Post Virtual Reality Sadness
medium.com
medium.com
I don't think this effect is specific to a medium. That it can happen with VR is a sign that the technology has matured.
By putting it down I was freezing the moment I had left it in time. When I returned to finish the book I felt that familiar sense of sadness. A period of my life (fourteen months!) was over. I'll probably re-read the books someday, but I know it won't be the same. I often get that feeling when I finish a work of fiction I enjoyed greatly. But there was something about "The Wheel of Time' that made it much more profound.
Any medium that can tell a story that people find intense and immersive will produce that same feeling. Why would VR be any different?
I remember everything, every single detail, from the bitter smoke of the cigarettes to the sweet smell of drying leaves. That's all very vivid. And I can recall that incredible feeling of solitude. In fact, the certitude that this was over. That from now on, I would only ever be able to look back on this period of my life.
Honestly, this was a strange experience. I had the feeling to be extremely old, on a death bed and looking back to the life I had. When in fact, reality could not have been further removed from that setting. I was barely 18 years old, and about to start a whole new life in North-America.
You know there is something incredible about the carelessness of one's youth. Of course, to appreciate it fully you would need to be aware of it. That, in fact, would kind of weaken that very state of mind now that I think about it.
Plus France is such a wonderful country to grew-up in. I know it might sound ridiculous, but at 21 years old, I already feel a little bit like my best years are behind me. Or rather, that the warmth and happiness I have experienced will remain unmatched from now on. It's hard to think about the gardens of Paris or the Cathédrale de Reims' parvis in the summer without a heavy heart. They were my companions for nearly two decades, and years later I still don't want to say goodbye...
I guess that's the cost of happiness
That said, high school also had its social games. Most people recall having been bullied or excluded at one point or another during scolarity.
And yes, you're an excellent writer ;)
And even those who dislike the idea of having a trained conscript army in addition to regular troops have their own version of conscription. The overall tone is the same, only the military context is replaced with community work.
Either way, it is hard to imagine the shape and form of such organization because of the sheer scale at which it has to operate to be even remotely efficient. I agree with what you said about college. You meet people, lots of people, and in fact lots of similar people. There is relatively little space for the kind of variance you see in high-school when the members of the community are filtered by their performance on a standardized test anyway.-
Every emotive, immersive experience seems to produce some whiplash of the soul upon separation. As you noted, this is not unique to VR or even literary works. Even so, since one's first such is the most memorable, VR will likely slowly replace older works in this department.
The last book I did this with was "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. There's probably less than an hour's worth of reading left, but I just don't want it to end. This was maybe a year ago and I still haven't touched it since. Eventually I'll probably re-read it from the beginning and actually finish it.
I also do it for bands I really like that are slow to put out albums. I haven't heard the latest GSY!BE (from early 2015) yet, not because I don't want to, but because who knows if they're going to go through another 13 year gap between albums! Maybe in 2020 I'll be having a really bad night and 40 minutes of "new" music from one of my favorite bands is exactly what I'll need.
I think my favorite has to be Schild's Ladder, just for sheer conceptual interestingness. I ended up writing fanfiction for it.
The best one from a literary standpoint is probably the Clockwork Rocket trilogy, though.
I originally bought Permutation City because of a recommendation on HN. Schild's Ladder might have to be my next sci-fi read for the same reason. "Sheer conceptual interestingness" is pretty much exactly what I want, haha.
Anyway, I would recommend finishing it. It's a great book.
Here's hoping I don't want to finish his other novels either :)
On the other hand, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to finish Diaspora. Although its opening chapter is fantastic.
As I exited my 20's and entered my 30's, I had to deal with several deaths in the family and having to finally deal with my own mortality, this has affected me in profound ways.
I've done the same thing you have, albeit with several movie trilogies. I skipped the last Matrix movie, I refused to go see the last LOTR movie (even though I read the books when I was in my teens and knew what was going to happen), and the same thing in the Divergent series.
It's practically become a common theme in my life - some sort of psychological avoidance to have to deal with the ending of a story, the emotions and the emptiness of something I pursued for so long, now at an end.
Dark tower was another guilty pleasure of mine.
Oddly I think it wouldn't, and wonder why. Is it because we want to know the one single ending the author intended?
In my case, having multiple endings to a book would definitely make my hesitation worse.
I was also disappointed with the ending. I roughly knew the general sketch of the ending based on remarks Jordan made at a DragonCon. I knew he had written that entire series just to get to that ending. But by the time I had reached Memory of Light, I saw a possibility for something even greater.
