Yale Anthropologist Lisa Messeri spent a year doing field work in Los Angeles in 2018 studying the political ecology of the VR community, and will be releasing her landmark book called In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles on Friday, March 8th. It’s the best book about the culture of VR that I’ve read so far as it is pulling in many insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), anthropology, social sciences, sci fi, pop culture, and philosophy.
Making claims about reality is daunting for any working scholar in the 21st Century, and Messeri uses the feeling of “unreality” as a analytical tool to analyze not only virtual reality, but also the fracturing nature of our political context, but also the unreality of Los Angeles as the factory of dreams and façade-like architecture that blurs the boundary for what’s deeply real vs what’s surface scaffolding enough to transport you into another reality.
Messeri uses the framing of fantasy to interrogate a number of claims being made by the VR community circa 2018. Fantasy by her definition could include both positive aspirational dreams, but they could also turn out to be deluded illusions. I personally prefer the using the phrase of potential since it is a bit more neutral for me, and includes both the promising positive potentials as well as the more perilous negative potentials. But she splits her book into three parts the Fantasy of Location exploring the unreality of Los Angeles as well as how VR transports you into another world per Mel Slaters place illusion. The second part is the Fantasy of Being deconstructs the VR as the ultimate empathy machine per Chris Milk’s infamous 2015 TED Talk. Then the third part explores the Fantasy of Representation with the aspirations of the LA VR community to create a more diverse and equitable ecosystem that transcends the bias and power dynamics of Silicon Valley. In each one of these three sections, Messeri uses case studies and follows specific individuals over time to see whether or not some of these aspirations and potentials end up becoming grounded into physical reality, or whether they end up collapsing into a more deluded illusion.
I was inspired to dig into my backlog of 800+ unpublished Voices of VR podcast episodes to publish some interviews that I conducted between 2017-2019 featuring some of the main characters and protagonists featured in Messeri’s book:
- Marci Jastrow is featured in Chapter 3 letting Messeri become a scholar-in-residence at Technicolor Experience Center
- Carrie Shaw of Embodied Labs is featured in Chapter 5, and radically opens up her business to Messeri to study
- Jackie Morie is featured in Chapter 6 as Messeri deconstructs some of the gender essentialist claims that VR is a medium that’s a natural fit for women.
- And Joanna Popper is featured in Chapter 7 as Messeri breaks down the unique pathways into emerging technology that she was noting as an interesting trend from an anthropological perspective.
I had a chance to read through an advanced copy of In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, and it’s already started to make a huge impact on the way that I think about the many dimensions of unreality in our present day realities ranging from the surreal experiences of VR presence to the fractured reality bubbles of our political discourse to the ways in which techno-utopian solutionism can impact the philosophies that are driving how technologies like AI are developed aspiring towards speculations of Artificial General Intelligence or Artificial Superintelligence.
I even started applying Messeri’s unreality analytic to make sense of some of what Alvin Wang Graylin was saying in our discussion about Our Next Reality. I said, “I found myself is this kind of unreality of a potential imaginal future of this post-scarcity, post-labor context where all of our problems have been solved, but yet the decisions that are made in that context are kind of backported to our existing reality now so that we need to make these decisions in order to strive towards this type of utopic vision of the future.” It’s these clashing of potential futures that gain a critical mass of believers that end up creating a multiplicity of potentialities, and the tricky part is when these alternative realities clash into each other in a way that makes the potentiality an actuality.
Messeri manages to provide a lot of deep reflection and insight into the broader political ecology of the VR community leveraging her wide range of citations spanning literature from STS, anthropology, social sciences, sci fi, pop culture, and philosophy. It’s one of the most stimulating and thought-provoking books about VR that I’ve read in a long while, and she manages to weave it all together great storytelling that dives deep into these personal stories for the purpose of revealing larger universal themes across multiple scales of the VR community, our current political and cultural reality, and patterns that may be driving other emerging and exponential technologies like XR, AI, and decentralized technologies.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this is the last of my series leading up to the book, The Land of the Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles. It's by Yale anthropologist Lisa Masseri, releasing on Friday, March 8th, 2024. And it's absolutely one of the best books that I've read about virtual reality. Full stop. I think Mysterii is bringing in so many deep anthropological and science and technology insights into virtual reality as a community, but also just bringing lots of different theoretical and analytical frames to be able to help understand what's happening in the political ecology of virtual reality as a technology. It's the most in-depth anthropological study that has been done so far within virtual reality as a technology. The type of anthropology that Massire practices is to embed herself into field study for a specific location and time. She chose the year 2018 in Los Angeles and tracks a number of women-led initiatives within the context of virtual reality as a technology, but also just has lots of deep theoretical reflections on the technology as well. The book is filled with lots of amazing references from science and technology studies and anthropology and the history of VR, the pop culture, the science fiction, other theoreticians thinking about the hyper real and the third space. So it's really a tour de force of scholarly investigation into virtual reality as technology. And Mysterio is creating this analytic frame called the unreal, which is speaking to the multiplicity of all these different other realities that we're living in, both in these virtual reality mediated realities, but also in the broader political ecology of alternative facts and fake news, and just the way that our realities are fractured and you know, the promise that virtual reality could start to kind of knit together these fractured realities. And so she's really deconstructing some of these ideas around VR as an empathy machine, that VR was going to be led by women, it's going to completely transform some of these existing power dynamics that we've seen in technology. And so she's looking at a lot of these promises and aspirations as well as potentialities. She uses the term fantasies to represent some of these possible futures that we could be living into. And so she's using all of her background in anthropology and science and technology studies to not only analyze some of these fantasies of place, fantasies of being, and fantasies of representation, and start to deconstruct them and critically analyze them through her background in the social sciences. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the WSIS VR podcast. So this interview with Lisa happened on Thursday, February 29th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:51.494] Lisa Messeri: I'm Lisa Masseri. I'm faculty in the anthropology department at Yale university. And for the past almost 10 years, I have been following developments in virtual reality from an anthropological perspective, meaning I've been curious about how the communities have formed with enthusiasm around this technology and imagined its present and future.
[00:03:14.174] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this work.
[00:03:19.554] Lisa Messeri: Sure. So I'm an anthropologist of science and technology and my undergrad is actually in engineering. So I began as a STEM kid and studied engineering at MIT before kind of becoming a bit disillusioned with what it actually meant to be an engineer in the real world. And luckily and happily and fortuitously, I stumbled upon the field called science and technology studies. or anthropology of science and technology and realized that I could continue to think about technology and science, but from a different perspective, from the perspective of the social sciences and the humanities. And so I pursued my PhD in history, anthropology and science and technology studies. also at MIT. And the first book I wrote, which was based on my dissertation, was about planetary scientists, nothing to do really with VR from an outside perspective. But what had attracted me so much to writing about planetary scientists and working particularly with exoplanet astronomers, those who were looking for planets in other worlds, but whose world were invisible, was the question of placemaking. So how did scientists transform scientific objects, in this case, places into worlds. And so as I was wrapping up that book, I was asking myself, well, what's another interesting science or technology that challenges us to think differently about how places are made, how worlds are made? And I was asking that question to myself and about 2014 and 2015, right after Facebook had bought Oculus and there was a ton of media coverage around that acquisition. And, you know, it kind of just fell in my lap as I read articles just as an interested news consumer and heard all these claims that VR helps us think differently about what it means to be in the world and to be in place. And so that was all it took. It took one person kind of saying those magic words and I was off at the VR races.
[00:05:11.247] Kent Bye: Great. And is science and technology studies, is that specifically an anthropological field or maybe could elaborate on that?
[00:05:18.171] Lisa Messeri: Yeah. Thanks for that question. Science and technology studies or STS is an interdisciplinary pursuit that really brings together social scientists and humanists across the spectrum from philosophers to anthropologists, to sociologists, to historians who are interested in thinking about the non-technical aspects of what makes science and technology do things in the world. So as a discipline, it begins in the 1970s at a variety of US and European institutions. And my particular training in STS comes from a more anthropologically inflected school of thought. So anthropology of science and technology began actually after STS, kind of in the 80s and 90s. And that's the school of training that I did my PhD in. So not all anthropologists are STSers and not all STSers are anthropologists, but there's a fair amount of us who fall at that Venn diagram intersection.
[00:06:13.474] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. Cause as I was reading through your book, I'm not sure if I've seen any other in-depth investigation of VR as a technology that is blending both the anthropological view as well as STS. And I mean, you're obviously citing a lot of different stuff in the course of your book, but is there any other precedent or research that's out there that has dug this deep into VR?
[00:06:35.388] Lisa Messeri: It's always hard. I never want to come in and say, no, it's just me, because that's obviously not true. When I first started this project, the book that I thought the most with, that I thought would have a fair amount of influence on what I was doing, is Tom Belsorf's Coming of Age and Second Life, which is an ethnography of the virtual world second life. Because I was doing virtual reality, and he wrote about virtual worlds, and theorizes the virtual a fair bit in his work. I was like, oh, that's going to be a natural conversation mate. it quickly became clear to me that doing an ethnography or the study of virtual worlds and sociality within virtual worlds is very different from studying, say, the political ecology of the development of the industry of VR. So aside from journalistic precedences, like Harold Rheingold's virtual reality book from the 90s, which kind of was like a journalistic account of the development of the field, I do think that my work is properly the first scholarly account of recent developments in VR. And as I'm sure we'll talk about it, I am not developing the whole industry. That would be impossible and insane. I am looking very particularly at community formations in Los Angeles and how that became a really influential node in kind of the global recent history of virtual reality.
[00:07:50.347] Kent Bye: Yeah, at first, I was like, really asking the question, like, why LA? Why 2018? But after reading the book, I can get a much deeper sense for how this practice of this type of fieldwork, anthropological fieldwork, where you really immerse and embed yourself into a singular place and location and really dive deep, I think you're able to pull out a lot of larger trends of the culture that I've witnessed as I'm popping in and out over the course of a decade. I'll go to events, but I'm not embedding myself into a single locale for an entire year. And so maybe you can talk about your different phases of production, because you said you started in like 2014, 2015, and then you embed yourself into field work for an entire year in LA. And then you've been working on writing this book since then. So that's, like you said, around a 10 year process that you've been working on this. And so maybe you could walk through the different phases and then picking LA and then that whole year embedding and then digesting and unpacking everything.
