The Web We Never Lost: Building A Future Worth Living In

November 10, 2023
2023 PXR Conference
Transcript of a talk given in VR

Hello, and thank you for being here. I’m glad to see a few of you at least are here in headset. Before we begin, I’d like to ask you to try something a little odd, and that’s to break the magic. Maybe close your eyes, but just notice for a moment that you’re wrapped in technology. There’s a computer strapped to your face, it’s a bit uncomfortable, maybe it’s still new and smells like plastic, in your hands are controllers, or maybe you’re holding them a bit awkwardly to make sure the camera can track them. Or you're sitting in a desk chair, staring at a glowing rectangle where a six foot tall purple fox is addressing you from a stage. On the edge of your hearing is the space you’re actually in, kids or coworkers or dogs outside. Just sit with that for a moment, take a breath, and then please come back here, in this room, with me.

To open I’ll quote from Matrix director Lana Wachowski’s HRC Visibility Award acceptance speech:

“I know I am also here because of the strength and courage and love that I am blessed to receive from… my family and my friends. And in this way I hope to offer their love in the form of my materiality… so that this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds previously unimaginable.”

Immersive VR is, by design and by nature, a first-person medium. You’ll notice this the first time you try it. If you are used to your own body and have regular and full access to your eyes and your ears, you’ll hear the way the room shifts, you’ll see your perspective change. This is especially true if you try on an avatar that is much larger or smaller than you are in real life.

I wish I could say that you’ll see the entire world change scale when you do this but actually, no, that’s not the experience. The world doesn’t seem to change, the world is just different. Once you were sitting at a table with a coffee cup in front of you, now you are leaning on a giant coffee cup, looking off the cliff-edge of a table. This shift, this view out of your sensorium, is not as it was before but it doesn’t have much bearing on your sense of being. You don’t necessarily feel yourself get smaller or larger. The scale only hits when you look at your friends, and the more intimate the relationship, the better you know that body and their stance and their way of being, the more you know how level their eyes are normally with yours, or how it feels to navigate your hand towards their palm, the more jarring the sensation. Strangers are merely giants, sometimes malicious but often ignorant, taking steps without noticing you. Friends are accidental giants, and you find yourself wanting to gain their attention, wanting their protection or awareness. Conversely, if it is you that is now giant you might find yourself standing very still indeed, until you have located all that you care about and ensured yourself you won’t hurt them.

Aware now that you are eye-level with your friend’s toe, you have a choice: the disorientation is real, but it’s yours or it isn’t. If you find this confusing and upsetting, you will probably leave. If you find it delightful or intriguing you will stay, you will explore until you find a virtual body that feels like you have always lived in it, and you will move through this life in this form just to see what it means to do that.

VR confronts you with your body, and it also confronts you with the idea that your body can be a choice. For some this is empowering beyond words, for others it’s a mistake, a confusion. I have spoken to people who feel at odds with their real-life body and find all of this incredibly affirming. I imagine there are people who find this level of control magnifies or reinforces their dysmorphia. Most folks land somewhere along this spectrum, and all find it fairly novel to occupy an unfamiliar form. In any case it occurs to me this experiment in body choice is radical and significant in a way that far exceeds our current understanding of what any of this technology is for.

Since we began this vast awkward experiment of living networked lives online, we’ve been saying something like this: online identity is for exploration, it lets you try things out, it allows you to see things from a different perspective. In the 1960s, decades before there was an “online” to be had, sociologist Erving Goffman spelled out the importance of this, describing in theatrical terms what he called “impression management.” The very nature of human social interaction is context-shifting. Certainly before this, since the dawn of humanity, we have context-switched, code-switched and masked our way through complex social environments for reasons ranging from convenience to panicked survival. So we know this, we live this, but the digital version of this narrative has remained relentlessly and exhaustingly default, which is to say mostly conveyed from the position of cis-male and straight. Computer mediated interaction is meant to be well-lit, bland and "normal". As the story goes technology is neutral. On a good day we tolerate the fringe, and maybe we ask how it feels for a person born male and masculine-presenting to temporarily occupy the strange foreign land of femme before returning safely home to the natural order. In most popular discourse this seems always where this discussion lands and that’s someone’s valid question I suppose, but it feels well-answered and it doesn’t approach the mind-exploding diversity and intersectionality of race, language, gender, bodies, shapes, and identities we can open our eyes to see around us in virtual worlds. It doesn’t adequately describe what is happening or why the ability to shift identity and hold multiple truths is important.

