The children loved it. But they would have loved anything. The real traction was created by the parents, who spent the bulk of their own time at the mall blinking wildly into their glasses, reaching for virtual specials, chatting and sharing. When they came back to the Barney’s virtual spectator deck – always stuffed to overflowing – their eyes thrummed at the site of their progeny.
It wasn’t just the parents. We all thrilled. The suburbs reached and blinked and clicked and gawked. The holograms stood proud and fluid and sexy.
And then it changed.
They painted the bottom half of an under-maintenance cooling tower on the N4 to Mozambique and the Kruger Park. The video flashed from a hundred kilometres out, a crudely cut mash-up of squatter camps and mine workers going down the shaft. Gardeners in blue overalls walking dogs. Maids in pastel pink pushing prams, little white heads bobbing inside. Open Free State farmlands, rich with crops. Sandton parking lots, replete with luxury vehicles.
Democracy is digital
the text flashed. Then
Land was taken
…then
People will not be quiet
…then
Reparation | return | revolution
It took close to a full day for the cops to find the cellphone paired to the paint. It was buried in a bucket, underneath a mop, in the tower’s maintenance basement.
Meanwhile, the press flocked. The public too. Land Rovers – carrying British and French and German and Japanese game viewers – parked on the highway verge, and then at the petrol-station lots. The khaki tour guides unfolded camping chairs and proffered coffee flasks. They pointed to the tower and its message. Tourists dunked rusks and refocused binoculars. Initially the cops pushed them away, but the scope of the cooling-tower broadcast was so extensive anyone could park on any road – primary or secondary – and enjoy the view. Eventually the scuffles settled and everyone watched it play out, together.
They stayed long after the phone was turned off and the video stopped. They watched the paint being scraped away with wire brushes and solvent, hoses and solutions. The breathless reporters with swept-back hair, the tourists, the government officials, the cops. They all stayed.
Transmission paint was cheap. And simple. Lash the dirty brown onto any surface. Wait for it to dry. Enter pin. Pair. Broadcast.
Post-cooling-tower-show, transmission paint was sold out, restocked and sold out again. The rush was led by street protesters, red berets, political challengers. Behind them the rest: small-time advertisers, the floggers of products, remedies, solutions. The hawkers and preachers and tyre repairmen. If you had a wall you had a stage. If you had a phone you had a broadcast. All you needed was transmission paint.
Back in ad land, the geeks figured out what the paint could mean for the consumer and the brand experience.
Entertainment.
Communication.
Etc.
Paint innovation was mandated and costed and assessed. Strategists plotted. Clients caught their collective breath.
But nothing could match club land.
Club VR had been fine, fun, entertaining in the sense that the future was fuzzy yet tangible. But the interface was inherently fake. The VR clubs were, despite much effort, mall kiddie pens with booze and pills.
Now, painted clubs stitched geolocation to the network, creating an interface with actual, physical depth. Now, once the punters paid and stepped through, the walls fell away. They could be taken anywhere. No matter who you were or where you went, the experience suddenly felt seamless. Limitless.
After years of burrowing down inside ourselves, we poured out of our houses – big and small, brick and tin, flat and shack – into the basements and the warehouses.
To touch, to hold hands, to kiss… to blow it all up into hyper augmentation and exaggeration. To step inside, then out into the stars and the planets and the true mythical. Well, fuck. It was great.
Genital nappies – naps – became the accessories of my generation.
And yes, I explored as well. I slipped my nap on, zipped up my retro advertising pants, donned my wire frames, descended to the basements, paid my money and did what everyone else was doing.
It was a clear, assumed city agreement. Clubs and drugs and VR sex downstairs. Advertisers and government up top, controlling the veneer.[1]
Everyone else in the cracks.
‘There is appeal,’ said Mongezi at the time. ‘If they weren’t such monkeys with the avatars it could be wild, nè? But I felt a bit stupid at the end. You know, when you take that nap thing off and admit you were fucking the same shitty JPEG as everyone else.’
It was an offhand balcony conversation. A flippant comment. But it made both of us rich.
VR punters wanted fantasy. They wanted to fuck the woman or man of their dreams, and they wanted to look unbearably hot doing it.
Mogz’s idea was simple: punters should compose avatars, not select them. They should wield the freedom of the four critical categories (face, ass, chest and legs). They should morph and blur identities. They should be able to pull together any mix of face and ass and have the result feel and look and taste right. None of it was new, but his brilliance was the jacking of open-source image software to deliver the fractional file sizes that allowed thousands of users to interact seamlessly within the club network – sexually and otherwise.
I knew none of these things. I barely knew what image resolution was. Nonetheless, about a month after our conversation, two things happened.
(1) Rick Cohen, a university associate, stumbled into my table at a Rosebank coffee shop, drunk, depressed and bemoaning the fact that he was closing down his VR club – the punters were dribbling away… the fad was over.
(2) The following week Mongezi sent me a message:
It’s done. The VR thing. It works. We should sell it.
Mgz
We sold it to Rick, who rebranded his city VR club as Mlungu’s. He gave us fifteen per cent each.
Heels clicked through all night, down the concrete stairs, ominous rather than filthy, then into the reception area staffed by rippling Zimbabweans who patted them down, took their cash and pushed the trembling punters in.
Rick Cohen was a true businessman. He knew the underground hype would die, fast, and when it did he was already selling off virtual chunks of Mlungu’s to sponsors. The bar counter, the tabletops, the urinals, the waitress’s cleavage. He lured the brands with the promise of their own slice of the legend, virtual reality in perpetuity, blah blah.
Smarts aside, he was also connected. Within six weeks Mlungu’s had formal office space at HHN. As the ‘reputational head’ of a new division, I had the job of making sure Mlungu’s sponsors looked good.
‘Mlungu’s changes the VR game,’ the street-pole slugs said.[2]
The door to the top floor of media life swung open, but instead of walking over the threshold I stepped back.
‘What is it with you?’ Angie taunted. ‘When the suits arrive it’s like you’re back in nursery school.’
I changed corners many times. I logged in from the office, I logged in from home, I logged in at Mlungu’s itself, but I always ended up in essentially the same position, just off the bar, on the side, watching the same scene play out over and over again.
1
To a degree. See the counterculture section of the Verwoerd Annex for full detail on the graf rebels and the use of retinal-pause subliminals to send messages within transmission-paint messaging.
2
For full detail on the VR revolution, transmission paint, interface glasses, etc., consult Annex II of the Slovo Library, St John’s campus.