[00:08:48.765] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, absolutely. So after I kind of heard, you know, read the media reports that VR was helping us imagine worlds in new ways. And I was like, Oh great, I'm going to do a project on VR. It was literally an overnight decision, which is so wild because it was like you make an overnight decision and then you spend 10 years of your life on it. But I was at the time a professor at the University of Virginia. And I googled virtual reality, UVA, to see who at my institution might have been doing that work. And one person came up, Denny Proffitt, who is a perceptual psychologist. And this was because it was right in that period where VR research had gone a bit dormant outside of particular institutions. And before, there was a ton of industry money that came back into universities to fund VR research. So now, I'm sure at UVA, there would be a lot more VR research. At my institution at Yale, there's a lot of VR research. But at that moment in 2014, 2015, there was one person who was doing it, and he was working on a legacy rig, right? The DK2 had just shipped, I believe, when I entered their laboratory, but what they had just retired were the old $10,000, $20,000 rigs that had the magnetic tracking on the ceiling and the headsets that use that tracking, which I don't even know how they work because that was just retired when I entered the lab. So I spent about a year hanging out with that community because as a professor, I can't just decide to go and do field work whenever I want. I need to wait for sabbatical and I need to wait for funding that will fund this. So I spent a little bit of time just familiarizing myself, even with the science of VR, the technology of VR, how it works, the state of the art in terms of the dev kits from both Oculus and from HTC. And I did a whole spinoff project on psychology research and VR particularly perceptual psychology research. So not as much the stuff that Bailenson does, but more like how VR can tell us something about how we see the world, which gets into like Thomas Nagel, what it's like to be a bat, kind of questions of perception and illusion. And I got really interested in nerdy with that whole history of like, what does it mean that illusions tell us some kind of reality about the world? That was kind of my warmup into thinking about VR and I was going to IEEE VR at the time and kind of like you at that point was popping in, kind of going to the events that I found accessible. So that was my training period, right? Where I was just trying to understand the world and the research happening in that world. But what had been my interest in the field more specifically was the claim of the empathy machine. Because in fact, the radio program that turned me on to VR as something I might be interested in studying was the TED Talk radio hour in which Chris Milks, how VR is the ultimate empathy machine, was kind of being featured. And as an anthropologist, and particularly as an anthropologist of science and technology, who has spent a lot of time thinking critically about claims that technology can fix social problems, when a technology like VR is being suggested that it could create empathy in others and therefore fix societal ills, one gets a bit nervous. And I was interested in understanding how that imagination came to be and where it came from. And so every time I would hear someone mention the empathy machine, I would Google who they were and where they were located, and it was LA. It was always LA. And I was like, that's fascinating because I thought I was going to have to go and do this fieldwork in Silicon Valley. And having previously done fieldwork in Silicon Valley, I didn't want to go back. Both because I knew the story there. I knew how to tell a story about technology in Silicon Valley because that's what my training has prepared me to do. I didn't even know there would be a scene in LA. So I was really excited. Every time it was leading me to LA, I was like, ooh, this is fun. This could work. And then I had done all of this theoretical reading during my PhD in theories about place. And there's so many really interesting theorizations of place that come from Los Angeles and from the LA School of Urban Studies, as it's often called, theorizing about LA as this postmodern city. And I never really spent time in LA, and I was always really interested in why this city became such a productive place for these philosophers and scholars to think about questions of the real and the hyperreal. And so in the summer of 2016, I took a month of traveling around California, both in the Bay Area and in LA, to do what is called in my field preliminary fieldwork. I made a bunch of connections. I checked in with folks. I got people excited about my project. And I applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation. Amazingly enough, I got that grant. I switched jobs. And in that switch of jobs, I had to delay fieldwork for a little bit. So LA was very purposely picked in terms of my field site of study. 2018 was when I could actually take a year off from my teaching job and teaching responsibilities. and do the kind of immersive field work that anthropologists are expected to do in our creation of knowledge.
[00:14:10.673] Kent Bye: Yeah. And as you elaborate throughout the course of your book, there's a lot of really fascinating social theorists who are talking about the unreal, the hyper real, but also Palmer Luckey was from Orange County and then he had the connection to the USC ICT with Mark Bolas and he was already working on stuff on his own, but he connected with Nonny de la Peña and went to Sundance. And so there's a lot of other connections there between both the military and entertainment that you elaborate, but also social theorists who are talking about this concept of the unreal or hyper real. There's a number of people that were talking about unreal. And that's in your book, The Lane of the Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, where you're really elaborating on this concept. And so I know that the Unreal has existed, but maybe you could expand on that a little bit in terms of how you both are looking at the context of LA as this place where a lot of the innovations of VR were happening, but also this other dimension of Bollywood art and hyperreal and all these other theorists who are looking at this facade nature of things were on the surface looked one way, but there's another layer that creates this fracturing of reality that gives us experience of the unreal.
[00:15:24.663] Lisa Messeri: Right. Yeah. So I think there's two ways I want to respond to this question. The first is just to try to say what the unreal is. And the second is to, yeah, put it in that context of larger thinking and like how to think about LA in the context of VR. So As I mentioned, or as you mentioned as well, there's all these theorists who have thought about postmodern realities from Los Angeles. Now, when I began a book about virtual reality, I was kind of like, uh-oh, I'm going to have to say something about reality. And that is an incredibly daunting task for a scholar in the 21st century to do. You could do it in the 19th century and even the early 20th century without much of a, you know, just flare something off about the real. It's really hard to have anything either new to say or robust to say about reality as a 21st century academic scholar. wants to be taken seriously. So that was the thing that hung over the head. That was my Damocles sword of the project, was that at some point I was going to have to make a claim about the real. And boy, did I not want to, because I didn't... The literature on reality, how do you review that in a book that then is still readable and has room to put your own ideas in? So the unreal for me came as an analytic term, as an orthogonal sidestep to having to say something directly about the real. I decided that what virtual reality in Los Angeles told me is not about reality, but about this kind of emergent perhaps form of reality that I call the unreal. So whereas The unreal exists in our lexicon as a colloquial sense of something that's extraordinary, like, oh my god, this chocolate cake was unreal. Or, oh my god, her behavior was unreal. It has both these negative and positive valences. I was interested in trying to turn that less as a colloquial term and more as an analytic term. So whereas I'm building off of scholars like Baudrillard, who talk about the hyperreal, or Ed Soja, who talks about third spaces as real and imagined places, The unreal is kind of my contribution to this literature as an analytic. So I do my best in this book to offer an actionable definition of what I mean by the unreal. And I define it as unreality is this moment in which we both recognize the multiplicity of reality, that we all live in different lived experiences and different worlds. So we recognize that there's some kind of multiplicity or fracturing of the real, but it's also a moment when that multiplicity and fracturing demands attention. So I'm trying very hard not to say that there's some new condition of reality that the 21st century or VR has brought forth. And instead, I'm trying to say that virtual reality focuses our attention on this multiplicity that has always been there and has always been felt in different ways by different people. So the Unreal for me therefore became a really productive analytic because it allowed me to scale across a lot of different things that VR was tuning my own attention into. So I started thinking about VR as you started thinking about VR in 2014, 2015 during the Obama presidency. And that was a very different US politics and culture to start thinking of questions like empathy and wanting to better understand your fellow human, your fellow citizen. And as soon as the Trump presidency got underway and the proliferation of alternative facts and this acute national conversation about different realities, came into focus such that there felt as though a common reality had been fractured. I realized that the unreality I see in virtual reality, in which it's kind of an unreal experience to put on a headset and occupy a different virtual world, even as your body exists in this world, that's a multiplicity of realities, that that same kind of multiplicity was metaphorically happening at the political stage, at least in the United States and in other kind of national contexts in which populist movements have been taking hold. And so the unreal was both something that allowed me to describe VR, and it allowed me to describe US politics. And then that third kind of scale between VR and politics was Los Angeles, which again, had this rich history of folks talking about LA as this postmodern city, as some kind of place, like Baudrillard, who's a French theorist, writes about how in LA, you could feel the simulacra. you could feel this kind of postmodern confusion between the real and what is represented. So I found that in the 21st century, LA as opposed to 20th century LA that Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, and Ed Soja were writing about. In 21st century LA, I could feel the unreal. I could feel this playful fracturing of multiple realities just in the way movie sets and facades, architectural facades populate the city. You move through different worlds as you move through LA, and it just all comes together in LA, as Ed Soja once wrote, as the LA Times masthead also once proclaimed.
[00:20:59.073] Kent Bye: Yeah, you had a reference to Bruno Latour, who was talking about realities being defined as when there's like a collision of two different realities that were incommensurate. And whenever you have a bumping up of those different perspectives, that's when things become real. So I don't know if you want to elaborate on that.
[00:21:17.478] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, I was. So as you noted, I did my research in 2018 and then this book is being published in 2024. So it meant that I was writing this book for about two years before it really went into production, two years during which, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic also became a big part of our lives and further fractured our realities. And while I was writing this book, I was, of course, teaching. I'm teaching my anthropology of science and technology classes, my STS classes to my undergraduates and graduate students at Yale. And the great thing about writing while teaching is often you're teaching classic canonical texts, and you're able to just kind of like, oh, wait, that's relevant to what I'm talking about. So one of the things that Latour has at some point written that I highlighted and made its way into my book because I was reading it for teaching, is this idea that Latour, who is probably the most well-known scholar of science and technology studies, he's really interested in understanding science and the creation of knowledge as a social process. And so the first thing that one might want to ask when trying to understand the sociality of the production of science is, how does a fact come to be real? There's a teleological answer, which is, oh, well, it's real because it exists. And that's not very satisfying for a sociologist or an anthropologist. So Latour's retort is, it becomes real when it resists change. It becomes real when it becomes stable. So Latour's approach of thinking about reality initially in his like kind of early stage career was to say a thing is real because a social network that surrounds it makes it seem as though it has always existed and it has always been sturdy. But some kind of like further distancing from the object shows us very easily that nothing is ever that stable and things are always becoming and in processes of becoming.
