Kyle’s Reviews > Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality > Status Update

Several topics addressed in the Appendices take root in earlier chapters and sprout forth expanded musings on postsymbolic communication, phenotropics and the clash between the old economy and algorithm-fueled networks where our attention to screen is a product for tech corporations with a steady supply of raw material: content we create by ourselves. Lanier’s futurism is hopeful but requires reading before we click.

Before wrapping things up on a hopeful humanistic note, Lanier recounts the plight of the World Wide Web, how one fateful decision (really a bunch of better decisions that were ignored) to make obtaining information a one-way path, meaning millions were hooked on presumably free access while tech companies seized control of the net. His simple equation of inversing AI with VR is sound and it might involve SecondLife!

A brave new Silicon Valley world is well established with VPL both at its centre yet remaining on the margins of culture. With such an omnipresent sphere of influence it surprising to find just a few lukewarm comments on 350° video; more space to dedicate to Japan’s VR scene, Jim Henson, Terry Gilliam, Al Gore and William Gibson, not to forget his generational connections to artists Antonin Artaud and Susanne Langer.

The eyes have it, for the time being, but Lanier’s interest in the virtual extends to many other sensory and bodily inputs: his hair gets an extended footnote, for instance. So much of the reality his young start-up VPL wanted to include puts an emphasis on feeling like a viewer belongs in the artificial realm, without solely “seeing and believing.” His About chapters are starting to mention more non-VPL key players.

Just at a point in his autobiography where I start to doubt how insightful and clever his conversational accounts might be: his out-maneuvering of coders, movie producers and girlfriends, Jaron drops a surprising self-diagnosis of face-blindness (unless he just happened to be watching the same Arrested Development episodes on Netflix as I was). His quest to bring the full body into the virtual just got real!

Taking a few chapters’ pause from his freewheeling life on the road, Lanier takes several stabs at defining VR, hitting upon some sparkling and unsavoury insights about the not-yet-there medium. Once giving his readers a taste of what it is all about, he switches back to his hippie-happening life moving from the East Coast elitism to the wild West. Finding his first audience reveals how long he has been about it all.

Writing his autobiography in order to elaborate deeper into how VR will eventually dawn into a new everything, it seems his humble origins relate back to his parents escaped from the Old World and it brutal genocidal policy towards certain people. Where the young Lanier ended up is the borderlands between Texas, Mexico and New Mexico; enduring family tragedies in a place that will probably become buried under a wall.