Virtual (Escape From) Reality
Note: This post was originally published under ‘Monday Musings’ on my Patreon several weeks ago. Go join the community for $1 per month to get weekly writing, audio rambles, and other stuff.
You've probably seen it already, but this morning Apple threw their hat into the ring and announced their shiny first official VR headset coming in 2024, called the Apple Vision Pro. It costs $3,499 and it will ostensibly change the home, the workplace, and the world for the better!
But we all know that's not true.
Amid other discussions around AI art and ChatGPT, the single thought that's been rattling around in my head for the last couple years has been: So we're really doing this, huh? Don't we know better? Can't we see through this?
We know AI art is going to make life and livelihood worse for artists, and indeed, for just about everyone. We know ChatGPT is already being used by students to cheat, by employers and corporations to argue for lower wages for writers or attempt to replace them entirely, and by the tech industry to mine data from users. We know experts in the tech world (indeed, many of the ones who helped create the programs taking center stage right now) are expressing regret, uncertainty, and alarming fear at what AI will do to the world at large. And yet we continue marching on like it's all just a fun little experiment to see what computers can do, as though lives are not on the line.
There's something about VR that feels even stupider than the other stuff, though. Come on, I mean, just watch the promo video Apple released. It's some Black Mirror shit and everyone knows it. And yet, for some reason, we continue marching forward like it's all totally-not-dystopian.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely against VR Playstation games, or the idea of VR entertainment as a momentary novelty or an inventive attraction. In fact, that's what it's been for the last 10-or-so years and I'm still unconvinced it will evolve into anything more.
The way that Apple is marketing their new headset, though, is far more than novelty, far more than entertainment, and far more than attraction. It's a light cybernetic enhancement, a new and exciting necessity to functioning in the modern world, from the makers of the same one that has already become a necessity in our pockets right now. It will revolutionize work, it will revolutionize personal life, and it will revolutionize play. One reaction from today even said "this will revolutionize memories." So that's, uh, great.
I still have my doubts that this will catch on in the mainstream—and like Zuckerberg's Metaverse, I hope we can roast and belittle it enough that it doesn't. Most of the tech that has truly revolutionized the world has appealed to people because of how it made connecting with other people more convenient. Cars, telephones, email, social media; even as each of them has had negative consequences—and maybe actually separated us from people more than they have connected us—the appeal that caused them to take hold in the first place was the notion that we could be more easily connected to others.
This incarnation of VR still has yet to sell anything like that, really. One of the little scenes from Apple's promo video shows a woman on an airplane looking around at the other passengers miserably before pulling down her VR goggles, shifting the environment around her to a beautiful fake sunset, and watching Everything Everywhere All at Once in the void. The irony of this choice of movie cannot be overstated; the conclusion of Everything Everywhere is all about Michelle Yeoh's character learning to be present and content in the reality right in front of her. The Apple promo makes a very different point: the appeal of VR is the ability to retreat into your own world, a world that nobody else can see, free of distraction or obstacle to being entertained. It's the pinnacle of individualism—and it might also be the pinnacle of isolation. That's why I'm really not sure if it will gain appeal in the long run; individualism sells, but if Apple wants VR to go mainstream, they'll have to figure out a way to normal convince people that they will actually connect with their friends better by paying $3499. The idea that "you can FaceTime people and, uh, hear them really well or something??" isn't gonna cut it.
That sounds like I don't take VR seriously as a lifestyle of the future, but in a way, it's already the lifestyle of today. We've been willingly living in virtual reality for years now—just go watch Bo Burnham: Inside. The difference, I guess, is that our phones and computers are still contained to their status as little windows into a universe that must be viewed through an object separate from ourselves. This new edition of virtual reality attempts to alter our daily sensory experience itself, like a symbiotic creature or an alien grafting its tendrils to our eyes and ears.