[00:23:14.416] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I think about your book, as you go through the different chapters, you're breaking it down into three major parts of different fantasies. So fantasy of place, fantasy of being, fantasy of representation. And I honestly had a lot of trouble with this word fantasy because it reminds me a lot of Mel Slater and his framing of everything in VR as illusionary. And then David Chalmers countering that with making the metaphysical argument that all of the experiences within VR are genuine realities or genuine experiences. And so I was sort of going into this resistance, like, why is this kind of illusionary framing persisting into the fantasy? But after reading the book, I have a little bit more context as to why you're casting things into fantasy, because there is a split between the representation and what is the actual, so the potentials that may be represented in VR versus the actual, the realness of Latour, the friction of the limitations of the simulation in some ways. But maybe I'll give you an opportunity to set the broadest context for these three fantasies of place, fantasy of being, and fantasy of representation that you're using to frame your investigation and all of your research that you were doing in your fieldwork in LA for that year of 2018.
[00:24:31.153] Lisa Messeri: Yeah. One thing I try to say very clearly, and I think what eventually convinced you that it was okay I was using the language of fantasy, is that fantasies are real. There is a reality to fantasy, and fantasies produce real social actions. So I very much agree with Chalmers' perspective that there is a reality to the virtual. This is coming also from, again, Tom Bellstorff, the anthropologist I mentioned before, that there is a reality to virtual being and virtual sociality. I think that's essential to understand as the get-go. I use fantasy because kind of in the same way that virtual and reality are oxymoronic words, it becomes an oxymoronic phrase because the virtual and the real are imagined to be in opposition to each other. But of course, as we just said, they go hand in hand. And in fact, in putting them together, we open up these whole new ways of thinking, the whole new imagination of what worlds can be and what digital spaces can be. So virtual reality is this really productive juxtaposition of two words that seem to be opposite, but force you to think deeply about their connection and in so doing, make a new reality in some regard. And that's the same thing I wanted to do with fantasy and technology. We often think of technology and fantasy as similarly opposed. But I wanted to force them together and show that they are not opposed, that in fact they also, when placed together, create this other kind of reality that the worlds that I write about in the book and the communities I write about in this book, come to be and come to take shape against. And I also just couldn't resist writing about fantasy because I was in LA. And as one of my VR friends told me at one point when he was confused, he's like, you want to write about technology? What are you doing in LA? And I kind of explained that I was interested in VR and ideas of storytelling and content production. He responded, oh, that makes sense because LA has always been about fantasy. So it just seemed incredibly essential to reckon with the preponderance of fantasy in this place and how that shaped something like VR, which you're correct, we have a tendency to think of as fantastical, as illusionary, as escapist. And because of my focus on VR empathy experiences, I wanted to present a different way of thinking about VR, one that was not about escapism, that actually isn't about fantasy at all, that is about trying to depict nonfiction, cinematic, quote unquote, real events and circumstances, but using VR to elicit a kind of fantasy of imagining we could experience another's life world that was necessary for creating this real social condition that people wanted to bring about, i.e. better citizens, better people, better worlds. So, the way anthropology works is you go and you immerse yourself. in this world for like a year. You take diligent notes, you know, you take field notes. You're really just that like kind of, you know, anthropologist with their journal writing down what everyone's telling you and, you know, doing interviews and all that kind of thing. And then you sit with that data for a while because you then have to figure out how do you make sense of a year? How do you make sense of all the things that you were told, all the things you experienced and saw? And so it was actually quite early in my digesting of my research that I realized The claims that I found most remarkable during my research, claims of VR as an empathy machine that can make us better humans, claims, and we haven't even talked about this yet, but I was really interested in women in this space and women in underrepresented voices. So claims that VR was going to be led by women, claims that VR could be a different industry than entertainment and it's like Me Too problems, which was kind of really fresh in mind when I was doing my research or tech. which similarly had problems of sexual harassment and marginalization of certain voices, that VR could be something different despite the fact that it has these intense military origins and comes from entertainment and tech industries, exactly the kind of industries it was being tried to make different from. I was like, how are those beliefs sustained? Because they were. They were deeply believed and they were sustained. And I realized it's because they existed within a meshwork of fantasy. These three fantasies that I detail throughout the book, Both the kind of fantasy of place that LA elicits, both in our thinking about different kinds of reality, but also just the actual practicalities of creating fantasy that the entertainment industry is excellent at doing, that fed into this fantasy of thinking who'd be someone else or somewhere else, the experience of VR, what that ontological bridging of worlds is like. And because I write about the empathy machine in a particular kind of fantasy of being another, and another with different life circumstances. This was an idea of like a good technology that VR could kind of do good work in the world, whereas we were just starting to see how social media and other technologies were kind of doing a lot of harm in the world. That idea of VR as good through its fantasy of being was also held up by this fantasy that VR could have a good workforce, a diverse workforce, a representative workforce. So, those three fantasies didn't present themselves to me one at a time. They presented them to me all bundled, and I had to do a lot of work to unbundle them and to show how there was a logic that the three reinforced one another, and that created the reality that I conducted my fieldwork in.
[00:30:02.318] Kent Bye: Yeah, as I was reading it, I would sometimes substitute the word fantasy for like potential or you'd said at one point where fantasy included aspirations. And I've looked up fantasy as a definition and one of them, the later down definitions where it starts to talk into delusion or unreal expectations or something that is diluted in a way. As I was reading it, I was like, this quote could be excerpted and taken completely out of context because I feel like the way that you're using fantasy has a very specific definition, but yet having to catch myself. And I'm also drawing upon a process philosophy. There's a lot of talk around both the potentialities of what's possible versus what's actual. And I use quantum ontology as a way of talking about the quantum wave function as a realm of possibilities. And then that collapses into one actuality. So you have all the possibilities and then you have the actualities. So the fantasies in my mind is kind of like this imaginal latent space that is including all these potentialities and aspirations that may or may not happen. But yet sometimes when you're talking about these fantasies, it is actually diluted. It it is actually like a transgression. So I feel like sometimes, even though I think about them as potentialities as more neutral, sometimes it does collapse down into a diluted fantasy. There's actually something that is potentially bringing harm that is not in right relationship with everybody.
[00:31:22.893] Lisa Messeri: I mean, I think that's actually a really helpful way of thinking about the multivalence of fantasy and what fantasy can do for how we think about the world. Because when people hear about my research, especially when I was in the thick of it and still doing it, and I was saying like, oh, I'm writing about women VR innovators in LA and how they're creating this narrative of leadership in this community, people would ask me, are women really leading VR? And I was like, that doesn't matter. That's irrelevant to the theorizing I'm doing and the understanding I want to do about this community, because it was the potentiality that really animated social action. It was a belief that women could be leaders that did lead to, I would say, for two or three years, a really female heavy representation within, particularly in LA, of VR conversations. So the fantasy was multiple, right? Because it is both like, okay, we can imagine a future in which women are leading the field, but it exists alongside the future that Silicon Valley is carving out, which is much more business as usual. And they can exist for a while together, these kind of two fantasies, or maybe the counter fantasy to the hegemony. would be another way of thinking about it. And then I think the tragedy of my story is that in the end, it was a fantasy. It collapsed. It was a future that didn't come to be. But it's not to say it couldn't have come to be. It just needed to have a little bit more of a shakeup than simply insisting that this could be. You need to actually change structures and institutions and other things to bring about one of these different But despite the fact that it's a bit of a tragic story and that it kind of failed to achieve its successes, I think that the fantasy work is vital because it presented at least an alternative to Silicon Valley imaginations, not even imaginations, kind of seeming inevitability. of virtual reality futures. And I think I just really cherish that there was this vibrant moment that lasted for quite a long time, in which it really felt like there could have been something different in the future. And I think we need these fantasies to be multiply potential to keep an industry healthy.
[00:33:40.377] Kent Bye: One of the really fascinating things that I caught in a footnote was when you were talking about how there's been a bit of a speculative turn with some of the methods of anthropology, both including some of these potentialities, either through the methods of world building, which you dive into quite a bit with Alex McDowell's techniques of gathering different leaders and talking about potential possible futures. So there's this kind of futurism aspect, or even going back and saying, what would the anthropology be like if it was always have a decolonial frame? And how would that sort of analyze the multiplicity of all these different perspectives, rather than having a singular frame? So love to hear you maybe elaborate on, as you're investigating virtual reality and theorizing about the unreal, how that may be mirroring some of these other speculative turns that you may be seeing within the context of the field of anthropology.
[00:34:28.339] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, great. So as I mentioned, the reason that the Unreal became a really helpful word and idea for me is, as I already said, it kind of allowed me to go between different scales from the technology itself to the city of LA to US culture and politics. But it also allowed me to think about what was happening in my areas of academia. And so when I got to LA, I had probably never heard of world building before. I might have encountered it in terms of science fiction and like J.R.R. Tolkien, but as something that extended beyond sci-fi, I don't think I would have had an understanding of what that meant. And as soon as I got to L.A., everyone was telling me about world building, like, oh, we're doing a world building workshop, you know, or we're creating our immersive experience first through understanding world building dynamics. And a lot of this goes to Alex McDowell, who is a production designer in Hollywood and worked on Spielberg's Minority Report. And it was actually in working on Minority Report that he back-solved his way to world-building as a technique first for narrative development. And then McDowell created this world-building institute at the University of Southern California in which he extended the way world-building worked for narrative and fiction and asked, well, if I can create a future in fiction, can we also create a future in the real world, a nonfiction future. And he began thinking about whether world building could be part of civic organizing. And that's fascinating alone. I probably could have written a whole book on that move, and instead it's one section in one chapter. But I found it really interesting that this technique of world building existed. And when I reentered academia after my fieldwork, I realized I was seeing world building in academia. I was actually seeing the word world building, and I was seeing scholars in anthropology and STS finding pleasure and finding hope in more speculative methods like world-building, like fiction and autofiction and stuff that normally you think of as, this isn't peer-reviewed and how can this get published? And it was having a real pride of place within several disciplinary conversations. And I was trying to understand, why is that? Why did something like speculation or world-building become so attractive for my disciplines, particularly, again, in this moment of 2018, 2019 Trump administration, kind of a collapse of reality in some ways, especially during COVID. I even taught a class called Speculation as Method because I just really needed to wrap my head around how scholars in so many different fields were drawn to this idea of speculation in general and world building in particular. And the answer that I come away with is for decades, for centuries, people have written really passionately about the problems of the world and structural violence and inequities and inequalities. And we can create the most rational arguments of why these things exist and why they persist. And we could even propose rational potential solutions of institutional change, et cetera, that might alleviate these harms and problems in the world. And from just a subjective, privileged position, the world doesn't seem to be getting any better. So one can get very frustrated with rational approaches. And there's something that then, in contrast, is very freeing about speculation. It frees you from having to be real. You can instead occupy the realm of fantasy or the unreal. And in that mode, some of the blockages that we might have felt as scholars seem to be opened up again. And it got exciting to be like, oh, okay, our rational approach has not been working, has not been getting us very far, but we can just tweak it a little bit. We can be speculative in our approaches. We can consider alternative pasts and alternative futures. And then we can maybe creatively think about what a different configuration of the world is. And so that was attractive, that remains attractive. And I think that brings academic discourses in much closer conversation with virtual reality and VR innovators, at least the ones I write about, than many academics might realize.