The popularity of “social media” over the last decade as an example of how this sometimes plays out. Face-Book says it all: a book of faces, identities tied to your government name along with supporting photographic evidence. A single identity, timeline from birth to death. Originally founded as a hot-or-not website for college hookups by a white male Harvard dropout, Facebook has evolved into the most complex propaganda delivery and stalking machine in the history of the world. Central to its function is the idea that there is one, and only one, identity profile which can be linked to each human on the face of the planet. Facebook maintains profiles for all of its users across the services it offers and the ones that it doesn’t. Facebook even maintains “shadow profiles” for users that don’t use the service, essentially naming the gaps between the interactions of known identities. As founder Zuckerberg famously said: “You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Ad-driven social media often enforces this policy further by requiring your online identity to be tied to your legal government name. The so-called “Real Name Policy” briefly forced author Salman Rushdie off the internet for being a fake. And, as with most policies designed for the default, the real name policy unequally impacts minority groups, those without the popular recognition of an author such as Rushdie, to a much more serious extent. Trans users find themselves needing to weigh access to their friends and family against deadnaming themselves in public and outing themselves in potentially dangerous situations. Victims of domestic violence find they can no longer safely stay in contact with estranged family members. Authors and performers find they can’t perform. I find it intriguing that most real-name policy stands in direct contradiction to professional organisations such as the Screen Actors Guild, which maintains that “...you cannot have the same name as another actor. When registering, you must come up with three names for yourself that you would be okay with using as your "professional name" in case someone registered is already using your name.” At the forefront of the so called Nymwars of the late 2000s were drag performers who rely on identity and gender performance as both a living and a way of life. It shouldn’t be lost that drag performers were on the front lines of Stonewall as well. Be Gay, Do Crimes. Stonewall was a riot.

There’s also an idea that all of this is new and resistance comes from unfamiliarity, but I don’t think that’s true either. In one form or another, since the dawn of humanity, we have constructed, reconstructed and performed. Queer people aren’t a new phenomena, wishing to sculpt how people perceive you is as fundamental as human language. Pushback doesn’t seem to come from an honest belief in essentialism so much as the terror of understanding just how flexible we are.

So I’d suggest humans almost universally understand the notion of context-specific identity and the power of gender representation, but remain deeply ambivalent about it. In spite of nearly decades of living our lives in the gloam of the nobody-knows-you’re-a-dog internet, we remain culturally uncomfortable with performance and performativity. We want it, but we don’t want to be called out on it. In terms of theory of play, we require the line between audience and performer to remain sharp and bright, we like knowing which side we are on, and often can’t really appreciate the performance at all if the line blurs. It’s fair to say the degree to which we can see and feel the edge of what Johan Huizinga calls the magic circle of play determines a game’s broad appeal: the brighter the line, the easier we find it to “allow” for the play to continue. The blurrier this line, the closer it is to what we call reality, and the higher the stakes and the more dangerous and potentially threatening the environment feels. We see this play out in the real name policy, and we see it play out with online fandoms and roleplay. Having a hobby is seen as part of a balanced life, being a fan of something is normal. Being involved in a fandom is somewhat peculiar. Converting your fandom into a lifestyle and building an entire lived identity? A bridge too far for most.

I think this explains in part why the popularity of social media exploded in the same timeframe that participation in virtual worlds became both more possible and stayed somewhat level. In 2017, Leslie Jamison explored this in The Atlantic, describing Second Life as the “Digital ruins of a Forgotten Future.” And now, in 2023, we find ourselves again considering this future. Facebook is still here, but it’s a rudderless golem now, huge and dangerous and shambling on, while Meta has turned its sights to the “failed” future of the past: immersive VR.

We continue to laugh and feel awkward about the flood of janky cartoon bodies we see in VR, but we also describe it as “a bit like the old internet.” An echo of the web we lost and lamented through much of the last five years, and which will certainly not be replaced by the desperation of “web 3.0,” but must arrive from somewhere, if only because the horror of having sacrificed all other forms of social interaction on the altar of the digital is terrifying to contemplate.

