Technophobia: Exploring Fearful Virtuality
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TECHNOPHOBIA: EXPLORING FEARFUL VIRTUALITY Kathryne Metcalf A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2019 Committee: Clayton Rosati, Advisor Edgar Landgraf ii ABSTRACT Clayton Rosati, Advisor With 171 million active users and a market value expected to climb to almost $17 billion in the next three years, Virtual Reality (VR) would appear to be a technology on the rise. Yet despite the public fervor for VR, our media landscape has long been marked by phobic depictions of the same—from William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to The Matrix (1999), to Black Mirror (2011-present), VR fictions always seem to dread its presence even as their audiences anticipate these feared technologies. How, then, can we explain the durability of fiction fearing VR, and what use might we find for that phobic response? While ample previous scholarship has explored how horror and other forms of genre fiction reflect specific cultural anxieties, to this point little work has been devoted to technophobic fiction as it represents and serves to manage cultural responses to new and emerging technologies. As VR grows increasingly common, such fiction might offer a powerful tool toward anticipating its uses—good and bad—as well as to influence the ends for which these technologies are taken up. Through textual analysis of Ready Player One (2018) and “San Junipero” (2017), I explore how fears of capitalist subjugation, disembodiment, and the limitations of the humanist self come to be displaced in VR’s technological systems. This work clarifies the technosocial politics of VR as they penetrate what it means to be human, and how technophobia itself might be mobilized toward the creation of a better technological future. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my partner Jeremy Kemball and my friend Tabby Violet for their help and support. They each read innumerable drafts, troubleshot confused arguments, and talked through countless instances of late-night frustration. I could not have managed the writing process without them. Thank you also to Dr. Edgar Landgraf for his patience discussing the complexities of (inevitably German) theory, and for his perpetual cheer and unflagging interest in my work. His passion and generosity with his time have been both inspiring and enormously helpful in completing this thesis. Finally, thank you to Dr. Clayton Rosati. He pushed me to answer more difficult questions than I would have set for myself, and to pursue more ambitious goals both in this project and in my professional future. My life is very different for having met him, and I am exceptionally grateful for his mentorship and support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION: ENTERING VIRTUALITY .................................................................. 1 Historicizing and Contextualizing VR’s Fearful New Worlds ................................. 5 On VR Itself: Theoretical and Definitional Challenges ............................................ 8 Methodology: Reading Cultural Anxiety Through Genre Fiction ............................ 13 CHAPTER I. READING PHOBIA IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOSOCIAL SYSTEMS.............................................................................................................................. 17 Virtual Revolutions: Marcuse and Technological Liberation .................................. 19 Technophobia as Counter-Revolution ..................................................................... 24 Critiques of Technophobia in Literature and Film .................................................. 29 Early Studies ............................................................................................... 30 Contemporary Scholarship .......................................................................... 32 Social Ordering and Technology: Marcuse and Heidegger ..................................... 37 Against Technophobia: Heidegger on Technology’s Essence .................... 40 Revitalizing a Political Techne ................................................................... 43 From Technophobia to Techno-utopia ..................................................................... 48 CHAPTER II. VIRTUAL PLEASURES AND VIRTUAL PAUPERS: VR FICTION AS A CRITIQUE OF UTOPIAN CAPITAL .................................................................................. 51 Online Abundance and Offline Scarcity: Poverty and VR Economies .................... 56 Utopian Architecture and Impossible Ideals: VR as Capital’s Seduction ............... 60 Authentic but Anonymous Avatars: Fearing Sociality Online ................................. 63 v Virtual Paupers in Virtual Reality.............................................................................. 69 Failed Revolutions and Alternative Mediations ........................................................ 73 CHAPTER III. POSTHUMANISM AND THE VIRTUALIZED BODY ............................ 77 Biomedical VR........................................................................................................... 79 The Virtual Abject ..................................................................................................... 82 Death and Dis/embodiment........................................................................................ 85 Purifying the Abject ................................................................................................... 88 Returning to the Body: Posthuman Articulation ........................................................ 91 Social Articulation and Multiplicity .......................................................................... 94 Hybrid Embodiment................................................................................................... 96 CONCLUSION: THE LIBERATORY AND FEARFUL TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGINATION .................................................................................................................... 99 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 105 1 INTRODUCTION: ENTERING VIRTUALITY “Oh, uh—” It is May 2017, and I am standing in the crowded main hall of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, fiddling with an Oculus Rift headset as the colossal skeleton of Sue the T- Rex looks on. Under the headset, an older man extends his arms suddenly, straight out, lurches in his seat. “Uh—” he repeats, this time with significantly more urgency. “That must be working again,” quips the technician next to me, and behind us dozens of museum visitors laugh, waiting for their own chance to be startled into their first look through virtual reality (VR). The man takes off the headset after less than a minute, apologizes, and quickly walks away shaking his head—a somewhat common reaction in our time at the Field, as several thousand visitors tried out our demonstration. These types of “demos” pop up everywhere in the literature of VR—as do their invariably fearful participants. Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford researcher and pioneer of emotive VR, begins his recent book Infinite Reality with an account of a frightened Mark Zuckerberg placed into a simulation straddling the edge of a giant pit (2). Howard Rheingold, an American media scholar who travelled around the world documenting VR research laboratories in the 1980s, offers several such accounts: Timothy Leary blanching at the NASA Ames research facility, one of the earliest VR labs in the country, as well as himself suddenly nauseated within an Autodesk demonstration in Japan (156, 30). Somewhat similarly, Jaron Lanier, the founder of VPL Research (formerly “Virtual Programming Languages,” bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999) and the father of contemporary virtual reality technologies, describes his working group’s standard demo as a collection of large falling blocks that terrified participants. During one such demo, a participant was so frightened as to vigorously dive under a nearby table, badly injuring 2 their arm in the process (Lanier 120). It’s clear that these VR demos seem to represent a real danger, at least to some. My own first experience in virtual reality, sometime in the spring of 2000, was in such a demo: through a friend of a friend, we had secured a private visit to the CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment) at the University of Illinois Simulation Laboratory (ISL). I found that setup—a small room surrounded by walls lit up with rear-projection, creating an immersive and interactive simulation of an aquarium of tropical fish—to be riotously amusing. My companion, however, found it uncomfortable and disquieting. We didn’t stay long. Close to two decades later, in 2017, I was invited back to ISL as part of a media tour in my then-role as a University of Illinois science writer. Though the technology had dramatically evolved (and the fish had been replaced by an interactive map of Baghdad), several of the other participants again begged for the demonstration to be cut short, claiming that it was “hard to breath” in the simulation. I didn’t much mind the technology, but the déjà vu was unsettling. It is easy to understand why so many would willingly go into a simulation without anticipating their own fearful reaction. Until very recently, VR interfaces of all types were prohibitively expensive, meaning that (unlike most other technological demonstrations) many visitors to a simulation lab would have never experienced anything even remotely similar—as