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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

There is no way in hell this ad was actually written to attract people to VR. This is, like, the dystopian version of VR. The physical world crumbles around us as we live in a poor digital rendering of our nostalgia. Somebody must have been super psyched that Facebook was huffing their own farts so hard that they didn't realize this was a critique of their vision.

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This comment[1] from a previous thread on the "metaverse" has stuck with me: there are real, living people who think that the world of Ready Player One is a valid aspirational goal, and some of those people work on projects like this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930355

You know what's worse than the world of ready player one? The world of ready player one where there is no VR.

I don't think creating fully immersive VR is inherently bad.

It's been a decade since I've read it, but my recollection is that the book tightly conjoins the success of VR to the crumbling of the world's institutions and societies: there's a positive feedback loop between VR escapism and not tackling the world's problems.

I'm not sure that "fully immersive VR" is intrinsically bad, at least not any worse than our current less immersive digital world. But it's not hard to see how VR can make a bad situation worse.

I'd argue that people would have more incentive to fix their real world if they hadn't had a fake one to escape to.

True, but you can use that argument against most forms of entertainment. Books, movies, video games, DND, sports, etc... VR is just another thing people can do in their leisure time.

Everyone here is freaking out "oh no, Facebook is going to make something so entertaining society will collapse". I would be so proud of myself if I created something so entertaining society collapsed, lol.

And why is that do you think? Is it inherently better, or is it only temporarily better? Have the social creeps, corrupt bastards and rapacious motherf*ckers arrived yet, or are they next year's customers? Because, I can guarantee you right now, unless someone's developed some kind of psych-AI to filter out those folks, there is NO WAY, your utopian VR world will stay "better than" the real world (assuming it even is "better than" in its most ideal form).

I have a belief - you can call it "phs318u's law" - There is no system, no structure, no belief, and no technology that can solve for the worst of humankind. Period. Eventually, bad humans > everything else. Kind of like a social entropy - its a one way journey.

Given the rare earth metals and countless other resources needed to run all the necessary technology, the two "real worlds" would not look the same. And that's not even factoring in the effect of having countless people checked out of real reality in the VR case, with correspondingly less desire to fix it.

The world of ready player one where there is no VR has some guillotines and maybe a future.

It is always weird to me how some people see the dystopian aspects of dystopian fiction as inspiration. They will see cautionary tales about certain technology and respond by trying to build that technology. It is even more bizarre when these people will openly admit it and name their product something like "Soylent".

The universe isn’t black and white. Hell it can’t seem to quite agree on where it’s particles are at a fundamental level (until we figure out what measurement is - see latest Sabine YouTube video). Further things are often negligible for some scale, great/useful for some scale, then outright horrible past some other scale.

Though naming something Soylent did always seem too on the nose.

It's not all "black and white". But this suggests a very superficial reading of source material this is purportedly based on. It's saying "Hey that future looks kinda cool!!!" at a very superficial level without a deeper reading of how peoples' material conditions are affected.

You can see that through Cyberpunk. People will think that if a world like that exists it’s exiting it’s full of challenges and amazing. Instead of having to leave a “boring” life in a “boring” world with all these limits.

The creator of Cyberpunk said that during the hype of the video game he was so sad to see that people really wanted to see it happen in real life because when he created this universe it was suppose to be a critic what the future with technology can bring instead of wishing it to become true.

I have to say Elon Musk and his fans doesn’t help.

You could have done this commercial very differently in a way that would have made it feel much less unsettling:

Garage band breaks up as members move away to start jobs/families. Band gets back together and plays in VR to large audiences.

The fact that no one at Meta recognized how deeply dystopian the commercial was, leads me to believe dystopian is part of the plan.

And the irony is really strong here since the term “metaverse” was coined in the context of a dystopian version of VR.

Was it? I thought it came from Snow Crash, and the VR in that book is generally a pretty nice part of that world IIRC.

> the VR in that book is generally a pretty nice part of that world

Yes, that's the point: the metaverse in Snow Crash may be pretty nice, but the world outside the metaverse fucking sucks. That's the dystopia.

Ah, understood. I read your original wrong then.

A better version of that story would really sell the addictive escapist appeal matched with the social incentives of participation (and maybe - more subtly - the coercive disincentives of non-participation) while allowing the dystopian reveal to happen gradually.