By far one of the most unsettling images in Apple's promo video occurs when they show the woman in the ad using the "mindfulness" app with her VR headset, sitting cross-legged and breathing slowly with this ridiculous machine on her face. Mindfulness, meditation, prayer, and all other experiences of the sort are supposed to be about engaging with reality—and indeed, often engaging with the reality of the transcendent—by using your five senses and grounding yourself in the physical world around you. When I pray, I like to be out in nature seeing the sunlight pouring through the trees. Apple's VR ad twists and distorts this idea by depicting "mindfulness" as the action of filtering out everything else and watching some kind of bizarre flower petals visualizer surrounding you in the middle of your darkened living room. If true prayer or mindfulness is about zoning in, this is an image of someone tuning out—and all with the help of a hollow, corporately-approved screensaver.
One of the more appealing purposes for VR that I've seen some folks in the film community excited about has been the ability to watch movies in a virtual home-theater, on the "big screen" strapped to your face. I don't doubt that this could be fun and immersive, especially if the picture quality of VR improves, and I wouldn't be opposed to giving it a try myself. Ultimately, though, it brings me back to things I've said and written about the virtues of movie theaters in the past. In a world that seems to get more divided and isolated every day, movie theaters have the momentary ability to unite our fractured multiverse by allowing a room of people to share the same reality together for two hours, devoting their humble presence and attention to something outside of themselves in the company of others doing the same thing. Watching a movie in VR is the complete antithesis to that experience; it is an artificial simulation of a big screen on the smallest screen imaginable, witnessed exclusively by the singular individual wearing the VR headset, removing them from the presence of others and allowing them to curate and control their "universe" in isolation. How would you even watch a movie with another person in this scenario? Do you both have to put on VR headsets for a total of $7000? How isolating, how individualistic, how mind-numbingly pathetic is that?
In my time growing up in the church, I encountered a lot of people who clung to the theology of heaven and hell as the final solution to escape the world in front of them. The idea was that the "things of this world" don't matter because someday we'll all be whisked away to an ethereal cloudscape and leave everything else behind. Especially when you're struggling with trauma, poverty, sickness, and the messiness of the world around you, it can be an appealing premise. But I've become convinced over the years that this is both a destructive notion in the long run and a wildly unfaithful reading of The Bible, which is in so often about drawing us closer into the reality, presence, and importance of the here-and-now—not because the transcendent doesn't exist, but because it does and we're engaging with it at every moment. The Kingdom of Heaven has the potential to exist right here, in this moment, and that means that everything in front of us (in this beautifully-created world that God called "good") has profound significance and value, not just as a meager first attempt to be thrown away later.
I think in some sense, VR holds the same theological appeal as the escapist afterlife ideas of my youth. It's a way to avoid the hard messiness, sharp tangibility, and pointed difficulty of the real world—even if that difficulty looks like other human beings in a movie theater—and filter out the mess to find escape. TS Eliot said, after all, that "humankind cannot bear very much reality." I'm reminded again of Bo Burnham's intensely sarcastic articulation of our current moment in Inside: "All human interaction, whether it be social, political, spiritual, sexual, or interpersonal, should be contained in the much more safe, much more real interior digital space. The outside world, the non-digital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space. One should only engage with the outside world as one engages with a coal mine—suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface."
The thing about these escapist universes, especially in VR, is that they are rarely neutral. As much as we’d like to believe that they are simply allowing us to look inward and focus on finding meaning within ourselves or even within the innocent entertainment or networking that we love, there is always another more sinister and self-serving entity present in the experience. The fact is, Apple is producing these headsets because they believe that they can make money off of them, and many other corporations (like Disney) will be participating because of that same equation. As soon as Bob Iger took the stage at Apple's event today, the Disney stock rocketed up to infinity and beyond.
These tools are not being developed altruistically to improve our lives, for the sake of peace and goodwill toward men. They are being developed because the billionaires behind them believe that our attention is a commodity, and the more immersive and symbiotic the device, the more easily our attention and personal data can be captured and monetized. Think about how addicted we all are to our phones already. Now think about the fact that this VR headset represents tech companies saying, "That's not enough. I need more data, more attention, more eyes on ads. I want them more addicted than that. I want our technology to attach itself to their faces." Just today, one of Apple's prototyping researchers publicly described the way that the company plans to use data like "eye tracking, electrical activity in the brain, heart beats and rhythms, [and] muscle activity" to capture and record the mental and psychological state of users—allegedly for the user's own benefit. As one reply to the information said: "Imagine thinking any of this sounds anything but incredibly bleak."