A year later, the unpublished chapter on Damonadred (don't remember how to spell his name) came out and therein lies that possibility. Except no one will write that epic :-D
That existential anguish that comes from having journeyed ablong way -- well, the Wheel keeps turning. That's the point. There is a koan that goes, "before enlightenment? Chop wood carry water. After enlightenment? Chop wood carry water."
Stories always come to an end, no matter how magnificent. It does not matter whether that story is a work of fiction, or something you tell about yourself. What doesn't end is awareness. The Wheel moves on.
That is how I felt about Planescape: Torment, widely regarded to have one of the best tales of all RPGs, and all other great stories in other mediums.
It makes me wish there was some way to get selective voluntary amnesia, where you wipe all memories of the specific content of something, just keep the feeling that it's something you have to experience [again].
I'm lucky (?) enough to have the involuntary form of this to some degree for media. I will often forget the plot points of a movie I've watched within days to weeks, and in many cases after a year I have completely forgotten ever even having watched it. I'll pick a movie, my wife will say "we've already seen that", I'll say "I don't think so", she lovingly puts up with me because she luckily likes re-watching movies, and even by the end of the show I'll have nothing but a vague sense of deja-vu the whole time.
I have on multiple occasions, rewatched movies with twist endings like The Usual Suspects and still been surprised on the second or third viewing.
I'd rather have my wife's photographic (videographic) movie recall though...
When I finished the last book, 12-year-old me cried. This epic whirlwind of a journey was over forever. And no one else in the world around me even acknowledged it had existed.
I could not stop thinking: This can't be real, this can't be reality BUT IT IS reality. You start realizing really what the people experienced in WWII and how reality surpasses fiction, how terrible and how amazing life could be.
I was an avid reader but it is one thing to read on the safety on your house and a completely different thing experiencing it in reality. I can't stand reading war novels now like War and peace because it really hurts me after experiencing some of it.
And then you have this "living dangerous" thing in which you want more and more of this war experience, like going deeper in the jungle and talk with people in arms even when you are risking your life and a mistake means death.
You watch things you don't want to remember but you want more and more for some stupid reason.
VR will be a great tool for people learning but it could be dangerous with some things too.
If you look at how good computer graphics have gotten, it's no a far stretch to see where it will be in 20 years, 40 years. Suddenly, the are-we-in-a-simulation philosophical debate comes to mind.
For whatever reason I've never heard anyone say this before but that's exactly the experience I had after I went and saw James Cameron's "Avatar" (2009) in 3D at the cinema back when it came out. I think I may have had that same feeling after finishing a couple of books as well -- probably after Catch-22 and after Cryptonomicon -- and likely some other movies too but Avatar is the one that I remember having had that feeling after.
Anyway, thanks for making me aware that others have felt the same way about fiction. Of course, I don't believe that any of my feelings are unique in the way that nobody else has felt the same but I hope you get what I mean. Also, when I say that I remember the feeling, I don't mean mean to say that I still keep wishing I could travel to Pandora or interact with the blue catpeople -- the feeling itself faded within a few hours or days or something like that, but the memory of having had that feeling stuck with me :)
Your assertions are going to be wrong if the medium is the current reality around us. The question then becomes where does that line begin and end?
That escapism doesn't really work.
And we can not only hope that the Star Trek economics of abundance comes about, but that it is made true through a combination of technology and new economic thought.
I remember feeling like this after:
- Playing with MS Paint on Windows 3.1 for hours on end until my eyes burned when i was 8.
- Inhaling Lord of the Rings in about a week when i was 10.
- Playing Ocarina of Time for 12 hours a day as a young teen.
- Playing WoW in 100-hour weeks as an undergrad on summer break.
My solution: Move out of the big cities. I live in a small town in the countryside and my world is that fantastic.
Sadly this is one of those topics, like violence in video games, where we don't get beyond this cycle of "accuse and deny". Which is a shame because IMO there are really important topics here we need to address collectively such as how this connects to addiction http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
The "data point" I've been able to confirm with other parents of small kids (under 10) is there is a connection between extended periods of computer-aided escapism and aggression.
The experiment you can try with most kids is give them a smartphone or iPad for 1-2 hours then take it away again with minimal warning but without using force. Once you've recovered the device, the next 15-30 minutes will typically involve aggressive behaviour; shouting, physical aggression towards siblings, demands to have the device back and something not unlike Gollum desiring his Precious.