So Second Life “failed” in the same space of time that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter ate the world and then collapsed in a big musky X, and virtual worlds are both in ruins and the hottest new thing. But why? Why do we eagerly tune in on our telephones to watch the realtime feed of the bloated rich while simultaneously laughing at people buying virtual luxury for pennies on the dollar? Why are we so deeply curious about this thing that we also gleefully mock? All the same reason I think: We know the performance is a performance, but we don’t want to be called out on it. We feel how potentially false all of it is, but we still want our turn on stage.

When Zuckerberg tells us that having more than one identity is a sign of lack of integrity most of us agree because it’s hard enough maintaining a single self, and maybe this lottery ticket is a winner. My Facebook name matches my driver’s licence, matches my tax form, matches my diploma, matches my credit card. It may all be false, but this is The false, the public, the single shared social current we all swim in, which makes it real by fiat, which in a capitalist culture is the very definition of reality. The term “identity theft” has never really meant that, but only the acquisition of someone’s payment credentials, and the story of social media and web 2.0 traces this tension between the overwhelming tendency of everyone to construct an identity from bits of other lives, words and songs and the landlord’s bellow that they own this and deserve to be paid for your effort.

If virtual worlds expand your ability to be in a thousand mostly illegible ways, social media condenses real life down to a single highly-legible scoreboard. Very few of us will ever “go viral” but everyone by now knows what it means to be the crowd in the shadow of a virus, a volatile centre of attention we all dance around.

In this space, Virtual Worlds lean hard in the oppostie direction: they embrace the idea that identity is fluid, constructed and bricolaged from the exhaust of dominant realities. Virtual Realities posit that fandom - cringy, offputting, full of shibboleths - are a legitimate way to live. They propose that lives can be well-wasted, that language choice matters and is fluid, that identity belongs to you and that while the future might have shattered into a thousand pieces, each is a tiny queer universe to itself, boundless. There truly is no need to glue it back together into the frame we’ve left behind, and that’s thought is terrifying to some.

Come back with me a moment to that virtual table in a virtual kitchen, where some pills make you larger, and some pills make you small, and the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all. This is you in a body you have selected, among your chosen family. You are eye-level with your friend’s foot, and this is delightful, or disorienting, or both. This is first person, but if you are a video game enthusiast, or an avid reader of novels, you might try and find the button that puts you in third-person view, which is a more comfortable method of occupying and navigating a body that isn’t yours yet. From this perspective you can see your character as “the player” and you can move about as a puppet, you have agency but it’s proxied through a mask you can observe. If you look for this option in immersive VR you will fail. There is no third-person mode. In fact you can’t see yourself at all, only your hands, or your hand-proxies: paws, or tentacles or cubes on sticks, in front of you. You need a mirror, and you go looking for one, a frame of reference to help reflect you back in a larger context, to provide some boundaries to make this all make sense.

Immersive VR is difficult to photograph. There are technical issues - for starters the headsets we wear are specifically designed to track head movement in as close to real-time as possible, that means that any feed directly from the user’s point of view comes across like a face-mounted bodycam. It tracks the gaze of the viewer, jittering around the edges and rapidly bouncing from face to object to distance to object again. This view utterly fails to document the experience of being in VR, but rather documents the physical and mental actions of the person wearing the headset. From this footage you can tell which elements of a world caught the person’s attention and in what sequence, you can somewhat tell what captures their focus and what distracts them, but you cannot really feel (or convey) what it means to be inside the world they’re in.

In Hamlet on the Holodeck, author Janet Murray offers a revised take on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief, suggesting instead that a better model for digital media is the active creation of belief: “When fans are able to explore the world, to ask questions of it, and discover new and consistent facts about it, then their belief increases as a result of their actions and they experience the active creation of belief.” This rings true, but by the same contract audience members must agree to the bounds of the play established by the world creator: they must stay on the intended path and frame their actions within the magic circle. The less clear this is, the more the illusion blurs, the more unsatisfying the experience feels.

In the early 2000s, when we still remembered a world before the web, Wired writer Chris Anderson wrote an article that became a book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The Long Tail described what would soon become the blueprint for the next two decades: Rather than specialise or service a local community, more money could be made in casting as big a net as possible over the most diverse of special-interest groups. Anderson pointed specifically at the music industry, suggesting that rather than concentrating on a handful of top-40 hits, a more lucrative business could be built by selling a whole lot more of smaller “obscure” content to “niche” communities. The key to making this work was an instant, international and nearly free distribution infrastructure: the internet. For non-rivalrous digital content, such as music and later video, this move was swift, bringing us Netflix, Spotify and numerous similar platforms. For physical goods, the infrastructure took a bit longer to build out, but Amazon saw to it and is perhaps better thought of as the world's largest logistics firm rather than the online bookstore it began as.

