As part of my continuing effort to self host all my own work I present the talk I gave at linux.conf.au in Christchurch in 2019. It was my first time either attending or presenting and I was stoked to get a standing ovation.

Edited Transcript.

I am a pagan Theologian, who is of course the exact person you want speaking at Linux conf, and I’m a virtual world developer. For my PhD I studied religion in virtual worlds to try to answer the question, if you do a ritual in a virtual world is it a real ritual? Of course this led me down some very very deep ontological rabbit holes. “Why is this an important question?” I hear you ask. I’m fairly sure that one or two of you will be gamers. When one is a gamer one is often asked, “why do you spend so much time gaming? Why don’t you get out and do something in the real world? That’s not real”. In sociology there’s a theorem called Thomas’s theorem, coined by Mr and Mrs Thomas, which says, if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Basically that means if you think it’s real it’s real to you. People have been killed over gaming, people have neglected their children until they die because of gaming, and people have neglected themselves until they die because they would rather be gaming. This seems pretty real to me. This is my thesis, Virtually Real: being in cyberspace, which you can download from here¹.

While people ask if gaming is real they don’t often inquire about the ontological status of programming. Obviously code is real because we pay people money to do it. It must be real, our society runs on it. It’s not like people are programming for fun or anything. That statement tells us a lot about our society’s relationship to work, fun and money, all of which are problematic. Coding is real because it’s real in its consequences. People get killed by code all the time. Any day now Hal will be refusing to open the pod bay door.