[00:38:45.730] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was a really fascinating insight that you had embedded in there. And one of the footnotes that I took note, just because I am a big fan of both world building as a concept, the future dreaming, but also Alfred North Whitehead, he's often referred to as like a speculative philosopher. So this multiplicity of possibilities that I feel like VR is representing and what I've, I'm really drawn to personally is to have some sort of embodied experience of some other potentiality. Now, maybe let's start with the first fantasy of place. where Mel Slater, he talks about the place illusion and plausibility illusion, which you unpack later. There is this sense of being transported to another place, but you're setting this context of this research by actually going into LA, whereas I had mentioned my process has been to popping it out for maybe three or four or sometimes a week, I'll go into these places, but I'm mostly going into a festival context or a gathering where there's people from all over different regions. And so you have a much different experience by embedding yourself into LA for that whole year. So I'm wondering if you can unpack this fantasy in place in this first chapter.
[00:39:51.577] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, so in the first part of the book, where I deal with fantasy of place, I try to mobilize the ideas of the unreal, the fantasy, hyper real, that as I write are kind of endemic to LA in these really interesting ways. And I try to do it in a way that understanding VR can actually emerge in a really interesting way from Los Angeles. And so, I mean, just to be clear to all the listeners, right, our methods are very complimentary, right? We need the more capacious, network approach to studying the VR community that you do alongside these kind of local studies. And like, I'm really looking forward to future work that maybe I did LA, but like there's New York, there's the Bay area, there's London, there's Germany, there's Tokyo, right? There's like so many different hotspots of VR that I think we can learn a lot from. And actually Paul Roquette, I should shout out him. He has a book called the immersive inclusion, which is about VR and spatial and audio immersion in Japan. So he also kind of offers a little bit of a place-oriented approach to VR. But what I am trying to argue, the reason I think that this place-oriented approach is valuable is because we learn different things about VR when we study it from different locations. So you learn something about VR when you're studying it at the network level, you learn something about VR when studying it from Silicon Valley, and you learn something about VR when you study it from LA. And I think what you see in LA that is occluded in other places is this idea of fantasy, the unreal, etc. But also, you learn a lot about relations between technology, military and entertainment, which, especially the role that entertainment plays in VR's development, I think is sometimes hidden because often the history of VR is told as a hardware story. You see the timelines of VR's development and it's headset, right? You have this headset, then you have that headset. And occasionally you mentioned what experiences came with these headsets, but it's really telling a story about technological development that is dependent on chips getting smaller and more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. That's the story we know that we learn really well when we think about VR in Silicon Valley. But when we think about VR in Los Angeles, we learn how vital entertainment is for understanding VR's past, present, and future. First, in the way that entertainment and the military have long intermixed in Los Angeles, such that when the VR commercial push in the 80s and 90s failed in Silicon Valley, a lot of those folks who had been behind it, Scott Fisher, who was one of the lead developers of NASA View, one of these first headsets, he and Mark Bolas had moved down to Los Angeles, to USC, And it was really easy to make VR work in LA because of this longer history of entertainment military collaborations. And so at USC, the Institute of Creative Technologies was able to get money from the Department of Defense. That was a compelling argument for the university to keep on developing VR because it both has military potential and it has entertainment potential. So these are handmaidens of one another, which you really see in LA that you don't quite see in other places. So LA gives us that feature of VR. And then more conceptually, I began thinking about VR as a facade. And I don't mean this in a derogatory way. I think there's a derogatory meaning of facade, like in LA, let's do lunch, kind of this surface level, disengagement, shallowness, that's not how I mean facade. What I am trying to do in saying that in LA, I learned to think about VR as a facade, is to use it as a reminder that like movie sets, like theme parks, these are both physical places that promise transportation to other worlds. very similar to how VR does. And it's thrilling. I'm a big fan of location-based entertainment and theme parks and movie sets. I spent a lot of my research time touring movie studios and going on movie set tours just because I found it really fun and interesting. But what's helpful about thinking about the facades of movie sets, which has a beautiful front to it, can look like an incredibly elaborate mansion or house, but when you look behind it, you see scaffolding. You kind of see that the world stops a little bit further into the surface, that it actually isn't a complete world, but allows you to imagine a complete world. And I think it's really helpful to temper our expectations of VR. in thinking about it similarly as a facade, that it can invite us into a beautiful world. It can help us imagine a beautiful world and imagine being in a beautiful world. But there's always scaffolding behind it that keeps it from actually being an experience of being in that beautiful world. And I just found that, particularly when thinking about the empathy machine, to be a really helpful corrective of what we can promise VR can do versus over-promising what VR can do. And again, that kind of thinking about the facade is something I probably wouldn't have stumbled upon if I wasn't in Los Angeles and thinking with that city as a way of being inspired and thinking about VR.
[00:45:00.363] Kent Bye: Yeah. I feel like there's certain contexts under which the fantasy dimensions or the facade nature of VR will kick in. And there's other contexts where, as an example, if you're in a social VR experience and VR chat, and you're in an immersive world and you're having a social engagement, When I think about David Chalmers' argument where he's saying that these virtual experiences are genuine experiences rather than illusionary, I've had debates with Mel Slater at IEEE and Los Angeles going back and forth because at the time he was like, look, President's research that he was interested in at that time, 2017, He was like, I'm only interested in the sensory motor contingencies that make VR completely unique to what I'm experiencing relative to other mediums that may be invoking different dimensions of social presence or emotional presence. At that time, he was only looking at the place illusion and a possibility illusion. So the degree that you feel like you're transported into another place, in a degree that it felt real. Other dimensions of presence of social presence or emotional presence or the sense of agency he wasn't as interested in until later he added the virtual body ownership illusion as well as the co-presence illusion. But again all of it was cast in illusionary framing. So I feel like there are some contexts when you're transported into VR where you do have a memory of being in a virtual place in VRChat and you recall that place But then when you're talking about documentary style context or trying to represent certain dimensions of reality, there's always going to be limitations of that simulation that are never going to get to that depth. And so sometimes I feel like the facade nature of VR is there. And other times I feel like you can have other contextual experiences within VR that feel completely real without having to invoke aspects of fantasy or illusion or facade.
[00:46:46.572] Lisa Messeri: Do you think it's helpful to think of virtual sociality in this case, because I think it's an excellent example, as distinct, as a distinct phenomenon, as opposed to trying to rein it into either fantasy or illusion or reality. But what do these kinds of analyses or conversations do if we stop trying to debate whether it's real or illusory and instead say it's different, right? It is a sociality. It is a meaningful sociality, but it's a different sociality. I'm just curious what you think, because I spent all my time outside of virtual worlds, and I am always really curious about how people who spend a bit more time in those worlds think about it.
[00:47:25.440] Kent Bye: Well, I feel like a lot of the work that I've been doing is trying to see a whole lot of different experiences and talk to creators and makers. So when I see a lot of types of experiences that are invoking these different qualities of presence. And so whether it's the dimension of agency, where you can participate in the experience, the active presence or the embodied presence is the sense of being situated in that place. And the feel like either you have a representation, like you're a character or you're a ghost. So either you have a body or you don't, you're kind of an omniscient witness. But there is this degree of embodiment where you feel like you are embodied in a virtual body ownership illusion and embedded into the context of the environment. So the place illusion and virtual body ownership illusion. And then there's the emotional components of how the experience is affecting my affect and emotions. So that emotional presence and then the social mental presence is both the plausibility of suspending your disbelief that thinking that's real, but also engaging with other people. So for me, when I think about VR experiences, I think about it across these different vectors of what is the active presence? What is the social mental presence? What is the embodied and environmental presence? And what is the emotional presence? And as I read through your book, you know, how to start to think about or characterize these larger sociological and anthropological dimensions that you're bringing into the conversation for interrogating these dynamics and power dynamics of race, gender, class, and everything else, like what is the harm when you start to embody somebody that is of a different identity and you're expected to have that experience of what it means to be that person, where it bumps up against the limitations of VR as a medium. because there are some things when you characterize it as fantasy that I agree are definitely fantasy, whereas other aspects of, say, a social VR experience in VRChat that feels like no need to invoke any sort of illusionary or fantasy language, where it diminishes the phenomenological direct experiences of people when you start to cast it as illusionary or fake or fantasy, the broad definition of fantasy. I think in your book here, you have a very specific definition of fantasy, but that's at least how I start to think about some of these things as I read the book.
[00:49:26.328] Lisa Messeri: No, I think that's totally correct. And I think it's really important to note the heterogeneity of what we mean when we talk about VR experience and experiencing VR. because it's not the same. Doing social VR is so different than doing cinematic VR, and it's a different phenomenon. I guess that's what I would argue. And so, like, I don't make any claims on social VR and the reality of that sociality. It's one of the reasons why, you know, you asked me before, like, what kind of books came before me. And I had first thought, like, oh, Tom Bellstorff's Coming of Age and Second Life, that's going to come before me, and that's going to be really helpful. And then I realized, like, actually, we were writing about two absolutely different phenomenon. And I think it is healthy for those of us who theorize and think about VR to not only identify these two phenomenon you and I are talking about here, social VR versus cinematic VR, but I'm sure there's any other number of them. For example, workplace VR, just kind of like the more mundane training that sometimes can be done and put into use.
[00:50:26.584] Kent Bye: And so- The other big one would be gaming, I'd say. Gaming, right.
