An odd thing occurred to me while watching Facebook’s F8 developer conference earlier this month. Amid announcements about new form factors for Oculus and a slew of updates on camera effects and lenses, I realized Facebook’s play for virtual reality is Instagram, not Oculus.
Instagram over time has developed three of the major components of Virtual Reality. First, the content is increasingly disconnecting from the “real” world and tending toward pure fantasy. Second, the “people” with whom you interact are increasingly professional characters in a game, not real people. Finally, the platform itself is becoming a self-fulfilling and self-contained economy unto itself rather than an extension of real-world society.
Considering these elements, I am more and more convinced that the path toward virtual reality in the coming years is going to be building on top of and eventually subsuming the physical world (through Instagram and Snapchat), rather than building a new separate world off to the side of reality (through Oculus, “the Oasis,” etc.).
It seems increasingly clear that Augmented Reality is the path toward Virtual Reality, rather than the other way around.
Fantasy Content: Layers on Top Of Reality
The appeal of Instagram from the start was its presentation of “hyper reality.” The initial product design encouraged users to thoughtfully curate what they shared—selecting only the most fantastic angles and images—and then improving and retouching their content for maximal visual appeal and impact.
Over time, the competition inherent in the platform has driven the product experience more toward straight (and highly appealing) fantasy and away from any semblance of reality.
At the tools level, expressive photo filters have evolved toward layers of AI-driven filters, masks and tools that allow amateurs to compete with professionals at telling richer visual stories. In the process what has happened is that hyper-reality has tended more toward fantasy in a way that is accessible for everyone to create.
As a result, increasingly little of what you see today on Instagram is “real” in any traditional sense. Instead it is well produced, staged, acted, curated and edited fantasy.
A similar evolution is likely for all the technology platforms. They will keep dealing out more and more powerful tools for people to use in the battle for attention. Apple does it with better and better cameras. Facebook and Snap do it by adding lenses, photo effects and more. Soon enough the battle will likely lead to AI suggesting what to post and when. Eventually even celebrities will be competing with AI characters and teams of people—like in WestWorld or like the art project @lilmiquela.
Virtual reality, historically, has been expected to emerge through a “new” world being created by a technology company on the side of, or parallel to, the real world. But what seems increasingly clear is that the imagery of VR will be achieved through layers and layers of fantasy built on top of reality.
Fantasy Characters: The Revenge of Professional Friends
Of course, virtual reality isn’t just about fantasy images—it is also about the world of characters generating great stories, content and interactions.
If you unwind the clock a decade, you could argue that what made the original Facebook application work so well was that it helped your real friends be more engaging and interesting than the mass-media untargeted grocery checkout line celebrities of 2008.
There was a brief moment where technology enabled real friends to compete with celebrities for attention.
In 2018, however, it is clear that Instagram has allowed celebrity to strike back with a vengeance by providing extreme production and distribution leverage to a new class of hypercompetitive and dedicated micro-celebrity content producers.
Professional “friends” with photographers, touched up or augmented photos, writers and fun plot lines of skiing or surfing or partying are more entertaining than the real people in your life. They are also generally more beautiful, and more dedicated to the cause. So obviously they will win your attention over your real friends.
This doesn’t mean real friends are not encouraged to try to compete. They do, and in the process of competing against great micro-celebrity-characters they are forced to be more and more character-like in many ways.
So, actual fantasy-based celebrities are on the rise, making everyone else more character-like along with them.
In one sense, this isn’t new. You could argue that historically the competition between celebrities and real friends for attention has happened over and over again, all the way back to the days of radio.
But, if for the last decade we have lived in a world where technology enabled real friends over celebrities, now a new breed of fantasy celebrities are winning the war for time and attention against your friends. In the process, they’re drawing platforms like Instagram away from reality and toward fantasy.
A Distinct Fantasy Economy Unto Itself
If the content and characters of Instagram are turning more and more into a virtual reality landscape, so too are the social economics of the platform getting disconnected from the real world.
In most popular science fiction, visions of VR economy, identity and self-worth in the virtual world are distinct from the real world. There isn’t a single hybrid fantasy-reality world, but distinct spaces for fantasy and reality separately.
In this respect, the key element of VR is not only that it is “virtual,” but that it is fundamentally distinct from the real world.
It feels like this separation into two distinct worlds is happening on Instagram. First, the design of the instagram application increasingly intentionally accommodates individuals maintaining multiple accounts and personae. You might have one for your family and a separate identity and universe for your middle-school friends. That mirrors the drive to disconnect from reality.
Second, the currency in Instagram is pretty explicitly attention on Instagram, rather than real world relationships. Micro-celebrities use the following and attention they gain to cross-promote each other. They form a whole attention-economy around themselves purely in virtual space.
The idea that someone can be very popular or powerful on Instagram in a virtual community completely distinct from their real world network and identity feels very much like the future we were told to expect for VR.
Unlike messaging applications and “real identity” social networks like Facebook, which try to be explicitly extensions of the real world, it feels like the Instagram world stands intentionally apart from reality.
Fire or Ice
This all begs a question: Does it really matter if the path to VR is through “layering” on top of reality versus through a distinct parallel universe?
I think it might.
In many science fiction narratives, VR serves as a useful pressure valve for an increasingly pressured reality. VR is the escape for the disenfranchised majority of reality, or an escape for people on drab spaceships on deep space missions or on a polluted planet.
But, if instead VR is bootstrapped off of reality itself and it becomes increasingly hard for people to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, I worry that the technology will rapidly increase the stress on the real world.
If fantasy seeps directly into reality, it can become very hard for people and culture to distinguish what is real versus what is imagined.
On one hand, some might make the argument that we need to inject fantasy into reality for the sake of our civilization. As the world shrinks to a global village, it is pretty clear that—just as with any massive compression of people, ideas and matter—we are dramatically increasing the pressure on the physical world.
I am concerned, however, that the mixing of reality and fantasy is both less “empowering” for individuals and more destructive to real-world society and relationships than the idea of a new virtual-reality alternative being born in its own space.
When I think about these questions, I am reminded of the great Robert Frost poem, “Fire and Ice.”
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
It may be that the pressure comes from the intense “fire” of global debate—as we compress seven billion people into one, small global village.
But, I would argue, the effect of virtual reality broadly, and platforms like Instagram specifically, makes a good case for “ice” as we retreat into our own personal worlds—disconnected from the reality of others.