Mansions on the Holodeck

Today I was given a wonderful tour of the giant mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. The sheer size of some of these houses is almost beyond comprehension.

Some are best described not so much as houses, but as palaces. Huge, sprawling and impossibly opulent, some contain dozens of rooms and nearly all are set within vast estates. The Vanderbilt Mansion alone, with its 70 rooms, is practically a species unto itself.

No human-made artifact is completely random — everything made by our species is an attempt to solve some sort of problem. Sometimes it may not be obvious what that problem is, but sooner or later you can always figure it out.

But what problem is being solved by these houses? Clearly they are not designed merely for housing and shelter. It is hard to argue that such crazily outsized structures serve any real utilitarian purpose.

I think the problem being solved here is primarily one of social signaling. If you are an obscenely wealthy robber baron, you still look like other humans. You have two arms and two legs, a face with two eyes and one mouth, hair, teeth, fingers, and all the rest. You are a little bipedal creature upon this planet who doesn’t look any different from your fellow little bipeds.

So to assert the superiority conferred by your vastly greater wealth, you need to create a virtual projection of yourself — some sort of avatar that is beyond ordinary human experience. And if you lived in the late 19th century, the best way to do this was through a vastly over-built house.

As evolving technology begins to permit us to “build” more and more within a socially shared augmented and virtual reality, what will the Vanderbilt Mansions of the future look like? They may not be physical buildings at all, but virtual habitations that allow us to make manifest our social status.

If you had all the money in the world, and you wanted everybody to know it, what sort of virtual mansion would you build, in the shared augmented reality of the future?

3 thoughts on “Mansions on the Holodeck”

  1. There is a term “Status Auction” — what is up for auction is status and the Newporters upped and upped the ante by building bigger and bigger houses. I’ve always wanted to see them…thanks for sharing your perceptions!

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