[00:50:30.267] Lisa Messeri: And I also, I'm like, no, this is not a book about gaming, even though on Amazon, it is a book about gaming apparently, because it's classified under game guides. So I'm really hoping to go to number one on pub date on that one. But early on in research, I will say originally I thought I was going to do both. I thought I was going to write about cinematic VR and I thought I was going to write about social VR. And I thought I was going to spend time in alt space and rec room and all these other things. But it really ended up being a completely different project with a completely different set of intellectual questions. And it helped me so much when I realized what I'm writing about is cinematic VR. And so I make that very clear in the introduction that this analysis pertains to cinematic VR. And I'm excited for the parts that I do think can be applied to other kinds of VR, but I wouldn't make those claims without myself doing the due diligence to think more systematically about those kinds. And so it's really excellent to talk with you because you have thought about these different genres more capaciously. And it's really interesting to me to hear what translates, what bumps up against some friction. That's excellent. That's the kind of work I want this to do.
[00:51:39.345] Kent Bye: Yeah, and that's part of the reason why I'm really drawn to process relational philosophy, because for me it's a lot about what are the relational dynamics in the context of the situation that makes what is problematic versus not problematic. So maybe that's a good segue into the second part, which is the fantasy of being, where you're really deconstructing the empathy machine meme that I have to say after covering VR for 10 years, there was a lot of excitement initially where a lot of people were talking about it. But then as time went on, as I talked to more people, especially academics, they were having a lot more critical takes about this idea of VR as an empathy machine and the limits of what it means to embody another person. And so as you were starting to deconstruct this meme, which as you were saying, this Ted podcast that was aggregating the famous Ted talk from Chris Milk that He was giving in March of 2015, and he did a fireside chat at Games4Change with Jesse Damiani, where he was citing the original definition of the empathy machine that was actually from a Roger Ebert talk that he was giving at a Hall of Fame induction that I had come across. Chris Milks, one of my white whales, very difficult to have him to want to come on and talk about it. So Jesse was able to get a lot of that information that I was not able to capture in my podcast, but it was really good to hear him acknowledge that it did come from Roger Ebert, this idea of how film could be an epidemic machine. It wasn't something that he was manufacturing out of whole cloth. And I was also very fascinating to see even through this footnotes where I'd like, I'm invoking this in the conversation with Nonny de la Pena. And I'm like, did I? And I went back and read the transcripts. I was like, Oh yeah, I guess I said it, but I, I don't remember at what order I was doing interviews at Silicon Valley virtual reality conference on May 19th and 20th. It was basically like. 46 interviews in two days and I didn't mark what order I was interviewing people. So when I published it, the order that I published it was not the same order that I was recording them. And so I'm sure there were other people that told me in that first 46 episodes, I'd have to go back and take a look into like, okay, where did this originate? I don't think I came up with that. I think it was probably listening to the community and reflecting Anyway, there's sort of like a chronology where you're tracing this as an idea and a meme, but also really trying to deconstruct different aspects of it. So this is a huge topic that's been in the VR community for a long time. How did you start to tackle the beast of the VR's Empy the Machine meme?
[00:53:59.785] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, this is the Ouroboros in the weeds of our conversation, which is I've listened to you for years. You're an archive for my research, and now you're reading me and reprocessing it. So I love this. This is great. I'm sorry to all the listeners who have to deal with our slight nerding out on this, swapping back and forth ideas. So yeah, as I said, the first time I encountered VR, it was through Chris Milk's TED Talk, and it was the idea of the ultimate empathy machine. Thank God for Damiani's interview with Chris Mill, because he was also my ethnographic white whale. I met with his number two, but could never fully get my foot in the door of within, which was fine in the end, but I was aspiring to that. But I had suspected for a long time that the empathy machine was a riff on Roger Ebert. And it wasn't until actually maybe a year or two ago that a nice peer reviewer finally pointed out that recording to me because I just haven't seen that Game for Change recording because there's just so much out there. So that was great. I was like yes confirmed because I had like in all of the writing otherwise I had like I speculate that you know Milk is riffing on Roger Ebert and you know I just want to flag that for a second which is that's really important for when I'm trying to make the case that LA matters for thinking about virtual reality, because when empathy machine is taken up and wired in the verge by critical theorists of technology, it redounds back to Silicon Valley, and it redounds back to this idea of technologies that are trying to make the world a better place, which is a conversation that exists and is problematic. But Milk's coining of VR as the ultimate empathy machine, right? Roger Ebert said film is an empathy machine. Milk is saying VR is an ultimate empathy machine, places VR squarely in a cinematic lineage. And I think that opens up so many more analyses for us to do about it that gets away from some of the more worn territory of critiques of technology and technological harms. And this was my own journey in trying to figure out the empathy notion was I originally assumed the Silicon Valley narrative. I assumed that this tech for good thing was part of the long lineage of corporate social responsibility that big tech firms had been doing as they were getting more and more bad publicity and the tech lash was growing. The tech lash corresponded with my field work year. It was like the word of the year in 2018, right, as I was doing fieldwork. So even though scholars were a little bit aware that maybe tech isn't always beneficent and for the best of humanity, the general public was only just catching up to these ideas, which we of course now I feel like it's common knowledge or it's in the water in more of a way.
[00:56:29.250] Kent Bye: So just to jump in, because March of that year was when Cambridge Analytica had broke. So there was more of a public turn towards Facebook and social media and an awareness of how some of these network scale technologies that had been basically unregulated and not really politically looked at by the public were suddenly looked at as a danger to democracy.
[00:56:50.603] Lisa Messeri: Exactly, right. And so, yeah, so like my research was kind of happening during that turn, which was also just like very fortuitous timing. And so, yeah, so I was trying to trace the empathy thing. And when I did my preliminary fieldwork, so I heard that TED talk probably 2015. When I went out to LA in 2016, the summer of 2016, before the 2016 election, importantly, I was able to meet with a lot of people who were hyped on empathy machine stuff. And that was the talk of the town. There was like a million meetups happening. They were all empathy related. I got a ton of letters of commitment from people who were in this scene. And then when I returned in 2018 to do my field work, the empathy machine luster was gone. There were still people doing it, but they struggled with the language of empathy. And I think that was really, to me, that spoke so highly of the community. Because the critique was made, the community heard the critique, and the community began to change their practices, especially for some of the easiest critiques that were being made. So for example, when Chris Milk says you can do VR and suddenly know what it's like to be a Syrian refugee, and his team is comprised of himself, who's a white male American filmmaker, and people who kind of look like him or occupy a similar social sphere, that really deprives agency of the people whose story are supposed to be told. It really turns them into subjects. But VR production studios and companies got that immediately and started enrolling people in these projects and saying, what is the story you want to tell? How do we tell a story about your community and your life? So that already fixed one of the low-hanging fruit critique that had been made about the empathy machine. But as I said, as I was doing my fieldwork, the empathy machine luster, people were really nervous about it and tentative about it. The critique was working, and people were being a lot more thoughtful about it. And so the empathy machine stuff really only comprises the middle third of the book, just two chapters, because I didn't want the whole book to be about it, because it was a fantasy that peaked and was on its way down and really has kind of, at least as the term, has kind of snuffed out a little bit. And I think to the health of the community, the VR community. But at the same time, I was really interested in the questions of how did this even become thinkable to begin with? And often when writing these initial critiques of the Empathy Machine that were published as I was doing fieldwork, before I was doing fieldwork, after, before I got my own book out and take on it out, the story always began with Milk, with Chris Milk, because he was the most charismatic producer of the Empathy Machine logic. But your podcasts were the key I needed because Milk's TED Talk, as you said, isn't until 2015. He wasn't at SVVR in 2014. And the fact that you talking with Nonny de la Pena and others were already talking about empathy made me realize that empathy does not begin with Chris Milk. And even looking at Jeremy Bailenson, who's kind of the most prolific researcher who's explicitly written about empathy in VR from a psychological perspective, he doesn't begin his early stuff with the language of empathy either. He was using the much more acceptable scientific, acceptably phrase of perspective taking. in some of his really early and significant works. And so I don't have an exact opposite of when and how empathy got into the conversation, but it does happen around this 2013, 2014, 2015 period. And the best I can do with my own kind of reconstruction and not having anyone who quite knows how it worked its way into the language is, in fact, Nonny de la Pena. And I see her as an incredibly significant figure in the field for creating the VR we have today. I mean, Apple, I mean, Meta, I mean, all of the big companies, Chris Milk, Palmer Luckey, She, to me, is the start of it because she was trained as a journalist, had already been doing really fascinating experimental journalism in Second Life, looking at Guantanamo Bay and prisoner abuses there. She had been interested in VR in the 90s by reading the press that had been out around it then and wondered if she could heighten her Second Life journalistic take and ended up going to Mel Slater's lab in Barcelona, doing a project with him, learning a little bit more about Slater's way of thinking about VR. Then coming back to LA, going into USC's School of Journalism, but meeting Mark Bolas and meeting Scott Fisher and being able to have access to some of these pre-Oculus VR rigs that, again, were incredibly expensive. She's the person who said, this is a medium that we can use to tell nonfiction stories, that we can use to evoke empathy in readers, which is what documentarians and journalists try to do. She was the one who, as far as I can tell, began to make the nonfiction stories in VR, to make the journalistic nonfiction stories. And as now we all know, Hunger in LA, her first VR piece, went to Sundance in 2012 at the invitation of Shari Freelow. And in order to get it there, she needed a VR rig. And Mark Bolas was like, no, you cannot take my $50,000 VR rig to Sundance. And so the lab intern, Palmer Luckey, with many other members of the lab, hacked together a portable VR device that could go to Sundance, made a huge press splash, Palmer, months later, kickstarted Oculus. A year later, Facebook bought Oculus. And in the meantime, Frillo was telling all the filmmakers who were doing anything interesting and experimental in LA to go and see de la Peña at USC. And Chris Milk is one of the people that went and saw de la Peña at USC, saw what she was doing, and worked in her model. So when I think of de la Peña, I think that she's incredibly vital for the story, both because in giving Palmer Luckey the opportunity to experiment with a low-cost rig. She further gave him the resources and encouragement, as well as Mark Bolas and even bringing him in as an intern to begin with, to make that infrastructural leap happen, which led to the big commercial push that we're still in the middle of. And she had the content inspiration to say VR could be something different. So when I was doing field work, she really wasn't getting the credit I thought that she deserved. Now, you know, she's gotten a Peabody. She's like, you know, a head honcho at, you know, an immersive degree in LA through University of Arizona. So now I feel like a little bit more she's getting the credit she is due, but she's due a lot of credit in this world. And I don't know if you feel similarly, but that was kind of like when I finally pieced together the story, I was just really blown away by how essential she was.