Based on my own experiences, adults can exhibit similar behaviour but extremes are dampened by conditioning, so harder to detect e.g it manifests itself in different ways e.g. sadness or depression instead of aggression.
My hypothesis for this is something like 'For every 15 minutes given to a medium capable of 'fully absorbing' human attention (books, computer games VR), 5 minutes of "unconscious recovery time" will be required to re-align the attention to the current "real" reality, during which subjects may display behaviour such as aggression, sadness or general distractedness / fidgeting'
This ratio of 15 to 5 might be different depending on the medium e.g. VR might have a more accentuated ratio than reading a book.
Why this is so I can't say for sure, but it's something like a tax on time spent existing in a disconnected reality vs. the "real reality" our bodies live in.
Try the same with a book they show interest in, and you'll get the same behaviour. But nobody does that with a book because it's ridiculous, right? But so it is ridiculous to do that with an iPad or a personal computer! I'd say it's a pretty normal reaction of someone who was concentrated and fully engaged in an action, only to be unexpectedly and forcibly interrupred.
Also disrupting "flow" can make people cranky since its hard to attain that kind of a mindstate (a lot of work can go to waste if somebody interrupts you).
Anyway... I've seen kids playing Pokemon Go running around the neighborhood and the forests near by, and they seem like happy campers. It's good that there is at least something that makes kids play outside these days.
It's still an opinion, sure, but the author did address this comparison.
Well talk about post adventure depression.
Then walking up to the door of your longtime girlfriend and knowing get what was awaiting me - talk about remedy.
Escapism in the former of a holiday from reality might be great - but reality has it's own perks.
I fully expect my children to be lamenting how their children won't want to come back to the physical (real) world - much like how we wanted our kids to get off the computer, and our parents didn't like us being on the telephone and watching TV.
The more we learn about humans the more its clear our narratives and "real world" are at least partial figments of our imagination. We remember narratives that we choose to and ignore evidence to the contrary.
VR could help reveal this for people (somewhat the same as is claimed for hallucinogens). It could also allow us to increasingly choose to build fully artificial realities. Who wouldn't choose to be a god?
Interestingly, I find this somewhat similar to looking at landscape photography that people enjoy - especially from vacation destinations. Almost every picture now has more dynamic range, edge contrast, contrast, and saturation than the human eye experiences. This means people get to amazing places but are disappointed when reality doesn't match the photo. Then they use various apps on their smartphone to try to take a picture that matches the fantasy (often by erasing any of the local context or culture).
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears.
— Nick Bostrom, Are you living in a computer simulation?, 2003This bit is seems little bit strange to me in that it's actually not necessary at all[1]... a simulation runs on its "own timescale", i.e. it doesn't actually matter how fast/slowly the simulator runs -- the simulation still experiences time advancing at the proverbial dt/dt. This paragraph just seems to be scaremongering to the effect of "it'll happen soon because new processors!"
Regardless: If we're living in a simulation of such fidelity it doesn't really matter if it's "really real" or a simulation; our lives will still start and end inside the simulation. (And I daresay this whole thing is just a trivial rehashing of solipsism with an added tinge of technophilia. I really wish physicists had more interaction with philosophers.)
[1] I could imagine an argument for positing that e.g. Quantum Computing would be necessary, but the "enormous amounts of computing power" phrasing is incredibly vague, so who knows what the actual premise is?
EDIT: Trim pointless "who said what" bit.
How so? I'm still not following the logic here. AFACS it does not matter how fast anything runs -- a simulation always proceeds a tick at a time. The simulated reality cannot (almost by definition) observe time at a smaller time scale.
The argument is that as a conscious being, your prior expectation of "where you are" should be a uniform distribution over all conscious beings. So the idea that you are "probably" in a simulation relies on the assumption that there will be more conscious beings inside simulations than in the top-level "real" universe.
I mean I can sort-of-see-it if this is the assumption, but the assumption itself seems quite circular to me.
EDIT: I also don't understand how this is connected to my point about speed-of-simulation, but...
Solipsism doesn't seem to quite fit. Like, sure, you're a brain in a jar in this scenario... but there are a lot of other brains sharing the jar with you, too. Solipsism inherently requires a singular existence rather than a communal one.