More than anything, watching Apple's promo video, I was struck by the way that it felt almost like a device built solely for the experience of quarantine during the pandemic. Nearly all the footage in the video features people using the headset to FaceTime with friends from afar, watch movies and sports live on their couch, play video-games online, and work remotely—all from the safe comfort of their home. During the pandemic, when we were all bound to our houses and unable to leave for months on end, this ability to escape into a digital paradise might have felt like water in the desert. And indeed, it makes sense that tech companies would be nostalgic for that era; I'm no pandemic conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but it's an undeniable fact that we were making more ad revenue and generating more data when we were forced to stay at home and migrate to an increasingly digital existence.
Now that things have more-or-less returned to the status quo, though, the marketing angle of personal escape (from the comfort of your couch) feels almost out-of-touch. In my experience, many people want to get out of their house more these days, especially after so much time involuntarily stuck indoors. Disney's tie-in ad for the VR headset asked, "what if you could bring Disney World into your world?" while showing a digital version of Cinderella Castle perched on someone's kitchen countertop and shooting off fireworks for them. Is there anyone out there who would really prefer this to actually going to Disney World? I know things have gotten weird in these recent years, but I have to believe we're all still much more sensible than that.
In the last few years, I have become increasingly convinced that the purpose purpose of life is to become fully human and to live fully within the richness of reality with God and other people. When I think about "living in reality," one image that springs to mind is The Royal Ocean Film Society's video STUDY MORE THAN FILM. It's an old favorite. In one sense, it’s a video purely about why filmmakers should expand their horizons of learning and doing to inform their art by doing more than just watching movies. In a larger sense, though, it’s a video about fully engaging with reality and all the richness that it provides.
"Train for a marathon. Learn to play chess. Study marine biology. Learn about other cultures. Learn how to cook. Learn to play the trumpet. Learn how to garden. Learn what's in your backyard. Go a Kayak and go out on the lake with your buddies every Monday. Pick up biking. Pick up hiking. Pick up a textbook or two. Do you wanna make films? Scratch that. Do you wanna make good films? Scratch that. Do you wanna make great films? Then you've gotta study more."
Living in reality can be hard and messy sometimes. I'm reminded of the opening scene of the newly-released Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, where Gwen Stacy chooses to leave her universe behind because she believes she can't fix her relationship with her father. As the ending of that movie shows, though: engaging with the messiness of reality can actually save lives and draw out something more beautiful than you could've conceived otherwise.
I’m not someone who believes that every last app and experience rooted in technology is part of a broad conspiracy; after all, I am writing this post on my Apple MacBook. I am becoming increasingly doubtful, though, that very many of these technologies are being designed with our best interest in mind. They are tools capable of being used to create and accomplish worthwhile things, but they are no longer neutral tools. It is an uphill battle to continue to use them well. But ya know what will never be rigged to mine your data? Walking in the woods. Ya know what won't ask to attach itself to your eyes and ears? Learning to make pottery with a friend. Ya know what won't try to sell you something at every turn? Going to the library.
Admittedly, writing all of this (and even writing about AI last week) makes me feel like I might be turning into one of those boomer Facebook users ranting about teenagers and their smartphones ignoring the world around them. There's some hypocrisy to those boomer talking points (especially since boomers have quickly become just as addicted as anyone else, and more susceptible to misinformation) but at their core, I do agree with the sentiment! Reality is good, true, and beautiful. We need our technology to draw us further into it, not offer an addictive and corporately-curated escape under the guise of fun and entertainment. Most of the movies we've made about AI and VR have made this exact point. Wall-E is about this! Ready Player One is about this! Black Mirror is about this! Somehow, under capitalism, it just hasn't sunk in. Insert gif of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park here.