of my theories about its contents fell in on themselves, and the blankness was imprinted with a sudden picture, a selfie before its time.