Moment of Inertia
Selfies in the Hall of Mirrors
Moment of inertia is a place where I'll be giving more of my commentary, in a longer form, on select topics I cover in my newsletter Magnitude and Direction. The goal is to give you 10 to 15 minutes of interesting reading on a topic while you're still in bed - your moment when the inertia of being cozy in bed keeps you there, even though you're awake and getting ready for the weekend morning. I hope you enjoy hearing what I have to say about the topics I cover in M&D and encourage you to participate in the discussion as well.
The “virtual world” has never been more real — but who’s reality is it?
Selfies in the Hall of Mirrors
Two decades ago, when you booted up a game from Maxis’ classic “Sim” franchise, the goal was to build a reality perhaps inspired by the one we inhabit, but otherwise distinctly separate and free of real-world considerations and consequences. The latest generation of world-building games — titles like Minecraft, Roblox, and EVE Online — while still existing on the same types of hard drives, graphics cards, and motherboards as those earlier “Sim” games, find themselves deeply enmeshed in our lived reality, responding to — and having influence upon — current events in a way that The Sims or SimCity never could have. It’s worth noting that this phenomenon, which had been slowly cresting since those early SimCity days and abruptly broke upon us in the spring of 2020, shouldn’t be thought of as either objectively bad or good; it has simply become a new dimension of our lived experience. Plugging our society in to the Internet can be a force for tremendous good, as projects like the Uncensored Library in Minecraft demonstrate, but there are also a myriad of examples that demonstrate how dangerous it can be to “live” two realities simultaneously (pizza, anyone…?). As Drew Austin put it recently, “If the internet ever provided an escape from reality, the opposite is true today: Now you’re more likely to escape from reality by putting your phone down and going for a walk outside.”
This strange, ironic evolution of the phrase “touch grass” isn’t just the product of an ever-more pervasive Internet, however; our bent and blended reality is the result of an expanding Internet that is not made up of one monolithic experience, but a mosaic of billions of different ones. In many ways, I have more in common with someone living in Mumbai or Sāo Paulo when we compare notes in the “real world” versus the online world — at least offline the three of us are all bound by the laws of physics, chemistry, and the other forces that make life on Earth possible. On the modern internet, even if the servers we’re pinging and data centers we’re uploading to are all located in Arizona, or Singapore, or France, we may be getting served slices of the internet that look more different from one another than Upper Manhattan does from the favelas of Brazil. On those occasions when “The Algorithm” serves you up something from outside your normal internet milieu, the experience can feel almost as jarring as waking up on a different continent — an abrupt and sudden glance into a world that looks and sounds radically different from your own (even if the room the content was filmed in bears a strong architectural resemblance to the room you’re consuming said content in).
Nowadays, it feels as though we’ve moved past the “filter bubble” era of the Internet and evolved (or devolved, depending on how you look at it) into an “a la carte” era. The trend “prefixes” have gotten ever smaller (it only feels like a matter of time before we start to get “pico-influencers”) because we’ve made it easier and easier to go “viral” with ever-smaller niches of people. Back in the “ancient” times, if you wanted to get into some niche community, you probably had to track down the one coffee shop, store, or bar where that community hung out (and God forbid you didn’t live in a city big enough to have a local branch of that community). Now, the “nichest” interests in the world are just a “r/” or afternoon of scrolling TikTok away. When I go onto the Internet through any of its numerous portals and ports of entry, I am in many senses getting a more real picture of the world than I would if I simply observed my surroundings and walked through my neighborhood — I get to live my life and I get to sample the lives of whoever I may interact with. In many ways, the Internet completely lived up to its promise as a repository for the sum total of human knowledge, we just failed to consider two things: (1) what people would do when they had access to all that knowledge, and (2) how much of that “knowledge” was information without being truth.
Perhaps it’s fair then, to take another page from Drew Austin’s book and acknowledge that “[i]t’s probably more accurate…to say that our definition of reality is less stable than ever…”. Maybe it’s even more fair to say we’ve always had a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, and our technological advancement just made it possible for us to realize our true potential. As Venkatesh Rao put it in an incredibly prescient essay now almost a decade old, “it seems likely that all fictions — and fictions may be all we have — are retreats from reality rather than approaches to it.” It’s particularly poetic, then, that what may be our last great retreat from reality isn’t into a cave in the mountains or a remote desert oasis, but into something much more like the OASIS. By placing all our “realities” on an equal playing field, we ended up devaluing all of them as well, including the one you’ll experience if you happen to look up from this screen and out your window. Take a break from the real world — go outside and touch grass.