[01:03:31.520] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd heard fragments of that story from different interviews that I'd done with both Shari Frilot and Nonny herself and recounting a lot of that. And when you read History of the Future from Blake Harris, which was not really ever sourced with anything, it's all manufactured quotes, so you can never really know what's what. But even in that recounting of the story, there's none of any of the women or people like Nonny de la Peña were involved in helping to really drive innovation in terms of the content and the stories, like you're saying that your research is focusing on, which I think is a key part of helping to weave together the story. And I just also want to flag that you had a chance to talk to Jackie Morey, who did a whole PhD thesis on other women that predated Narnia del Peña, who were doing more art projects. And so there's a lot of other experimentation that was happening even pre-Nonny de la Peña, that is a bit of the history of VR that's still not popularized or even well-known, and that Jackie Moray took it upon herself to try to document it in the context of her dissertation that she published in 2007, which I was happy to see that you were including in there as well to tie in these other aspects of the history. So I think in your book, you're helping to tie together a lot of those different strands. But I did want to follow up on one aspect before we move on to the last chapter, this whole idea of technological solutionism or trying to use a technology fix. I often fall back on to Laurence Lessig, who talks about the pathetic dot theory. I think of it more of a social, economic, political, domains of control where there's the law, there's the technological architecture and the code, there's the culture, and then there's the market dynamics and the economy. So there's like these different sociological, political, economic dimensions that sometimes if you try to use technology to collapse everything into solving all these problems with just using a technological solution. So I'm wondering if you could just comment on that phenomenon and from your perspective in the science and technology studies, how do you fight against that type of technological solutionism mindset?
[01:05:27.539] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, so the kind of watchword I go by is if it is a social problem, there's never going to be an exclusively technological fix, right? Technology can absolutely be part of it, but this idea that technology alone can fix social problems is a problem of incommensurability. It's asking something from one domain to fix something in another domain, and that's just usually like an untenable place to start from. I literally teach a whole class on how we get this, like how we get this way of thinking in the world. And then that class also then helps disabuse students of that way of thinking. But in general, all you need are case studies, right? If you just actually trace how technologies end up being in the world from the hype to actually what they do in the world and on the ground, you get a plethora of examples of technology not actually delivering on its developmental or social promises. I think an excellent book on this vein is Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine, in which she looks at the one laptop per child, which was the absolute darling of the tech world for quite a few years in the early 2000s. It was this idea that we can build a $100 laptop, get it to the world's poor, and this will alleviate poverty. That was the claim being made. This laptop is going to alleviate poverty because we're going to give people technology. They'll be connected. They'll educate themselves. They'll get jobs. They'll raise their standings. And it didn't work for a variety of reasons, but what was fascinating about Ames' study is that even as it repeatedly failed in the deployment phase, it still was lauded by the tech community because the idea was so good. So I think part of how we disabuse ourselves of this techno-solutionist mindset is to be excited about the hype. hold on hope that yes, we can build a better world and technology is part of building a better world, but that we then need to really diligently trace these solutions on the ground and see their afterlives to understand when and how these things succeed or fail. So precisely because so much critique had been mounted on the empathy machine, I didn't want this book to be something that just beat up on it further.
[01:07:25.170] Kent Bye: It's like kicking someone when they're down.
[01:07:27.292] Lisa Messeri: I just feel like I didn't have anything... I wanted to capture that critique and I wanted to capture how the community had responded to that critique, but I didn't feel like I had anything necessarily new to say on that front, but I thought it was a really important thing to capture it all and to try to narrate it as persuasively and succinctly as I could, just so that it doesn't zombify itself and come back in a different, even worse way. But I wanted to take seriously the desire for technology to do good in the world and to be a force of change and societal betterment. And that's why I was really excited when I met Carrie Shaw and her company Embodied Labs, who you've also interviewed. And I was actually in the field, I was doing my field work with Shaw when she met you and got you to interview her. And she was like so excited. She was like, can't buy interviewed me. And you know, it was a very exciting moment for her. It felt like she made it in the VR industry after that. But what I was so inspired by with her company is rather than thinking about VR as this like, one-and-done solution. She thought so carefully about the community she wanted to help and how VR could be more particularly integrated into that community to do the help. Embody Labs is a VR company that uses these empathy machine experiences that we've just been talking about and being nervous about, but for caregivers who work with the aging population. The idea was that it put VR in a low-resourced community, care workers. And it put VR in service of people who were already in community with whom the VR was hoping to help. So unlike me watching a VR experience about a Syrian refugee, and I've never met a Syrian refugee, that substitutes a social connection. it replaces my need to actually go out and find a Syrian refugee to talk with and understand their lives. Whereas what Shah was doing with Embodied Labs is she was augmenting an existing connection and using VR to strengthen that community connection. So because these people were already in community with the subjects that these VR experiences, it still wasn't perfect, but it just felt to me promising as how these lofty visions of VR as something that could do good in the world. And I think we need to keep hoping VR can do good in the world. This was just an example that I felt got close. And I was just really glad I could come away from research with an example.
[01:09:51.714] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I like how you're also invoking this idea of effective economies, where if you think about empathy machine and you're trying to empathize with someone, you're only learning about their story. There's no way for that other person to receive anything back from you if it's a 360 video or if it's a simulation. But if it's something that is in the context of trying to help caregivers to deepen their understanding with the people that they're already caring for, what they're going through, allows for the possibility for an economy or a flow of care. So I like that idea because it helps to also elucidate, you know, what's the difference between an experience that's not in right relationship versus one that is in right relationship. And I feel like part of it is, is there some real time mechanism? Or I think the other thing is there's a difference when you're doing a first party embodiment versus a ghost. And I did an interview with Devin Dolan at Sundance in 2016. which is the first year that I attended Sundance to look at the more storytelling aspect. And he had written an article and he was talking about these two different axes of either you're embodied or you're a ghost. And then the other dimension was whether or not you were having any sort of agency in the context of the narrative. So does your actions actually play into the experience? So the holy grail would be that you were embodied and that your actions matter and that you're a character. But sometimes in these experiences, it's almost better if you're like a disembodied ghost, because it's like avoiding some of the more complicated nuances of what it means to embody some of these representations of identities that you don't actually have any direct embodied experience of that experience. And so I think that's another dimension of in these empathy experiences, what is your embodiment? Are you disembodied or your ghosts? And then what are the deeper relational contextual dynamics of how you might be in relationship to the people that are being talked about? Cause there's like traveling while black was an example where you're much more of a disembodied ghost and you're kind of witnessing and it feels super powerful due to that, but it's not making you the character of racism.
[01:11:49.401] Lisa Messeri: I, yes, completely agree. I give a talk in which I actually kind of do a similar diagram that I came up with kind of on my own, but it's wonderful. We all converge at these spots. And definitely, I wanted to distinguish witnessing from embodiment. I do it a little bit in the book, but not as explicitly when I talk about the fantasy of being someone else versus the fantasy of being somewhere else. That was my attempt to give a dimensionality to this analysis, because I felt like a lot of the critique of the empathy machine collapsed that. And I think that's really crucial. And when I give that talk on these dimensionalities, I always end with traveling while black, because I thought that was one of the best experiences I've done, which showed me that this could be good, right? Because it allows me as a white person to be in a space, to have a fantasy of being somewhere else, being in space, in this case, like a cafe or a diner that is majority black occupied and owned and be witness to Tamir Rice's mom talking about what it was like to lose her child to police gun violence. And it was so moving and really meaningful. And I didn't come away, and this was already after I'd developed my whole critique of the empathy machine. I came away with that would be like, no, that worked. Why did it work? And it was absolutely this witnessing versus embodying that made me feel like, yes, this is just a really powerful film. and VR can tell really powerful stories. And we shouldn't just go back to only doing first-person shooter games and enterprise applications. I want the community to keep working towards what is a ethical and moral way to tell these impactful stories.
[01:13:22.557] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there are examples like Cloud River Citra where you are witnessing, but there are other deeper contextual dynamics of how is the story told, but also trauma tourism type of dimensions that are also in there as well. Well, and the last part is the fantasy of representation. which you start to dive into both the dynamics of creating a diverse and pluralistic future of VR, but at the time you're also deconstructing a lot of what is essentially gender essentialist claims that women would actually be way better than men at creating this VR experience, but also trying to create a really diverse workforce of what you call the fantasy of representation, which, you know, again, I want to reiterate that the fantasy is potentiality of the possibility rather than something that is diluted, but something that has not yet happened, but yet with all of the newness of the field, it created all these new possibilities for people to come in and to make a name for themselves and to potentially have a career in a way that they wouldn't have had in more established film industries. So love to have you break down. How do you start to unpack some of the different topics around gender and critiquing and unpacking in the context of this part three.
[01:14:35.825] Lisa Messeri: Yeah, so I mean, even just think about the conversation we've already had, right? Nonny de la Peña, Carrie Shaw, Jacki Ford Morie , Marcie Jastrow is another character I write about, Joanna Popper, Jenn Duong, you know, Julie Young, like, there were just like, the VR scene in LA was exploded with women when I got there in a way that like, as someone who has trained as an engineer, studied science and technology for a long time, like, truly I had not encountered quite as powerful of a explicit message about female representation and actually a seemingly enacted representation. And, you know, I think here's again where fantasy ended up being really helpful for me, because at first I was a little seduced by the fantasy, right? I was kind of like, okay, yeah, this seems like something that's happening. But it only ever remained a potentiality, as you're saying, because all these women didn't get a payday. What we're thinking of is that in the end, what technological development does is it makes people rich, right? That is one of the reasons people go into this thing, a lot for the good reasons. But Chris Milk, he pivoted real fast away from empathy machine stuff to fitness apps and got bought out by Facebook. I've stopped following whether that's still under FTC review or whatever. It went through.
[01:15:49.413] Kent Bye: It's through, yeah.
