Cyber Metaphors and Cyber Goals: Lessons from “Flatland”

Reasoning about complex and abstract ideas is greatly influenced by the choice of metaphors through which they are represented. In this paper we consider the framing effect in military doctrine of considering cyberspace as a domain of action, parallel to the traditional domains of land, sea, air, and space. By means of the well-known Victorian science-fiction novella Flatland, we offer a critique of this dominant cyber metaphor. In Flatland, the problems of lower-dimensional beings comprehending additional dimensions are explored at some length. Inspired by Flatland, our suggested alternate metaphor for cyber is an additional (fourth) dimension. We then propose three common characteristics between the world of Spaceland as experienced by Flatland natives and that of Cyberland as experienced by humans, and finally explore some possible new insights suggested by the Flatland dimensional metaphor.

Circumstances and Stances

The “particular cultural and political circumstances in which i write” have changed decisively several times in my life. I have been several times an expatriate and finally an émigré from Yugoslavia, and I am now an expatriate from Canada—a life that has made me very attuned to global material and moral changes. I shall focus on the changes that I personally felt as inciding deeply into my professional work in the last ten years or so, the watershed for me being the illegal and immoral bombing of Serbia led by the United States. By then I had published three books on science fiction—Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Victorian Science Fiction in the U.K. (1983), and Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988)—and written enough further essays for a fourth book, which was scrapped when the Liverpool University Press had its budget cut. The changes make me, alas, the bearer of bad news, for as I see it our rulers have in practice destroyed the wall that our disciplines wrongly thought existed between culture and political economics, and we had better draw the consequences. And yet the gesture and bearing (see Suvin, “Haltung”) of writing this report also imply a hope that with much clarity, work, and luck we intellectuals—writers and then critics—can make an important difference.