Lisa Messeri is faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University and author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, also published by Duke University Press. In her new book In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, she offers an ethnographic exploration of Los Angeles’s VR community, showing how technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
You describe an early vision of VR as an “empathy machine.” Where did this altruistic idea of VR start, and what does it think VR can do?
In 2015, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker gave a TED talk entitled “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine.” This talk named a phenomenon that had been brewing for several years at the intersection of academic research and journalism. Put succinctly, the idea was that because of VR’s sensorially immersive quality, it could induce strong feelings in viewers that allowed them to deeply understand situations far removed from their every day. Rather than VR being a vehicle for escapism and fantasy, instead it was meant to expose people with privilege to experiences of poverty, discrimination, war, and a litany of other injustices. When I began hearing podcasts and reading media stories about how VR could help one understand what it was like to, for example, be a refugee, my alarm bells went off (my training prepares me to be skeptical of technological solutions to societal problems) and the work for what eventually became this book began.
Does VR actually achieve what this vision believes it can?
The ambition of my book is not to say whether VR is or isn’t an empathy machine, but rather to understand how people came to believe in this vision and what have been the consequences of pursuing this vision. Why, in the mid-2010s, was the promise of a beneficent technology still so appealing despite what we were all coming to understand about the biases of algorithms and the social harms and radicalizations happening in online spaces? On the one hand, the empathy machine was one last chance to believe in the promises of technological progress. But there was also this complex irony that positioned VR as a digital fix to the social divisions and fractures that analysts increasingly understood to be caused (in part) by social media and the filter bubbles produced by algorithms. In other words, this next-gen tech was being positioned as a solution to the problems caused by the previous generation. However, as I detail in the book, these concerns are very focused on Silicon Valley and I was more interested in why the empathy machine was appealing for folks in Los Angeles who were just as likely to come from Hollywood as they were from a traditional technological background. In this context, the empathy machine imaginary wasn’t positioned in relation to previous technologies, but rather it referenced broader trends of social and political unrest in the US. Because I was conducting fieldwork during the Trump administration, during which time there were mounting energies from movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, it was apparent that the empathy machine was responding to a growing liberal awareness of the inequities that accompany different lived experiences.
Your book focuses on the VR community in Los Angeles specifically. Why Los Angeles
and not Silicon Valley?
When I began imagining a project on VR (back in 2015) it came as a big surprise that I would be able to conduct fieldwork in LA! As I mentioned, I was concerned by the empathy machine imaginary, and as I began to research where some of the key promoters of this vision were based, my searching led me to LA. This really excited me, as I had already done fieldwork in Silicon Valley and I wasn’t too eager to return. As much as I love the Bay Area, I felt like it would be really hard to say something distinct about VR when writing from that location and with its overdetermined narratives about emerging technology. At the same time, my anthropological project is to write about places of (and people with) power, so LA was ideal in so far as I could approach technology in that location from a fresh perspective while still deeply attending to structures of power and privilege. I will also add, that when I was in graduate school and reading widely on theories of space and place, I loved reading theorists of LA like Ed Soja and Mike Davis, as well as Fredric Jameson’s reflections on the Bonaventure Hotel. There was fantasy in these musings on LA, and I was really excited to conduct fieldwork in this much theorized urban landscape. In the book, I indulge these interests by suggesting that being in LA and moving through its architectural façades becomes a fitting way to understand the experience of immersing oneself in VR.
You describe the entertainment industry as a tech industry of its own – particularly when it comes to special effects. How does VR play into this?
One of the key questions I ask in the book is “What is ‘tech’ in LA?” When I first began my research, the structure of feeling around that word and who identified as working “in tech” was quite different from my expectations informed by work I had done in Silicon Valley and my own undergraduate training as an engineer. I ended up developing the concept of “technological terroir” to remind analysts of technology that local political economies shape not only individual technologies, but also the very concept of “tech” and “tech work.” In LA, the dominant structuring force for the creative class that I conducted fieldwork with is, of course, Hollywood. Hollywood is an incredibly technical industry, particularly as blockbusters have come to drive the box office. I really like the book American Blockbuster by fellow Duke author Charles Acland, which emphasizes that not only do certain filmmakers (like James Cameron) drive the need for advanced technologies, but they also then tell stories that normalize these technological advances. In my book, I found it necessary to distinguish “cinematic technologies” – like cameras and CGI – and “emerging technologies” – like robots and flying cars – to more clearly delineate technologies that help tell stories from technologies about which stories are told. VR, by these definitions, is both a cinematic and an emerging technology and because of that blurring it became a way to better understand the aligned and competing interests of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
A big part of the altruistic idea of VR was based in the hope that the industry could
achieve true gender equity. How did this play out in reality?