[01:15:50.373] Lisa Messeri: So Milk got a payday, Palmer Lucky got a payday. The men in the story got paydays, very few of the women did. So that's when I began to really think that the language of fantasy is helpful, because it begins to show us that even when there is social action happening around a desire, in this case for a diverse workforce, What actually are some of the benefits of therefore being in the workforce are still being unevenly distributed, even if you're going by a merit-based calculation, I would argue. So the gender stuff, you know, it always is, it's like really interesting and challenging to write about because as you write, I encountered so much essentialist logic in which it was claims again and again that women were VR's natural leaders. And why that is concerning to kind of a feminist anthropologist is in making a gender claim, even if it's a positive claim about a disenfranchised group, it reinforces the binary that sets up that group to be disenfranchised in the first place. So if you say that women are VR's natural creators, then you've already kind of reinforced a male-female binary that in fact precludes other people from being part of it. I mean, that's a little bit of a pedantic and scholarly critique, but I think it's an important critique because in the end, what the women I worked with wanted was power, right? They wanted to have social standing. They wanted to be impactful. They wanted to have their voices heard. Many of the reasons that women and other represented voices aren't heard is because of these structures that are already in place that are defined by gender, race, class, identity. These essentialist logics regrettably maintain those structures that keep women in often unvoiced positions. So that was just kind of like a general comment that I had wanted to make in this project. But then what I thought was so interesting is the way in which the final chapter of the book is when all the fantasies come together to really think about what was happening in this place of fantasy where VR was being offered as this fantasy of being and VR being a good technology and this desire for this kind of like female empowered workforce. How was that actually impacting the women who I was perceiving as successful, those who actually had managed to like increase their stature by affiliating with VR? And there it became so fascinating because I saw all these women who had leveled up, let's say, by switching from maybe being an assistant or kind of a production assistant in film to working in VR, being able to become a producer quite quickly because there was less of a hierarchy. And then because VR is this like shiny technology, getting some of the stature that comes with being a tech worker. So I had all of these women who were really proud to be a woman in tech. And again, as someone who trained at MIT, I had this very fixed notion of what a woman in tech was. I was like, oh, a woman in tech is a developer, has some kind of technical skills that they leverage into being an entrepreneur, et cetera, et cetera. And all of these women in LA who identified as women in tech, not all, but many, were storytellers, were filmmakers, were actresses. And I thought that, wow, that's actually quite an amazing hack that many women were able to pull off, that through leveraging the skills they had in entertainment and storytelling and porting them into a kind of technology, in this case, VR, They were able to claim a different identity, an identity that had a higher social standing than the identity they previously had, even though they were just doing the same skills that they already had developed. So they were able to put their expertise in a different context, and in so doing, actually get some of the benefit that's being promised by being a STEM worker in this case. And I thought that was fascinating. As an anthropologist, I was just like, that is a really cool cultural formation that is happening here. And that in the final chapter, I attempt to document. And the final takeaway is that what I discovered is that in LA, when someone says, I work in tech, tech came to mean something different. It indexed a different set of skills and expertise. And that to me is really powerful because going back to the conversation on technological solutionism, I think one reason it's so hard for us to get out of that mode of thinking is because tech had this universal power and claim as existing everywhere in the same way. Therefore, a technology that fixes a problem in New York is a technology that can fix a problem in Bangladesh, right? It's universal, it travels. And the fact that even within California, how people talked about tech and what it meant to be in tech was different, was such a powerful example that technology is locally and culturally shaped. And as an anthropologist of science and technology, that is like the main message that I always want to get out to my students and readers and anyone who will listen to me.
[01:20:47.021] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I actually wanted to swing back briefly to the first chapter where you dig into the story of Marcy Jastow at the Technicolor Experience Center, because you follow her in that very first chapter. She lets you in. Traditionally, anthropologists have had a hard time getting access into Hollywood, but with VR, you're able to kind of get into the back door. And as all of your stories are coming to a close, you kind of have this potentiality of what might be possible, but then slowly, piece by piece, there's the realities of the situation where None of the women that you're featuring are coming away with this big payday. I'd say probably Carrie Shaw on Embodied Labs is continuing to really be persistent and continue to do really amazing work with Embodied Labs. But with Marcy Jastow, with this vision of how Technicolor was going to be a part of this future, I actually did an interview with her that I haven't published that I did at South by Southwest in 2019, where I saw the Mars experience that she was working on. while you were there. And so I want to get that interview out hopefully after this podcast, as well as actually, I haven't, unfortunately have not published the full interview that I did with Carrie and I've thought about it a lot. And I want to also release that in the context of this conversation, because I think going back into their stories and having the conversations that I had with them, because there was a lot of excitement for location-based entertainment. This was 2019. This was before the pandemic. And the ways that Marcy was trying to really bring in her skill sets for post-production, but where this was going to go in the context of the VR industry. But you were able to get a front seat into what was happening with lots of different people coming through the Technicolor Experience Center and Marcy Dresto. And unfortunately, at the end, it shuts down in a way that it doesn't continue. And so there's like a recurring theme of the potentiality is not coming into actuality, but I'd love to hear you just kind of reflect on that entry point that you were having into LA. Yeah.
[01:22:36.414] Lisa Messeri: I mean, Marcy let me into Hollywood and like, that's something that very few anthropologists have been able to do. And there's so many arguments in the book that I'm able to make that I couldn't have done had I not gotten that like up close look. And I'm so like, I mean, I'll tell you, I also got an up-close look at an NVIDIA presentation on generative AI in 2018 when I should have bought stock. Um, so that's like what I should have done, but yeah. So I was actually at Technicolor while the Mars experience was being developed. I worked on it actually. And I was part of the world building workshops that led to fleshing out the narrative in that piece. But what's really interesting about Jastrow's narrative. So she began in visual effects and really saw the transition from analog to digital and the VFX community in the VFX industry, including working with James Cameron and like on a lot of like Oscar winning pictures in which. early digital effects across the production pipeline were being implemented. And then she got into VR. Ted Shilowitz and some other folks were like, Marcy, you got to do for VR, and this is how Marcy tells it, but you have to do for VR what you did for kind of digital post-production. And what she had done for digital post-production was figure out how to get everyone talking to each other. such that the pipeline, like a kind of a production pipeline could emerge. And it's like, could she do that for VR? Could she take out some of the friction in VR production and make it something that Hollywood and studios were interested in? Because the studios had been burned by 3D. They had invested a whole lot in 3D projection and 3D infrastructure and 3D projection, and it really was not a return on investment. So Hollywood studios, when I was doing fieldwork, was very unsure about VR. And I mentioned that I saw at one point and talked to the creator. I don't know if you ever talked to Gibson, but the creator of cycles.
[01:24:27.561] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so I actually, I had a chance to see cycles at Sundance and do an interview with them about cycles.
[01:24:34.064] Lisa Messeri: Yeah. So, I mean, as he told me, and I'm sure he told you like, That was Disney's dipping their toe in the water of VR, right? It was kind of like, though they of course had done it with Aladdin in the 90s, this was kind of their contemporary moment of giving funds to an artist's vision in the animation studio, right? And saying like, go ahead and try this. I don't know, dot, dot, dot. I think that story is still unfolding given how it's being incorporated into Apple's spatial computing world. But what I find so instructive about Jastrow and that I then have seen in a lot of other women who I've been, you know, I'm still friends with them. Like I follow them, we text, we catch up every once in a while when I'm fortunate enough to see folks or to visit LA. But Jastrow kind of was very disappointed after the closing of tech. She felt like she really tried and she didn't have good faith partners to make it happen. And originally she turned back to traditional production. She went back into remote production work, which like right before the pandemic, it was like amazingly timed. And when I saw her in 2021, which is when, because of the pandemic, I finally was able to get back to LA, the metaverse thing was just kind of in its hype phase. And it was then that Marcy kind of was like, you know what? going back. And she and a bunch of other people who had been kind of knocked out of the VR stage entered metaverse, crypto, NFT, DeFi land. And because of their experience in VR, were able to kind of make themselves desirable in those fields, particularly as content producers. And so I think since, I haven't caught up with her in a detailed way recently, but she built out the metaverse for Shiba Inu and premiered that at South by Southwest in 2022, I want to say. And what I find is so interesting is that VR became a pipeline for some of these women to keep chasing the hype cycle. And I don't mean that cynically. I think there is passion behind these choices. But VR didn't actually become the end of a lot of people's stories, even after that market deflated and empathy machine deflated. Again, unlike Shaw, who's been amazing at continuing to fundraise around her company. But all these other women who never quite secured funding, it's not like they then just went back to film or went back to doing whatever. Many of them have been able to stay in the hype cycle and find new places for themselves in this VR, AR, AI, crypto ecosystem. And that also has been very instructive for me because it shows me how VR is not isolated, but like part of this broader story and therefore this broader way that we need to understand these emerging technologies and their relation to one another.
[01:27:17.343] Kent Bye: Yeah. And that's what I really took away from your book was by diving deep into one location for one year, you're able to pull out all of these larger relational dynamics of both the technology and the politics and the culture and the market dynamics and how that all feeds into the culture of LA and then continues on to other technologies that come in. So I think there's a lot of really deep lessons that you have in this book. And I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of VR might be and what it might be able to enable.
[01:27:51.341] Lisa Messeri: Well, I've been preparing an answer for this question for years. So for me, this is how I would like to think about the ultimate potential, is for me, VR was what Sherry Turkle has called an evocative object, this thing to think with. And as she writes, these evocative objects, we come to love in particular ways, and we come to love the way they make us think. And for all of my critique, that is very much how I feel about VR. VR has been this incredible evocative object for me. The way it opened modes of thinking shocked me again and again. And so what I think the ultimate potential of VR is, is something that really gets us to think about the world in different ways. And I'm really excited for future thinkers and scholars to kind of take up VR as an evocative object and further open up the ways in which it makes us think.
[01:28:51.587] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:28:56.396] Lisa Messeri: Pend, I would like to thank you for having an incredible archive that filled in many holes in my story and is just a real service to this community. So it is a thrill to be here and to talk with you. And just thank you for the work you've done over this decade.
