MATTHEW GAULT C U LTU RE 02.15.

2021 09:00 AM

Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid

Radical Social Change
Tech oligarchs are encouraging the creation of virtual worlds as a
cheap way to avoid problems in the real one.

PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

THE FUTURE OF virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley
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 sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a
political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental
disaster, and political instability, why not sell everyone a device that whisks them
away to a virtual world free of pain and suffering?

Tech billionaires aren’t shy about sharing this. “Some people read this the wrong
way and react incorrectly to it. The promise of VR is to make the world you
wanted. It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone all that they would want. Not
everyone can have Richard Branson’s private island,” Doom co-creator and former
CTO of Oculus John Carmack told Joe Rogan during a 2020 interview. “People
react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation. You have to
make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more
value to a lot of people in the virtual sense.”

Virtual reality is an attractive escape, but it’s not a solution to the world’s ills. The
problems of the real world will persist beyond the borders of the metaverse
created by companies such as Epic, Valve, and Facebook. Without decisive and
radical action, our planet will continue to burn, the gap between the rich and poor
will grow, and totalitarian political movements will flourish. All while some of us
are plugged into a virtual world.

Worse, the virtual world will be one owned and controlled by the companies that
create them. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set
of VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face—forever.

By the principle of the free market Silicon Valley lives and dies by, virtual reality is
a loser. Only 1.7 percent of Steam users have a VR headset, according to a
December 2020 hardware survey. And while it’s true that sales of headsets are up
during the pandemic, roughly 30 percent in 2020 over 2019, video game sales in

general are up overall.

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Valve released Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020, just as the lockdowns were
beginning. This was the first new Half-Life game in 13 years, the continuation of a
franchise fans had been desperate to play for more than a decade. It sold well for a
VR title, somewhere north of 2 million copies, but didn’t match the incredible
numbers of 2020’s top-selling titles and was quickly forgotten by the mainstream
press. Unless you’re really into VR, you probably weren’t talking about Half-Life in
2020.

The reasons why are obvious. First, virtual reality is expensive. At the high end,
Valve’s premiere headset—the Valve Index—costs $1,000. On the cheaper end,
Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 is $299. To play Alyx, those headsets need to be wired
to a high-end gaming PC. The price of these machines vary, but something that
can handle VR will cost around $1,000. Once the machine is built and the headset
hooked up, the player will need to carve out a dedicated physical space to play the
game. Most games require a minimum of about 6.5 feet by 5 feet, but the more
space you have the better.

VR requires an incredible amount of cash and free space to set up properly, and
the headaches don’t stop there. Right now, it reminds me of the early days of
computer gaming. It works most of the time, but I’ve spent hours tweaking
settings, adjusting controls, and reconfiguring hardware in a desperate bid to
achieve the optimal experience.

Cash, space, and time is no guarantee that you’ll enjoy VR games. Some people
experience nausea and vertigo in virtual reality. Sometimes, you can overcome
this by properly adjusting the hardware or slowly exposing yourself to the
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 this by properly adjusting the hardware or slowly exposing yourself to the
technology. Some people get their “VR legs” and adjust. Others never do. Setting
aside VR sickness, the technology is incredibly inaccessible for differently-abled
people. The industry made huge strides toward making video games accessible to
a wide range of people in 2020, but virtual reality—with its bulky headsets and
strange controllers—is simply impossible for some people to use.

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But all these problems can be overcome. As Carmack mentioned in his Rogan
interview, tech companies will drive down the cost of the headsets. “Moore's law
may be crapping out in terms of absolute performance, but we've still got a lot of
price-performance that we can drive out of these things,” he said. “We can have
virtual reality devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will
be able to have these.”

Carmack was explicit about the importance of tech companies pushing virtual
reality. “Not everyone can have a mansion. Not everyone can have a home theater.
These are things we can simulate, to some degree, in virtual reality. Now, the
simulation is not as good as the real thing. If you are rich and you have your own
home theater or mansion and private island, good for you ... you’re probably not
the people that are going to benefit the most,” he said. “Most of the people in the
world live in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose to be if they
had unlimited resources.”

That’s absolutely true; most people in the world live in cramped quarters and
would choose not to. But Carmack’s solution is to create a virtual world where
people can escape. It’s a promise of the future where the living conditions are still
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 people can escape. It’s a promise of the future where the living conditions are still
cramped but people have accepted their material conditions and retreated into a
fantasy world created by the tech companies.

And it will not stop at screens and speakers. Elon Musk is working on a brain-
machine interface called Neuralink. Similarly, Valve’s Gabe Newell is heavily
invested in creating the literal matrix. "We're way closer to The Matrix than people
realize," Newell told IGN in 2020.

In a televised interview with New Zealand’s 1 News, Newell was explicit about
creating a world where brains and computers interface and computers are able to
make changes to the brain. He even called the body a “meat peripheral” and
further dehumanized the physical form. "You're used to experiencing the world
through eyes. But eyes were created by this low-cost bidder that didn't care about
failure rates and RMAs, and if it got broken there was no way to repair anything
effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not
at all reflective of consumer preferences,” Newell said, sounding like a cartoon
villain.

For Newell, the goal is to achieve a fantasy world better and more fascinating than
the real one. "So the visual experience, the visual fidelity we'll be able to create—
the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual
fidelity,” he said. "The real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the
experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains.”

If this all sounds like a nightmarish vision of the future where the world burns
around us while we retreat into fantasy worlds, you’re not alone. “There’s this
piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner,
drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,”
Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build,
people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”

Carmack’s response isn’t encouraging. “Is his life really better if he takes them off
and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there.
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 and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there.
We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning.
People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you
because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world
to our will.”

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set of

VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face—forever.

For Carmack, virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place. “That’s
how the world gets better, by building technologies and distributing them to
people so that they have something better than they would have had if that didn’t
exist,” he said.

That assessment of virtual reality ignores several fundamental lessons we’ve

learned about technology in the past few decades. Far from liberating the world,
technology has introduced new methods of control into our lives. Power changed
hands as Silicon Valley came to dominate our lives. Facebook, Google, Apple, and
Amazon wield an incredible amount of control over our lives, and much of the
power they wield is occluded.

The rush to create digital worlds ignores both the hard realities of the physical and
the ways we might all be manipulated if tech companies control not just the apps
we use every day but the very world we inhabit. Look at Epic, whose Fortnite is
lauded as the first metaverse. Far from being a land of unrestrained freedom and
palatial palaces for everyone, Fortnite is a popular video game that sometimes
hosts impressive live events while slowly selling its inhabitants goofy costumes.

Virtual worlds will be molded in the image of their creators, not their participants.
Already, landlords are dividing up real estate in the blockchain-backed metaverse
Upland. When Apple and Fortnite go to war, it’s their users who suffer. Virtual
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 Upland. When Apple and Fortnite go to war, it’s their users who suffer. Virtual
worlds can be anything we want them to be, but Silicon Valley sees them as a
place to push digital mansions and movie theaters on the hoi polloi. It will be a
simulacrum, an ersatz world like our own with the pain edited out.

You can bet they’ll charge top dollar for it.

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Matthew Gault is a writer covering weird tech, nuclear war, and video games. He’s worked for
Reuters, Vice, and the New York Times.

CONTRIBUTOR

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