EDIT: Pithyness. Solipsism is fun, isn't it? :)
EDIT#2: I didn't mean to dismiss your point preemptively. I actually think it might be interesting to explore whether there could be (in principle) such a thing a shared-yet-simulated reality without succumbing to the solipsism argument. I don't think it's possible, but I'm not a philosopher. Incidentally physics has a similar problem. If you're interested, look up Boltzmann Brains and the "Arrow of Time".
Photographs with modern digital technology have many advantages over what our eyes can do, but I find it's typical the opposite problem of trying to make an image that adequately captures reality.
The advantage is that our brain can interpret the information from our eyes in real-time, meaning we can extract much more from a scene in real life. A photograph is just a snapshot with a pre-selected focal point, exposure, and view angle, and it can never reproduce the sensation of viewing something for real.
Strange, I always assume it's the other way round -- photos can't capture these amazing views. That's especially true in the mountains, where in photos it's usually "meh, just some rocks" while standing on the top of a mountain irl has all these amazing views and feelings that cannot be expressed easily otherwise. Though in a crowded, popular tourist destinations[0] your argument is closer to truth.
0. http://www.boredpanda.com/travel-expectations-vs-reality/
1) It reminds me of the quote:
“Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.”
― William Feather
2) What is the author doing in actual reality that makes it so pale compared to VR?
It's interesting that the first example brought up is about interacting with a phone.
For god's sake man! Play a sport, have sex, go for a walk and smell the leaves, go for a swim in the ocean. Sweat, strain, climb and explore. Be an _animal_ because that's what we are!
Go and get barrelled on a wave in the ocean and then come back and tell me that VR is better. :-)
I don't think it's that straight forward. I have a pretty fine damn time irl http://www.pauric.net/blog/?p=22
I've played a few of the leading titles on PSVR but then hit upon this simple puzzle game that has burrowed into my mind. I can't wait to get back to it, I lose hours to this game
https://youtu.be/YoxJFkFzu98?t=1h56m49s
It scratches an itch that is hard to find in the real world (I do enjoy packing our cases up for vacation though).
I think it's something about the immersion, pulling on your focus so hard that you loose yourself, like a good book.
VR is all the things you compare it to (wrt pulling focus) except it's on tap.
Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe all you need is the character to look you in the eyes. But I suspect most people would need more. Someone you can actually talk to. Not just pick multiple choice responses
It's not "stereoscopic HMD" type VR - yet. There are projects (CtrlAltStudio, for one) working on that.
Take the answers from the human participant, make appropriate "mmhmm" noises, vary randomly around the center of the human participant's statements (in a space generated from the answers of other participants), and play back with continued eye contact and the face and body of high status persons.
I guarantee you could have that face ask for $5 for a ticket for next time and get it.
Not about love but friendship. In any case, a good movie.
Some chemical's going off in your brain, saying "WOW, my kids are AMAZING". It's a delusion that helps the human race carry on. How can you compete with a nature built in drug?
What you going to do for kicks in 10 years time when your kids are teenagers? The allure will have rubbed off by then.
The only legitimate symptom I've heard of is some people, myself included, get VR dreams in the beginning, but they quickly go away. This has led me to the idea of making a VR lucid dreamer trainer considering dreams and VR environments have so much in common, but thus far not a lot of traction on my part especially in regards what game mechanics would help you achieve lucid dreams.
That said, I find most of the experiences fairly milquetoast with rare "Wow" moments which cannot be relived again. Unlike a typical skinner-box game, you really can't get wow'd over and over, but man, those initial wow's are incredible. I just flew in Freedom 7 in Alan Shepard's shoes last night in the beta for 'Go For Launch.' This had the real controls and the real audio in the mission. I didn't exactly weep, but it did affect me strongly on am emotional level, especially when I thought someone should ask Shepard to try this and tell us how realistic it is only to remember he passed away a while ago. I've been at work all day and haven't wished to be back in the capsule and I know if I do it again, it'll lose 90% of the magic. I may not ever play that mission again to be honest.
Savor the moments, guys. Don't pine to be constantly re-living the same stuff over and over in VR. It'll disappoint you in the end. VR is special in a way, but its not magical. It follows the same rules all other entertainment does. If you're finding yourself addicted then you've got a personal addiction issue. Its not the medium, its you. You probably need help at this point. Ask any ex-WoW addict how bad it can be and how it ruins lives. Seek out that help.
> If you're finding yourself addicted then you've got a personal addiction issue. Its not the medium, its you.
The author gets many things right, such as the change in perception of distances. I get this from VR, but I also get it from changing from glasses to contact lenses (and vice versa). Doesn't sound like complete click-bait to me.
