Month: October 2019

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems. (Source: Wikipedia)

Today, Philip Rosedale tweeted a link to a provocative piece Rushkoff wrote on Medium this past August, titled Most VR is Total Bullshit. And I think it’s a must-read, even if you completely disagree with his premise.

Douglas Rushkoff argues the virtual reality, originally developed to be a countercultural and psychedelic technology, has instead been turned into an experience “characterized less by imagination and creativity than surveillance, control, and extractive corporate capitalism”. He goes on to say:

The VR revival seems fixated on augmented reality, where instead of going into a whole new world, we see imagery superimposed over this one. It is a marketer’s dream technology: novel enough to be interesting, grounded enough to prevent true exploration, and perfectly suited to the task of labeling every object in the world with a price tag.

The current VR hype doesn’t offer us access to new worlds so much as new ways to package consumer entertainment. It’s Facebook’s Oculus Rift, gaming, movies, Bible stories, and of course porn. Most VR today is little more than 360-degree video, a slightly more immersive version of business as usual. This non-interactive entertainment is to real interactive VR what Game of Thrones is to Dungeons and Dragons or Windows is to the command line. The fact that the technology has become easier to navigate and more lavishly rendered is hardly a consolation prize. It’s a prison.

While Rushkoff admits that VR does have some useful applications, he offers a dire warning:

VR does appear to have value in medical or therapeutic contexts. I’m glad we have virtual experiences that can help retrain an obese person to eat less. Gulf War veterans suffering from PTSD have benefited from VR that recreates the conditions of their trauma. But we mustn’t fool ourselves into believing that these applications are delivering the Promethean power of digital fire to the masses. They turn their users into the passive recipients of content, rather than the active constructors of a reality.

And so the race is on to build a VR landscape of, say, the Serengeti, where the animals and savanna look as authentic as they do in Disney’s new CGI version of The Lion King. Never mind the climate crisis threatening the real savannah. People raised with these virtual worlds at their disposal will come to prefer them to reality, anyway, just as they are coming to prefer porn to the messiness of sex. And as members of the Frankfurt School tried to warn us, once a culture prefers the simulacrum to the world, fascism can’t be far behind.

He argues that VR must support and enhance creativity, as opposed to simply immersing the user in simulations:

By focusing on immersive simulation over active creation, most virtual reality technologies undermine the innate human abilities that they could be fostering. “It is worth pointing out that we have been making virtual realities for a very, very long time,” Terence McKenna reminded us at the dawn of VR. “When you sit the children down around the fire and begin to tell the old, old stories and pictures rise out of the flames — that is virtual reality.”

We must use technology to stoke those collaboratively creative flames, instead of extinguishing them.

It’s a short, engaging read, no more than 10 minutes long, and I encourage you to go over to Medium and read it yourself in full, to see whether you agree or not with what Rushkoff has to say.

UPDATE 5:29 p.m.: Well, one reader had this to say about it!

And Peter (better known in High Fidelity and Sansar by his handle, Theanine) makes an excellent point.