Session 8: #VRforGood
In Northwest Florida, there are two major industries: seasonal beach tourism and supporting the military bases. With few exceptions, almost everything in the small towns along the Gulf Coast gravitates around these two concerns. As the VR renaissance roared on, it was becoming clear that if I ever wanted to play a larger role in the growth of VR beyond military use, I would need to be physically closer to the industry. My wife and I decided to rent a small apartment in the Pacific Northwest. I continued my military consulting work, as I did have a number of existing customers in the area. While developments were happening in Silicon Valley, Greater Seattle was more my style. Having the big players of immersive technology within driving distance felt like a good move, even if I would have to fight I-5 to do it.
My colleagues called it The Left Coast. I shook off the words, thinking it the typical Fox News programming I had encountered in the military. There may be pockets of far out agendas, I had thought, but I had assumed most living in the harsh beauty of that part of the nation weren’t too unlike myself. I understood the dynamic between the shaman and the sacred. I had spent most of my career among the sacred, protecting the country and its Constitution, suspicious of those that would do it harm. The cutting edge in VR was in the realm of the shaman, however,-- novel, curious, unconventional, and mysterious. If I was to get anywhere in this budding industry, I would need to loosen up a bit.
1000 Pacific Time, 7 Oct, 2017.
I deleted my Facebook account in 2011. Sadly, it’s still the convention everyone uses to announce local events. My wife, begrudgingly, maintains hers. I have a ritual on the weekends when I’m in town. Mid-morning, she reviews her various groups to see what we may want to do that day. In a burst of surprise, she exclaims that the Tacoma Film Festival will have a VR section. Aha! That wasn’t going to happen in Florida! I dug out my JanusVR t-shirt from the bottom of my drawer. I was going to finally meet the people interested in VR in this area! People who weren’t trying to fulfill a government contract! We sped to the historic local bookstore where the VR film festival was hosted. The bookstore is a book lover’s dream, reading nooks, shop cats that are rumored to accompany you while you browse, and an eclectic collection of local writers. The back of the store was reconfigured to fit the bays for Vive’s. These were metal, fabric covered booths with the umbilical suspended from the top, and the lighthouses secured in the corners. This allowed a safe experience for whomever was in VR, as the chaperone system of the Vive would warn the user before they hit the walls. In an alcove were a few Samsung GearVRs--mobile phone based VR. Some waiting in chairs, others being charged on the floor.
I galloped into the area eager that I was to finally meet local VR enthusiasts in “meatspace”. This was going to be the start of being a part of the local industry. My hopes were dashed as I saw the placards of the experiences and overheard the conversations of the people who milled about the bookstore. My colleagues were right.
I just crashed upon The Left Coast.
Source: Unknown
I tried my best to keep my mind open during my visit, and there were a few experiences I enjoyed. One actually used JanusVR! The volunteer working the booth let me punch in the address for my webspace after getting the computer on Wi-Fi, and I gave him a tour of my webspaces instead! As much as I sought out joy and wonder in this event, I felt the crushing pressure of the grievance industry. Up until this moment it had been a mild annoyance, but now surrounded by it, I knew something that once gave me goosebumps had been completely hijacked. I’ve been in torment of what to do about it until I decided to write these Notes from The Metaverse.
In Northwest Florida, when a jet roars overhead, you’ll often hear through the spittle of lite beer nearby, “that’s the sound of freedom!” Similarly, whenever someone wants to make a social change that may not be in your personal interest, persuaders call VR an “empathy machine” Both may feel that sentiment is true, but the claims are both technically wrong. The turbines of a Chinese J-20 fighter over my house, though similar in timbre to an F/A-18, are unequivocally not sounds of impending freedom. Flooding the highest bandwidth information gathering organ a human has does not make your argument more sensible, just sensed.
VR is not an empathy machine. It is a rhetorical machine.
The annoyance started right at the beginning of the VR renaissance. The /r/oculus subreddit was a nexus of information as the technology was blooming. As development kits started to reach universities the blog posts began rolling out. Social science researchers explored the use of VR to gauge empathy. Some even advertised participation in the studies. Even with the ridiculously small resolution and only three degrees of freedom, graduate students hypothesized they could change the world! I thought it very odd that the topics of empathy concern seemed to parallel the platform of the Democratic Party. It was still early days, I wasn’t going to let it bother me too much. This will fizzle out like many things experienced in college, I had thought. At the time there were a few overtly feminist engineers and mathematicians I used to watch on YouTube. They usually kept their politics on Twitter, leaving the desired tech information on YouTube. It was odd how quickly they latched on to VR, quickly spinning up companies and organizations--it didn’t seem like a sense of wonder that I was having. There was an urgency to it, an urgency that finally makes sense today after learning more philosophical details.
“Both amazing promise and unforeseen consequences,” Indeed! The Veldt, next to the Erotica section.
I was surprised when watching a panel interview with the leadership of Oculus at Oculus Connect in 2014. I noticed a YouTuber I had been watching. I was eager for an intelligent question. I guess I should have checked her Twitter. She asked a classic Kafka trap question to John Carmack for which there are no satisfactory answers. Carmack, in reply, had the best deflating answer I had ever heard. He didn’t have resources for identity games, and he had challenges hiring the best people regardless of their immutable qualities. This is a sentiment I felt flying over my enemy with my crewmates. The proportion of women and minorities onboard the aircraft meant nothing to the Taliban we were fighting. All that I thought mattered to them was our competency, our lethality, and our desire to come home safe together.