[01:29:16.098] Kent Bye: Oh, yeah, maybe just as we kind of close up, I very much appreciate that. And yeah, it was a real honor for me to see any citations. I think anybody who's in academia, you always like to see that your work gets out there and get cited. And I think there's a lot of ways in which that my work is often invisible to a lot of existing academia, but I'm glad that anthropologists like yourself are starting to dig in to the archive. But as I was reading it, I just want to sort of bring it back to the unreality and how it ties back to the larger political context, because I feel like there's some ways that you're able to close that circle as well. And so as you think about all this deep dive into VR, I love VR. I'm obsessed with what the experiences are. I love the people. I think it's a fascinating thing to study and dig into similar conclusions you have, but I think it also is maybe reflecting of this time of unreality of the political fracturing. And it's something that I know that I've wrestled with over time and certainly after January 6th, there was like a conversation that I had that I was just trying to like make sense of the mirroring between what I was seeing and the culture of VR and how that was mirroring the fractal representation of the larger culture. But I'd love to hear if you contextualizing what's happening in the VR and the unrealities and the fracturing of realities and how that ties back into the world that we live in now and how technology can be an instigator of some of those fractures.
[01:30:36.615] Lisa Messeri: Completely. Yeah. My book opens and closes with January 6th and the riots because At that point, my book was more or less done, right? I still had a couple more versions to go, but all the pieces were in place and it was moving through the pipeline. And when January 6th happened and the ride on the Capitol happened, I was watching it and was like, oh, I know this story because VR trained me to think in a particular way that made what was happening as an alternative reality, as a conflicting reality, as an unreality, as ways that fantasy becomes real. That is what was happening. All of the commentators who were talking about it on the podcasts I listened to, like Slate Political Gab Fest or in the New York Times, they were all using the language of my book. my unpublished, only in my mind book, only on my hard drive book, to make sense of January 6th. And that's when I was like, oh my god, VR gave me a way of thinking about the world that I want other people to have. And then as I was, again, still trying to figure out how I wrap all this story together, I had been listening to your podcast. And it was your interview with Fox Buckley, where suddenly January 6th was in your conversation and in your mind. And as readers who might The listener has stuck to the end of the podcast and who makes it to the end of the book, which is maybe like four people. But for you, dear listener, like Kent brings out my book and provides me with the perfect epilogue that I needed to think through the end. And Kent, it was your use of like Popper's paradox of tolerance. You invoke that to kind of try to describe how you were reckoning. with January 6th, and it made me understand that there was this paradox of unreality that tapered over kind of the political claims I was hoping to make about the book. And what it redounds to is that part of what people with good intentions with VR and VR empathy experiences wanted to do was, in response to seeing that we live in a fractured reality, that my lived reality is different from someone else's lived reality, It was hoped that VR could bring it back together by bringing me into another life world and making me more empathetic and kind of re-knitting a social tie that has been degrading, as one might narrate it, over decades and centuries and years. And to me, that paradox is that actually collapsing back into a belief in a single reality deprives us of the creative and fantastical thinking we need to be doing to actually bring about a changed and better world. And so that becomes the paradox of the unreality. Unreality calls for us to re-knit back together to a common reality, but I actually think that is not in service of the better futures that we're all hoping and imagining for.
[01:33:26.995] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I was just reading up that last section moments before we started to talk. And so I was like kind of remembering that moment, wrestling with that, but also I feel like I'm very committed to this idea of pluralism of trying to be very accepting of lots of multitudes of different perspectives, but yet, there's a limit to that type of pluralism, which is that intolerance of like, can you really be completely inclusive of those who are not also as inclusive? And so that Popper's paradox of tolerance speaks to that, but also this larger world that we live in, where these alternative realities have been spun into these conflicting political views that have real impact. And so it's difficult to maintain that neutrality when there's manipulation, deception, fake news, and just lying that is polluting this information sphere that is slowly eroding democracy. So as we're like heading towards the next election here in this year, I'm also like watching r slash politics every day to see like, are we going to have a democracy? What's going to happen in our future? And so I'm, I find myself continuing to like, have this unease of these alternative realities that have been spun up. And there's a number of different documentaries that were at Sundance this year, my wife and I watched 37 documentaries. There's a documentary there called and so it begins about the Philippines and Dorte and the resurgence of Marcos and how the alternative realities were happening there. So I feel like it's a deeper discussion here about parallel alternative unreal realities and how they're such a big discussion around our world today. And I feel like your book is helping to weave a lot of those threads together through the context of what you've been able to learn from the unreality of VR.
[01:35:10.973] Lisa Messeri: That's my grandest hope. So thank you. That is the kindest thing I could hear.
[01:35:16.292] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for writing this book. I highly recommend folks check it out. Like I said, this is like the most in-depth anthropological look in VR that I've seen so far. I don't think there's anybody that's done as an extensive field study and write up and so many amazing citations that I'll continue to be digging into and help to inform my own work. But thanks so much for taking the time to embark on this 10 year journey and to write this book and to come on the podcast to help break it all down.
[01:35:41.990] Lisa Messeri: Thank you. This was fantastic.
[01:35:43.667] Kent Bye: So that was Lisa Masseri. She's a Yale anthropologist who's written a book called The Land of the Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, which is releasing on March 8th, 2024. So a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I took 10 pages of notes as I was reading this book because there were just so many insights that it's one of the most rich texts that I've read about VR that is tapping into both the history of science fiction, the cultural dimension, some of the references of previous ethnographic work that Tom Belsorf has done within the context of Second Life. I really think this is a landmark study that It's certainly the most in-depth look of virtual reality and it's one of the books that I've gotten the most insight into because she's drawing upon all these traditions of science and technology studies and anthropology and just weaving in all these different references that up to this point have not really been in conversation with the broader XR community. I'm so happy that she chose to dive into Los Angeles, which has got all this facade nature, all this dimensions of unreality. 2018 was a very interesting in the evolution of virtual reality technologies, just because it's still an era of PC VR. The Oculus Go had released that year, but it was only 3DOF. The Oculus Quest wouldn't come out until May of 2019, which kind of flipped the entire industry into another direction of standalone VR as a way of really taking off. So at that point, the virtual reality as an ecosystem really was in this liminal space of still not really capturing the imagination of the public. We're here in 2024, which the Apple Vision Pro has just released. And so it's kind of reinvigorating different aspects of the virtual reality as a technology, even though, you know, Apple's calling it spatial computing. It's still essentially a virtual reality and mixed reality technologies. So there was a lot of promises that were happening at the time. And when she did her preliminary study in 2016 in Los Angeles, there was a lot of hype around the empathy machine. And then when she was actually there in 2018, that had died down a little bit, but it was still persisting and it still honestly persists today. And so she's not only deconstructing a lot of that VR as empathy machine through this lens of fantasy of being the idea that you could actually understand what it is actually like to be another person. certainly a lot of limitations for what VR as a technology can do in order to Really truly give you this experience of what it means to walk in somebody else's shoes or to have their experiences and then the fantasy of place is really digging into Los Angeles as this nexus of entertainment and military and technology and how USC ICT ends up being this real central point for how virtual reality as a technology is having its resurgence and I Palmer lucky also being in Orange County in Los Angeles and to have an internship there and to go to Sundance in 2012 before the Kickstarter had even launched and have this experience and I had a chance to talk to Palmer lucky about that experience and how he was really struck by this what he saw as this gaming technology being shown to people who are non gamers and how emotionally evocative and moving it could be and so really tapping into this potentiality for how this other tradition, the lineage of the cinematic tradition that is coming out of the context of LA is fusing with virtual reality as a technology and how so much of the history of VR is being told through this lens of the technology, and not so much as through the lens of content. Yeah, and the phrasing of fantasy, whenever I think about it, I think about it as a potentiality, because there are potentialities as a potential future. And mystery is using fantasy in a multi valence way where there could be both positive aspects of fantasy that allows you to take action and to live into your fantasies and dreams and make your dreams come true. But there's also a negative valence of the delusion aspects of fantasy, which when I hear fantasy, I tend to think about the negative aspects rather than potentiality. But as she's talking about these different fantasies of fantasy of place, the fantasy of being, and the fantasy of representation, there were still a lot of potentialities for how we can have a lot more equitable and diverse future within XR, but a lot of what she was seeing with the dual realities of Silicon Valley's influence on how this technology was going to press versus the more idealistic possible futures of virtual reality that were being played out within Los Angeles with all these women led communities and women led initiatives. And that as the series documenting in the context of this book, a lot of those different initiatives that she started to see in the beginning of 2018, by the end, and by now, a lot of those have not been able to sustain and there hasn't been a lot of women that she's featuring that were able to have these huge paydays when it comes to the dream of creating a technology startup and being able to sell for lots of money. Certainly Carrie Shaw, I think is probably the most successful person that she is featuring just in terms of consistently working on the vision that she was featuring in the book, and then continuing to survive as a business in the context of VR and body labs and doing this training aspect. Also just this frame of the unreal as a way of deconstructing these different realities. And I really love the reference back to Latour defining real as resistance. And so there's a way that enough people are believing something then it starts to have a resistance where that belief or that reality starts to clash with other realities. And so we are living in a context where that is certainly happening with these fractured realities and these filter bubbles and alternative realities and fake news and manipulation. And also just looking into potential futures of artificial intelligence and what I was deconstructing in the interview that I did with Alvin Wayne Graylin and Lewis Rosenberg of the test real complex of ideologies that are driving the resurgence of artificial intelligence as a technology. And so there's a way in which some of those philosophies and ideologies create these alternative reality bubbles of potential possible futures that are also taking this kind of tech solution as a collapse of so many of these political, economic and cultural realities that technology is going to swoop in and solve all of our problems. And so, yeah, just really appreciate Ms. Sari saying, look, if it's a social problem, there will never be a pure technological fix to that social problem, because they're just different domains. And there's ways in which that the culture having values that are driving the creation of technology and our economy and our laws and our politics, that there's ways that these are different domains that are collapsing each other, when you're going to take something from one domain and expect it getting to solve all the problems in another domain, that Very rarely has technology been able to deliver on the extent of all their social claims. So certainly technology is going to be potentially a part of making a better world, but it can never be relied upon within its own context because there's always a broader context of the cultural context, economic and political dimensions as well. So the land of unreal virtual and other realities in Los Angeles releases on Friday, March 8th, 2024. Like I said, it's the best book that I've read about VR is given me the most insights and most deep reflection on what I've been seeing within the VR community and providing a lot of insights for how I make sense of what's happening here, both in what's happening with VR, but also how it fits into what's happening in the broader cultural and political context of our day. So. That's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
