VIRTUALLY REALITY

In the spirit of "Why Not?" which has both plagued and enlivened my life, I recently allowed myself to be persuaded to book an Instagram promotion for my most recent novel, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, as well as my other works. At the same time, I made sure I was running no other promotions of any kind anywhere else, nor even mentioning my books in formats or forums like this: I wanted absolutely flat sales so that any spike could be clearly attributed to the effect of the Instagram ads. This is an old tactic I use for my conventional book promotions and gives fairly accurate results. And what happened next, and what did not, is illustrative of the strange reality in which we live.

The promotion began around the first of January and is now winding down as the month itself comes to a close. In that intervening time, the separate posts about my writing garnered approximately 120,000 likes. Please note that I did not say 120,000 sales. I said "likes." And during that corresponding period I made exactly $8.26 in sales.

You read that right, folks: Eight dollars and twenty-six cents.

My math sucks, but unless I'm mistaken that means for every 14,000 people who clicked "like," I sold about a dollar's worth of books. To make even $82.00, I'd have had to get 1.2 million likes. To make my rent, which is $825, I'd have to get 10.2 million likes. In other words, the entire population of Greece would have to click "like" on Instagram.

But even this is assuming a great deal. Or, as we say in the criminal justice field: "assuming facts not in evidence." For I am deeply suspicious of whether most of these "likes" were clicked by human hands. In fact, I am morally certain the majority were liked by fake accounts or bots. My posts go up electronically, are "seen" by robots and then "liked" by robots, and then come down. The numbers, the analytics, are impressive, but since little of it is real, there is no corresponding result in the real world.

Many, many years ago, when chat rooms were very much in vogue, a writer on "Law & Order" called the internet "a place that's not even a place." He was quite right. But the reality is that this unreality now occupies at least -- at least! -- fifty percent of our very real, physical, tangible lives. Our brains have, through continuous use, become rewired to crave validation and attention from online audiences -- audiences which may not actually exist. I can't count the number of people I have seen, in the last 15 years, boast about how many "friends" they have on social media, as if all but a handful of them were actually friends! (At least the word "followers" more closely fits the cold, impersonal reality.) I have even, this very week, witnessed the grotesque sight of an Instgram influencer and YouTuber who struts around in bikinis and measures herself by the amount of lust she generates in anonymous men, moaning almost hyterically about how lonely she is...almost as if the stream of online validation and adulation had no actual substance, because even a million "subscribers" can't make you a candle-light dinner.

This bifurcated existence, in which we give equal import to things which aren't there and people we don't know, as we do to our actual friends, family, lovers, pets, jobs, hobbies, etc., is the salient feature of the 21st century to date. It has gotten so the seemingly harmless phrase "pics or it didn't happen" has taken on a chilling quality, because to a whole generation (or three) of people, this is factually true. Their sense of reality has been redefined, so that an unshared experience is no experience at all, but rather a kind of scientific-philosophical conundrum, like Schroedinger's cat. If you go to a concert, or to some scenic overlook, or a sports event or a nightclub or even a restaurant, it is now customary to document and record the event. Many people post almost professionally edited and mixed videos of their gym workouts. Warren Beatty famously jeered at Madonna that "she doesn't want to live off camera." The same insult could now be levied at the rest of us. And it is not mere narcissism that drives this impulse. It is an acknowledgement that we now live in two worlds -- one physical and one virtual. The problem, however, is not that this situation exists, but rather when both worlds are treated as if they have equal value, for the slope is slippery indeed. As someone who worked in the video game industry for nine years, and correspondingly met many from the vast community of cosplayers, Youtubers, Instragram influencers, etc., etc., I can say with assurance that there are many who have taken this a step further, and are more comfortable and more active in "the place that isn't a place" than in their actual, physical lives.

On the surface of things, this is understandable and was inevitable. Even in the 70s and 80s, there were millions who found safe harbor only in eccentric fantasy worlds -- Dungeons and Dragons addicts would be a literal example, but this could be extended to metalheads, punks, and other isolated communities of semi-or-full outcasts, be they tied together by role playing games, video games, music, drug-music culture, or what have you. I myself was one such kid: from the age of ten to about fifteen or sixteen, I lived primarily in my own head. Had I the resources of todays similarly aged kids back then, I'd have been no different than they are now: so there's no judgment here. I am simply pointing out that technology has allowed what the people of my generation (X) and those before us could only dream about: a way of making everyday reality optional. The internet has not been around long enough for us to say definitively what the consequeces of this will be, but anyone with eyes can see the downside goes lower than the upside rises. People are fatter than ever. They are unhealthier than ever. They are more anxious, more depressed, more nihilistic, more angry, and more suicidal than they have ever been, and a lot of this can be traced, circumstancially at least, to the pervasiveness of the internet. Life is hard: virtual reality is easy, and humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If you want to be an unstoppable badass killer covered in medals and stripes and held in awe by your peers, you can join the military and spend a couple of years working and sweating and bleeding your way through basic training, advanced training, airborne school, Ranger school, Special Forces school, and so on...or you can just get really, really good at Call of Duty, all without doing a single sit-up or even rising off of the couch. The distinction between the actual and the virtual has blurred to the degree that the very definition of reality no longer has a clear, sharp, obvious definition.

This is a problem for which no solution, short of an electromagnetic pulse which would destroy the internet entirely for the foreseeable future (and plunge the world into chaos as a result), presents itself. And indeed, short of such apocalyptic disaster, there may be no solution at all. Like atomic energy, this particular genie ain't going back into its bottle. This problem is, however, one which has come about in my lifetime, and watching it grow has been a fascinating process. I was certainly not among those who foresaw the troubles that are now with us, but I do remember being especially taken by a line of dialog from "I Robert, You Jane," an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which did, all the way back in 1997. It is a point of view which back then was considered laughable, but today has gained a great deal of currency indeed:

The only reality is virtual. If your'e not jacked in, you're not alive.