Seems like VR has been the "next big thing" for my entire life, its true potential yet to be reached but right around the corner. It's as if it filled the role played before by the flying car: an image of a future just close enough to imagine but remote enough to tantalize./1

This connects to @davidgraeber's essay on flying cars, where he argues that technologies of simulation have been presented as compensation for the failure of the more transformative technologies imagined and promised in the mid 20th c to materialize./2

But it's interesting that VR has functioned ideologically as the final horizon of the current technological trajectory, the endpoint of which is supposed to be the totalization of simulation. It had to promise something more, even if that something more was more of the same./3

On the other hand, perfected immersive simulation was also figured as a dystopian nightmare, esp in The Matrix but also in many other 90s movies, which has hovered over our era alongside the continued optimism re VR./4

Baudrillard argued simulation wasn't simply a matter of screens and headsets: the logic of third-order simulacra pervades "meatspace" as well. Perhaps he'd say the real function of promising perfected VR in the future is (like Disneyland) to make us think the present is real./5