Not content to take advantage of these economies of scale across existing affinity groups, the same infrastructure has been used to both create and force-multiply previously insignificant groups into publics with real power to influence the world. The primary goal of this is commerce and advertising, but the consequences are far reaching: The new economy brought us Taylor Swift and Beyonce’s Lemonade and helped many of us survive the pandemic, it also brought us Occupy and #meetoo and the Arab Spring and a resurgence in White Nationalism. The United States moved from a country where homosexuality was outlawed in places to one where marriage equality is enshrined in federal law, bringing trans issues to the forefront, while simultaneously fomenting a massive wave of misogyny and trans-misogyny, the forced-birth movement and widespread sexual repression. At the moment we remain in a state where queer communities have never been more visible and better connected, while also seemingly teetering on the brink of fascism. The pride flag is a well recognized brand, an annual celebration of joy that is also a hashtag and a demographic category, funnelling energy away from the fact that we’re still very much in the middle of a riot.

Roughly two years after Spotify came online as a service, Microsoft computer scientist and designer Bill Buxton wrote an article called The Long Nose of Innovation, positing that there was a mirror-image of the Long Tail he called the Long Nose. Using this model, Buxton proposed that the bulk of the work in understanding how to significantly apply a new technology takes place for a decade or decades before the real impact is seen. Buxton writes: “What the Long Nose tells us is that any technology that is going to have significant impact in the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old. Any technology that is going to have significant impact in the next 5 years is already at least 15 years old, and likely still below the radar.”

Here in 2023 we find ourselves at the end of a twenty year unregulated international experiment in the “web as platform.” We have moved much of our lives and nearly all of our cultural production online and into networked publics, primarily in the form of a handful of private websites that often think and act as nation-states but with a less clear and far more dangerous relationship to the communities and the principles of governance of the communities that they contain. The network is made of unruly people, but having built this future, social media companies have come to believe they own their citizenry.

Meta sponsors the creation of immersive VR headsets and as is well known, renamed their entire company in a bid to get ahead of the metaverse curve. In many ways this move was pure economics: Facebook’s web 2.0 networked model, where they rely on the hardware of potential competitors and datamine online behavior, is a dying industry. It remains extremely lucrative, but the various publics caught in the web 2.0 net are getting wise and this subjects their earnings to the “whims” of those who might value privacy in a different way. There is significant movement away from collapsing our identities completely into a single feed, and significant disagreement that negotiating different social contexts necessarily constitutes lack of integrity rather than, say, quite normal and healthy human interaction.

In 2022, Apple integrated privacy features which prevent tracking in certain circumstances and reportedly “cost” Facebook over 12 billion dollars in “lost” revenue in that year alone. It is no wonder that companies, including Apple, are working on a play that directly connects their product to your body using hardware they control. When launching in Europe, Meta acknowledge some privacy concerns by removing the requirement that you register a social media account to use a Quest headset, but given that researchers have show that you can de-anonymize someone wearing a VR headset using just 5 minutes of head movement data with 95% accuracy and off the shelf tools, having a registered account is the least of our worries, all you need to do is speak out loud or move your body and we know what to sell you.

If you live long enough to see something of your past come back as a trend (merely 20 years should do it), you will experience nostalgia, or the pain of unrequited homecoming. Undoubtedly this is old people talk, and you might not remember the trend In recent years among early internet pioneers to publicly mourn “the web we lost,” which comes along with descriptions of newer technologies, such as immersive VR, as “something like the old internet.” While there is much to appreciate in these reflections, these expressions ultimately feel shallow and counterproductive over time, less like expressions of regret for who we might be and more like expressions of longing for missed business opportunities no longer open for exploitation.

Along the route, scattered in the contrail of the Long Nose, are communities of care and innovation: each quietly building out and maintaining their own universes for their own people, without feeling the need to plug these into a mythological public the size of the entire globe. These networks, identified as weak-ties at global scale, are in fact strong-ties at local scale, and potentially form networks of resilience that are far stronger than their visible nodes might imply.