I do think it's an interesting point that the escapism VR offers is possibly equivalent to some dissociatives, and that it hasn't really being considered. Some people struggle with addiction to (plain) video games. Blaming the person isn't fair or helpful at all.
Among the spiritual seekers for these kinds of mindblowing experiences, there is a seeking for greater and more intense experiences. What follows is a sort of emptiness or depression. It's touching on dukkha, that is, existential anguish.
The key, as it has always been, to be present in the present moment, whether that means being present during the VR experience, or being present in meatspace. Being present to that emptiness will allow it to bleed out and dissolve.
I'm personally glad to hear about these reports. There is a good possibility that VR and AR is the gateway towards mainstream exploration of consciousness. Up until then, honest discussion about existential anguish has been buried and suppressed, and I don't think that has served our civilization well. Here's a shoutout to all the explorers to come.
My own perceptual warping story doesn't come with a game, but I assure you its super disorienting to spend a couple hours looking thru a low power binoc microscope to work on electronics and then just get up and walk around, your hand eye coordination is all messed up for awhile because what you see your hands do has been times 2 magnified and bent 90 degrees upward for some hours. Putting a key in a keyhole is a challenge for a couple minutes till reality snaps back. Its a form of sea sickness, after all. Your position sense doesn't match your optic sense and that makes some people puke although in low doses you just feel really weird.
Much like there is a difference between the taste of a beer in a relaxed setting vs after a long afternoon of yard work, your blood sugar or hormones or something distort your perception of the taste of the beer. Or DnD / pathfinder / rpg in general seems more fun when candle-lit. And a zillion observations in a hundred comments here about drugs or whatever.
I would think there are more technological opportunities to mix perception alteration with a story or game than just AI or what we've mentioned. Perhaps someone could scientifically calculate a formula to determine the correct music for a game. Maybe there is a type of food that naturally goes with social media use (probably something sugary). Maybe a certain hue of general room lighting is good for certain TV genres. Aside from VR technology, however cool it may be, I have this feeling narrative/game plus perception warping is a large mostly unexplored solution space.
I like to sail. I wonder if, along the lines of the theory above, liking sailing comes from ultra low dose perceptual warping due to subclinical sea sickness combined with the purely mechanical labor of sailing. Could you give me a small dose of anti-anti-sea sickness pills and I'd love basketweaving or something.
I'm sure after you have the time to become "normalized" to VR, the real world will seem less depressing. perhaps even refreshing.
I have the Oculus Rift, but have experienced nothing like what he's describing. Maybe its the lack of room scale, the lack of hand/arm interaction (Oculus Touch isn't out yet), or maybe I'm just playing different games?
Oculus never felt magical to me. In fact, if I'm being honest, it was kind of a let down. Yea it's cool, but the resolution is garbage (even in the production version I have). This article reads like someone who's never used VR, but worries about what it COULD do to you... if it really were great.
Without that hand tracking, it's difficult to feel truly immersed in the world.
The next generation of pixel density will make a huge difference IMO. I can comfortably work in VR with multiple desktops, but the resolution is tad too low.
I am interested in this. Can you, say, write code or read text for long hours, without having to upsize the text too much?
I get around this by adding multiple emulated displays (using Headless Ghost / Compulab Emulator) that are visible only in VR. Gives more room for window placement.
I'm used to working with 2-6 monitors on the desktop so it's natural for me to extend that into VR, but some people don't like the head movement needed.
I certainly get some of what the author is talking about in terms of that coming-out-of-the-matrix feeling: the tetris affect of my chaperone cage is strong, and objects feel weird to interact with, using the phone UI is kinda ridiculous.. however, I certainly don't think I am experiencing any type of postpartum sadness.
Roomscale VR is /ridiculously/ immersive. Every.single.person. I have put in omg and wtfs; even if they don't particularly care for video games.
I understand what others are saying about books, but really vivid dreams seem like a closer match. You can't control a book, in a dream there's still some agency, some action that can change everything.
I would expect this is closer to when movies were first invented. There's a story (which may be untrue) of a movie which had a train heading towards the camera, and people running out of the theater thinking it was real.
I expect the feelings the author is exploring is in part experiencing a brand new medium. What I really like about this article is how the author isn't drawing conclusions, but rather saying this is an interesting phenom to investigate further. VR does provide extensions to fundamental human ability (I can only thing of the depression a disabled person would feel if they could move around virtually), and I would be interested to see if there's a fundamentally addictive quality to extending your interactions with reality.