I write a lot in the book (and in talks I have given about the book) about how “Women in VR” became a visible community in LA as VR was re-emerging onto the commercial market. People often ask “are there really more women in VR than other tech sectors?” But what mattered to me as an anthropologist was how this narrative emerged and how it impacted people who voiced and identified as women in VR. Certainly there were several women whose careers and reputations were greatly advanced after they pivoted to VR, and I give them space in the text to narrate their experiences and theories for why they found VR empowering. But I also make clear that some women felt excluded from the “popular feminism” that was often on display and, more materially, the financial beneficiaries of VR largely have been men or corporations with male CEOs. Sometimes it is more analytically helpful to think about the fantasy of inclusion narratives rather than their reality.
In researching this book, you spent time with the co-founder of a start-up that creates VR
experiences for caregivers working in eldercare. Can you describe their project and what
you learned from your experience with them?
The company I worked with, Embodied Labs, imagines a different user for VR. Rather than the privileged audience intended to view empathy machine experiences or the young, tech savvy gamer strapping on a headset to enter a fantasy world, this company creates VR experiences for professional caregivers who work with aging clients. The company suggests that these experiences can help (often underresourced and often women of color) care workers understand experiences of aging that are inaccessible to younger, more able-bodied people.
I was initially wary of conducting fieldwork with Embodied Labs, as some of the key problems with the empathy machine were being reproduced in their VR experiences and I was also aware of the critique from disability studies scholars on analog disability simulations that are often a part of medical training. But the more I talked with the CEO, the more I realized that Embodied Labs might be a helpful opportunity to think about the contexts that make interventions more helpful or hurtful. In other words, after spending a chapter voicing the harms of the empathy machine, I wanted to follow up with a chapter that considered if such well-intentioned approaches could be salvaged. Could the empathy machine be otherwise? Working with Embodied Labs helped me offer some lessons that we might apply to VR and other technologies that could better set the stage for altruistic visions to potentially be realized. I am not saying this company is perfect nor that it avoided some of the pitfalls that critics have highlighted. But it was important for me to not use critique to outright dismiss the possibility of technology assisting in our goals of being better community members, and instead look for models that could help imagine alternative modes of engaging technology and alternative visions of who technology can serve.
You end the book talking about recent developments in VR via the metaverse. How does
the vision of VR you’ve described manifest in these developments?
I knew it was going to be a gamble to write about VR. It was a guarantee that, by the time this book came out, either the technology would have faded into obscurity or it would be completely transformed from what the community I worked with was developing in 2018 when I conducted fieldwork. It was therefore always important to make this book about something more than VR. As I hope readers will discover, this book is about the fantasies that technologies facilitate – fantasies that individuals have for themselves as well as the social orders they hope to bring about.
Since I concluded my research, the subsequent fantasies that have captured industry and public fascinations have included cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the metaverse, and most recently generative AI. There are three ways that I have found my research on VR helpful for my own processing of these tech trends. First, it is sometimes the case that VR is directly implicated in the fantasy, as in Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse where we all are wearing our Oculus Quest headsets and hanging out in Meta’s virtual world. In this case, my book becomes a ”pre-history” of sorts to how we got here. A second observation I’ve made is that folks who I came to know through their VR work have at times moved on to one of these newer trends. These individuals serve as helpful reminders that while the physical things might be new and shiny, often the people, institutions, and ideologies undergirding them have common foundations. And finally, one of the intentions of this book is to expand our critique of the US tech industry to include other centers of power. There is a lot we still have to learn about the connections forged between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The recent writers strike in which AI featured prominently as a concern of LA’s creative class serves as a striking example. As my research illustrates, such tensions emerge not simply from Silicon Valley engineers imposing their vision on Hollywood storytellers. People in the entertainment industry are themselves actively pursuing, developing, and investing in AI. Like VR, AI is both a cinematic and an emerging technology and the complexities that arose due to VR’s blurring of these two kinds are evident in how AI conversations have been unfolding.
While thinking about VR in LA might seem at first blush quite specific, my hope is that this book is of interest to anyone who is thinking through the forces that structure our visions and fantasies about the future.
Read the introduction to In the Land of the Unreal for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E24MSSRI.
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