I’m particularly heartened at the overlap between the retro-tech communities, folks who find and restore and archive “lost” technical knowledge and evolutionary “dead ends” and queer communities of mutual aid. Certainly not all of these folks interested in old computers are queer, and not all of them consider their work to be anything more than a pleasant distraction, but there’s something about understanding and caring for artifacts that belong to a different time which feels less like nostalgia and more duty of care.

You can see this in the practice of sourcing and rebuilding components, getting up early on a weekend to stoke a steam boiler or precisely match a shade of paint or building out an entire archive of lost zines for no reason other than someone might need it someday. This thing is special to me and my 5 friends. Someone else might come across this and feel less alone. The people I know who will spend their time and money running a long-forgotten machine from the turn of the century or listening to music on records that are older than they are seem less interested in pining for an imaginary past then they are in imagining an alternate future where, for instance, you can listen to music without it “counting on your permanent record” Really imagine playing a record for a room full of people without automatically notifying the authorities, registering your preference or influencing the song’s chart position? Simply listening for pleasure, because you enjoy it and you think your friends might too, and you’d rather just tell them that yourself than post it to your feed.

In immersive virtual worlds, I’m heartened by the fact that we are seeing the emergence of computer-mediated communication that strongly encourages synchronous face-to-face communication in an environment where it actually becomes difficult to extract value at scale. Virtual worlds promote a non-rivalrous universe: it doesn’t cost you more to go to a copy of an exclusive virtual club than it costs me, and everything about the environment is identical. Travel costs are the same. What is different are the people you are with, and the bonds that you form, and this seems appropriate and more human scale: the only real thing that we have to lose is time and where and with whom we chose to spend it.

Social media, primarily asynchronous, promises the impossible: that you can live multiple lives in parallel by making “better” use of your time. Rather than a wasted bus ride, you can use that time to craft an instagram report and increase your clout score. Social media is fundamentally aspirational, it’s a content production, it’s performance as a job. Immersive VR is quite different: rather than spend the time performing your online self for points, it asks you to spend real time disconnected and untracked, focused only on interacting with the people in front of you, using your voice of choice and your body of choice, one conversation at a time. This seems like a healthy return to me: social media as actual social bonds rather than friend count, and discussions that proceed more slowly, face-to-face and without the cut-and-paste and encyclopaedic memory of online discourse. Ownership also requires forgetting, and histories which are allowed to fade like snapshots make for online social interactions that are better and more like our imperfect analog lives: deeper, richer and more ephemeral.

Finally, I’m heartened that the primary early adopters of immersive social technology seem to overwhelmingly fall into overlapping constellations of queer, disabled and neurodivergent communities (who often negotiate visibility for personal safety), and fandoms, (who often negotiate visibility and identity for the pure pleasure of it). These communities often resist commercial exploitation because, in spite of the lessons of web 2.0, they remain uncomfortably “weird” for “mainstream” audiences, and yet it’s these folks that are putting in the work: building a better future for themselves and their friends.

Cultural critic and art historian Dave Hickey writes in his essay Romancing the Looky-Loos: “At this bedrock level, the process through which works of art are socialized looks less like a conspiracy than a slumber party. The whole process, however, presumes the existence of artists who are comfortable with this tiny, local, social activity, who are at ease with the gradual, lateral acquisition of constituencies and understand that the process can take place anywhere and, if successful, command attention everywhere. The musical vogue of Prince and his entourage, of The Allman Brothers Band and their compatriots, and of Seattle grunge testify to the efficacy of this process. It only requires artists who would rather socialize their work among their peers, horizontally, at the risk of ire, than institutionalize it, vertically, in hopes of largesse.”

A ghost is unfinished business. In caring for dead tech, the caretakers are not looking for a return, but a satisfactory resolution: a vision of an unrealized future that is present in the past, a bit of the long tail that isn’t so much dead as it is not sufficiently explored. In exploring identity online communities and fandoms aren’t necessarily looking to prove their niche is better, they’re simply looking to live the way they see fit, with permission to explore among the like-minded. I want to believe that this vision of disparate networked villages is our future, as it bodes well: we shatter the vision of a single identity existing in a single frame and in its place we might find a thousand complete worlds, stronger and better connected and more resilient than ever before.