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sateve...
Mine was triggered roughly a year after I had been into VR and also a year after I moved away from home. It's hard to say which played a bigger role. It was triggered by my best friend coming to visit me.
It's fucking terrible. And I don't know what to do about it.
This is akin to why BBC documentaries always look better than the real thing. (I watched Planet Earth II last night). Those giant lenses in the fancy cameras can keep more objects in focus, allowing us to see both the parrot and the mountain background in ways we couldn't in the real world.
Of course people can and will get addicted to almost anything. VR may be healthier than heavy drinking, heroin, meth, etc.
Honestly, I don't see why these activities are mutually exclusive.
I am much more concerned about the kinds of destructive power that people who are heavily-drunk, on heroin, or tweaking on meth, can now have inside of these head-mounted displays.
Even then, returning back to reality was painful.
Environments exert evolutionary pressures, which select for/against existing traits (inherited or mutated) in organisms.
The Lawnmower Man I remember is just a short story and has nothing to do with VR or cyberspace at all. The movie doesn't have anything to do with the story. Like "I, Robot", it's a case where an existing unrelated screenplay had the name of a famous written work slapped on it to try to increase viewership.
Is VR experience is expected to be something very new , I mean for example when u do something new like play a video game or sport you experience something new , is VR experience is something similar ? OR is it trying to mimic the natural behavior (like feeling of hitting the ball when playing a sport )
They are obviously interested in eCommerce given TaoBao. I don't think Buy Plus went super well given it was targeting Cardboard. But they have stuff cooking with Vive and Magic Leap. Unfortunately, VR eCommerce is a hard problem. It's shiny-sounding, but it's difficult to provide actual value to consumers that isn't just hype.
And also VR hasn't entered mainstream China at all, not even for developers, so adoption is an issue. No one has space, and the VR cafes only attract super gamers.
iStaging created their WebVR viewer with A-Frame: https://aframe.io/blog/istaging/...this seems to be doing well given Cardboard is enough for this use case. 360 photos aren't really a compelling experience, but sufficient allowing clients to at least get a tiny feel for the place.
But the articles about VR becoming "big" in China, I am not sure about given visits there over the last couple years.
I didn't get this effect with less intense games like Space Pirate Trainer.
When I noticed myself getting mean online I thought, “Something has gone terribly wrong.” It was obvious the rest of the ARPAnet had a social problem, not just me being some sort of asshole.
My book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is ruffling virtual feathers across the ARPAnet. And so it should, because I invented virtual reality. Wikipedia, which is a tissue of lies, says so. Prospect magazine’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll lists me. Also, my hair is much better than yours. And I’m fifty. According to Wikipedia, so I’d better change my birthday.
Today, the web is a bland place. It’s all user-generated content — silly clips on YouTube, spiteful anonymous comments on blogs about my books, endless photographs of people at a bar with their friends or up a mountain with an ironing board. It was much better back in the early days of the ARPAnet, before we let the commercial users on. These words will mostly be read by numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. You know, the peasants. Virtual reality is far more ennobling, but you never hear people talking about that any more.
The ARPAnet only creates banal mashups of old culture. Salvagers picking over a garbage dump. Only the old-world economy of books, films and newspapers creates original content like Lawnmower Man or Battlefield Earth. Everyone knows that real artists have no influences. This stuff the kids are into these days is just noise!
The ARPAnet is also killing music, according to my good friends at the RIAA. Did you know there’s no music in Spain any more? It’s true!
Will we — meaning I — be able to live off our brains in the future, or will we just have to give our creative works away for free? If we can’t live off our brains then we’ll need a form of SOCIALISM just to survive. WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNISM! Until the Wikipedia Corporation finally builds a good interface, for goggles and power-gloves.
Open source and open content are a cancer. The dogma I object to is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn’t have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, so I’m going to call it Digital MAOISM, which is COMMUNISM. Update, five years later: Here is a detailed retcon explanation of why I was not just trolling for headlines by calling Wikipedia COMMUNISM, but was speaking precisely and you just weren’t thinking hard enough: [snip 10,000 words]
Also, you should get into virtual reality more.
You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is published on papyrus scroll and hand-illustrated by monks. You cannot have a copy until you have fought your way up the mountain and proven yourself worthy.
Netflix' CEO seems to already be thinking about this:
http://www.ibtimes.com/simulation-hypothesis-matrix-possible...