Bitcoin, Second Life and the Allegory of the Cave

Maybe Plato was right and the reality that's perceivable by the senses is only a shadow of the truth. Ideal forms do exist, but they’re not apprehensible so what you’re left with is the condition of the cave dweller looking at silhouettes. This was the theory behind The Matrix too. Empirical reality is really virtual, the production of a mechanism that leaves the mind in a continual dream. An on-line creation like Second Life creates a universe which plays on this principle in the end offering something, which though admittedly not real in any sense, vies with reality to the extent that it satisfies so many human needs. Bitcoin functions in a similar way since it’s essentially a virtual currency. If anything knowledge from an epistemic point of view seems to be leaning away from the notion of absolute truth and absolute reality. Increasingly the universe is a relative place. In the literary world, deconstruction played a role in this by enforcing the idea that texts were culturally bound; in science you had Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The current occupant of The White House has taken a perverse form of this idea in his labeling  much reporting as “fake news.” Those being accused of propagating “fake news” hurl the epithet back and the two sides are off to the races, having been tossed from Eden of Absolute Truth.