As the VR film festival panelist moderator went on about enforcing diversity through the power of empathy, I daydreamed a bit about my loadmaster who complained of bruised breasts after laying on her chest looking out the aft scanner bubble buffeted by turbulence for hours, and my favorite gunner who called himself “Blasian”, half Black, half Asian. He kept us awake on long boring missions in rarified air with a constant flood of self-deprecating jokes. The diversity in my daydream made me chuckle with happy remembrance. The vocal fry and upward inflection that droned on from the panelist in a semi-religious chant brought me back to reality. What she wanted was something very different from what I knew. What troubled me was that there was very little conversation about the technology, only the social impact. It felt like a missionary sorting out how to make religious conversions. They didn’t care about the inner workings of the musket, like I did, just that it got the desired response from the natives.
In fact, I observed how little of those that hung about the festival had any technical “chops” whatsoever. Most were writers and program managers for their respective projects. This made it even harder to connect with people in the room. Not only was I not signing up for their crusades, no one would geek out with me. I concluded the day by exchanging information with a very nice fellow that wanted help in creating a 360 degree film on human trafficking. Not very good at feigning enthusiasm, I couldn’t offer a clever way to “amplify” that message with my technical knowledge. He was sincere in his effort, trying to improve the world, but in that moment, it felt like selling to a guerrilla a case of rifles and grenades--saying, I know you want to solve your problem, but are you sure you want to use these? That’s what it felt to see the progressively minded search for weapons in immersive technology. Some in the room had bigger plans for social impact than eradicating slavery.
The reason why immersive technology was so delicious to some was how it intertwined with postmodern philosophy. To contemporary postmodern philosophies, truth and reality are subjective. The only thing of importance is the power struggle between oppressor and the oppressed. To have a “virtual” reality at your command is very useful to anyone intending on dismantling power structures and reorganizing human interaction. Those YouTubers I once followed saw that utility from the start and moved in fast on it. Since they moved fast and organized while the rest of the industry was still trying to find a viable monetization strategy, they’ve earned the de facto mantles of authority in privacy, ethics, and of course, social change. They have written codes of conduct for professional conferences unchallenged. You would be a marked man if you did. If you weren’t going to join the crusade, they’ll still out race you to the holy land.
I extend this challenge. Go deep into Mississippi where you can clearly see the stars at night. If you are able to get a signal on your phone, find a church, open a major VR brand’s “VR for good” website, and ask the congregation if they fully support all the actions on that page. There may be a few, but others will most likely be debatable to them.
Today, we have an offered Metaverse where your speech is recorded constantly in case you may offend someone of a protected class. Structures are installed to delete you if you do not conform to the ever increasing and twisting demands by those seeking social justice. Soon we will have an economy overlaying the real, and if you do not comply, you do not participate. This is probably why 5G providers keep inviting themselves to the XR conversation.
We are inching toward a future Metaverse where liberty, individualism, and personal responsibility are deleted in favor of equity, harmony, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Chinese Communist Party is pleased. The Chinese Communist Party is investing.
As mentioned in the beginning, I’m torn between the shaman and the sacred. I stand between the allure of the possibility of how immersive technology can improve the human being, and the solid rock of western culture that I have defended. As I step forward into this future, I can not abandon my principles that brought me success in life. I differ from the postmodern inquisition that want to use VR to bring about social change. I, instead, think VR is best for the exploration of one’s individuality. To paraphrase a response to a demand that there be more Black representation in VR, they bravely retorted that their avatar was purple and there should be more purple people! This fleshy baggage doesn’t need to be brought into that space. The Metaverse allows you to encounter someone’s pure will and thought. The virtual worlds should not be a restrictive utopia for social coercion but a higher bandwidth expression of one’s mind. I stand by the freedom an adult should have in exploring that expression, even to my disgust and confusion. The trap to that, however, is that those who demand a censored Metaverse remain unchallenged. While I stand by my principles and refuse to promote censorship of ideas that disagree with me, I can no longer be tacit on the subject. I love immersive technology. But it is a tool, a powerful, but dumb tool, just like a gun, dependent of the agency of its user. While I won’t stop someone using it to try to dismantle a nation I defended, do not expect me to applaud subversive implementations.
I theorize that those who are heavily invested in social impact I have encountered over the years have stunted the VR renaissance. At every turn when immersive technology could have captured eyeballs with the widest net and monetized its growth, the adherents of postmodern doctrine were there to suck the joy out of your eye sockets and ensure you, the viewer, were properly self-flagellating and guilty of the privilege to be able to use VR. I remember browsing the media of the Samsung’s GearVR, a good majority of the videos offered to experience were there to remind you how bad the world was and how you were to blame. That wasn’t very compelling for a return “sticky” experience. Instead of exalting pure exploration of what could be experienced, there was likely always someone on the planning call, with purse strings, insisting the VR experience get on message.
Consider this a volley from my Index Controller across your bow. Not everyone in VR loves Burning Man. Not everyone in VR wants to put up with California dreaming. Not everyone in VR even speaks English, nor plays identity games. Not everyone in VR wants a little red book. Yet the tastemakers installed and boosted by forces unseen all keep pushing the same future that doesn’t include patriots that think like me, whilst smiling and calling for inclusion all the same.
To mirror Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, this is the ninth and final chapter of the first part to this blog. Before coming to conclusions about this final chapter and the observations contained within, please read my prior sessions leading to this. You will hopefully find that I brought you along a winding journey of my wonder and despair with VR. It was my intention from the beginning to arrive at this point. The end of the first part, I am at an impasse. I do not know what to do with an industry that has been usurped by this collectivist culture. I will find a way to create and explore all that immersive technology can do, and I will ensure that others are able to do the same in privacy. This must be made clear: the only way I’m bending a knee is to tighten a tracker on my foot.
(I could not find the original source of the title image. If you know who owns it, please let me know so I can credit them)