In the Land of the Unreal

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In The Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

“With careful, easy, and fun to read prose, Lisa Messeri examines the efforts to build and promote a new technology and related industry, thereby introducing readers to hot button current concerns in our culture: about the role and power of technology; the changing nature of the real and fantasy; and the assaults on truth and humanity. A compelling ethnography.”

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.