That would be better, but I think they've done about as well as they could while still convincing management that it is an ad.

The problem is that the physical world crumbling around us is something that we can all see with our present eyes. That now those of us who live outside of East Asia are in the middle of a plunge into the abyss is plain as day. Simple things like visiting a grocery store or driving down the streets of ones childhood home are extremely alienating things that generate nothing but loathing and regret. Nobody is selling any solution better than escapism than this, and indeed, most people who say we should restore society to the standards of the times where we were building material prosperity and social fabric are called all called all sorts of pejoratives, banned from the workplace and financial services, and even subject to violence by mobs and militias that the state seems to either ignore completely or sometimes nod and winkingly support. All of society screams to you to shoot dope and put on the headset, and no other alternatives are given.

I haven't seen any of this stuff.

The only thing that worries me a little is the cars without license plates.

You haven't seen any of this stuff? There's been multiple frontpage articles on HN alone about financial institution based censorship. The Canadian government is gloating in public about banning people from the banking system and getting them fired from their jobs in the past week. I am absolutely stunned you haven't heard about any of this happening.

>There's been multiple frontpage articles on HN alone

I was replying to your original comment, focusing on the real world around me.

You wrote "the physical world crumbling around us is something that we can all see with our present eyes"

And "Simple things like visiting a grocery store or driving down the streets of ones childhood home are extremely alienating things that generate nothing but loathing and regret"

I live on the edge of a small American city (roughly 1 million greater urban area) where it's only a few miles between downtown and the suburbs so I do errands anywhere in the vicinity.

Early in the pandemic, it was the suburban grocery stores that had significant numbers of people who seemed pushy, vaguely angry at the world, and maybe 1/4 of them not wearing masks.

I was more comfortable going to the inner city grocery store because everybody was wearing a mask and keeping their distance. Not that I was particularly paranoid about the virus, just because it felt less hostile and less crowded.

The scariest thing I've seen there was a pickup truck plastered Florida-style with graphics and lettering about somebody's paranoid fantasies, vendettas, and politics. It straight up looked like someone who might randomly murder you if they learned you worked for state government because they think the governor is some kind of evil dictator coming to take their guns.

I don't see my neighborhood crumbling. Haven't been to my "childhood home" but I don't think anything in particular has happened to the street it's on.

What specifically do you want to restore? Cheap colleges, social safetynet, unions? People will (often incorrectly) call you a socialist for supporting that kind of stuff, but just don't think of it as a pejorative.

What I want is irrelevant. The point is a good half of the population in the United States believes that the social and material landscape they grew up with is in profound decay. What I specifically perceive to be the issue is much less important than the fact that lots of people think their lives are being trampled upon, but if we're asking me personally? For starters, I want the businesses of my home that were shuttered due to arbitrary restrictions that were not levied upon megacorporations over the flu to be reopened and fully compensated at the expense of the people that made trillions. I want them to go back in time and prevent the government subsidized section 8 housing that infested my town and skyrocketed and filled it full of fentanyl and methamphetamine and subsequent overdoses and rape and murders to be prevented in the first place. That would also have prevented it from being later burned down in riots as well. I want public schools that enrich the cognitive function and knowledge of my kids instead of trying to convince them they are racist and transgender. I want there to be a steady supply of goods on store shelves again, and not incredible supply chain crises created by an intentional multinational campaign of The Great Reset. I want Klaus Schwab to not be able to publicly gloat he controls the elected representatives of G5 nations. I want to be able to travel freely without having my family's medical decisions scrutinized. I want the free as in freedom Internet I grew up with back before 5 companies controlled the entire social graph. I would like more manufacturing backbone and jobs in the United States, like before we shipped everything to Mexico and China. I would also like 95% of H1Bs to be banned, and the sponsors penalized by the government for immigration fraud. I want housing to cost the same percentage of the median income as it did for my grandparents. College, the same.

I don't see the world crumbling in any permanent way. I just see the conventional liquidity costs problem where people hold onto money to avoid storage costs and capital depreciation. This can lead to a war until artificial capital scarcity sets in and the accumulation game starts from scratch. The truth is that this is not a good reason to advocate for VR because the solution is pretty simple. Internalize capital depreciation and storage costs involved in maintaining liquidity of physical goods by introducing holding costs onto money and land ownership.

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