"These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident." - Paul Virilio, 1994
I find myself standing at a precipice. As technology invades our lives in unforeseen ways, the clash between the real world and the virtual world reaches a climax. We used to live our lives in reality: the world of objects observed by subjects (you or me) where one thing caused another and things were true or false. This has changed. Of course, the real world still exists. You can go outside and walk. Your computer is real, and so is the circuitry that allows cyberspace to emerge. But we no longer live simply in the real world.
For most of my life, the virtual and the real world have existed in an uneasy harmony. For sure, there have been hiccups. Many of us played a lot of video games. Our parents suspected that we were leaving the real world to live in the virtual; running away from home, from the comfort of our chairs. This is the vision reflected in Ready Player One: the real world is rough and depressing, while the virtual world feels empowering, comforting, and liberating.
In truth, the fear of people losing themselves in video games was overstated. While video game addiction is a real thing, it's far from being society's biggest problem. A harmony between the virtual world and the real world was maintained because people knew they were engaging with simulations. While a small number of people dove into these simulations and never returned, the vast majority of people played the games and otherwise continued to live as before.
This harmony ended with the rise of the Internet. While video games allowed us to indulge in simulated fantasies, the Internet made distance and time seem obsolete. Instead of driving to the movie theatre, you could now instantly watch a movie from home - and it's not just movies: banking, work, socializing, complaining, making art, looking at art, listening to music, making music, seeing the world, showing things to the world, sexual satisfaction, attending church, and much more can be done without leaving your desk. If video games began the escape from reality into the virtual, the Internet began the displacement of the real by the virtual.
The primary effect of this displacement was alienation or isolation. While the Internet's simulations (is it a sim?) of interaction kept users coming back for more, there was a hollowness (maybe a rottenness) to the experience. If you compare how people interact in real-life public places to the interactions of users on Twitter, it is hard to believe that the Internet could ever displace the real at all. It's even harder to believe that people would choose the virtual over the real. And yet, this is exactly what happened.
People did not choose to replace parts of their offline world with the virtual world because the virtual is better. Rather, people chose the online world because it allowed for a frictionless freedom. Take any example of the real world's displacement by the Internet: dating used to require embarrassment, risk, time, uncertainty; today, it's in part replaced by a smooth swipe left or right. Watching a movie used to involve cash, travelling, and human interaction; streaming services remove all of this, even moving the monetary transaction into the background to the degree that many forget that they are paying for streaming services at all. Insulting someone to their face tends to be difficult; insulting someone online, as you probably know, is not only easy: it tends to feel really good.
This atrophy of the real world seems unstoppable, yet resistance was never futile. The common prescription of those who opted for the real over the virtual has been to "touch grass". This prescription suggests that while the virtual has displaced the real in many ways, the line that separates the real and the virtual has remained clear. If you turn on your computer monitor, it acts as a window into the virtual. If you turn it off, go outside, and touch grass, you have successfully reached the real world. You're free to choose, and you should probably choose touching grass.
In 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on almost 700,000 users without their knowledge. Using promising new algorithms, they tweaked users' algorithms to show either more positive, or more negative content. When users were exposed to fewer positive posts, they produced fewer positive posts; when they saw fewer negative posts, they produced fewer negative posts. What this showed was that while algorithms are trained by the user; the user is also trained by the algorithm. As one article's title put it "It can manipulate your mood. It can affect whether you vote. When do we start to worry?" [1]
Of course, if an algorithm can manipulate your mood and affect whether you vote, it can also influence whether or not you 'touch grass'.
Media has always influenced the minds of its consumers. But conflating the influence of theatre, music, film, and television to the power of the Internet's algorithms would be a mistake. While a great theatre production can manipulate masses into feeling a specific emotion, the experience is that of a broadcast: the author has created something that you are now experiencing. Soon, it will be over, and you will leave the theatre, perhaps better prepared to face the real world.
Hugely different from being a "broadcast", algorithms bring the user into a feedback loop. The algorithm analyzes the inputted user data, adjusts its output to better align with the user's preferences, repeat. Today, the creators of these algorithms aim to maximize users' time on the platform and to harvest as much user data as possible. By invisibly embedding itself in our near frictionless scrolling, the algorithm might as well by embedded directly into our brains, as it has access to formerly impossible amounts of user information. The algorithms don't know what we want, but they know better than anyone or anything else in the world what we will do. In other words, they can predict the future.
I've purposefully omitted the most horrifying detail from the above description of the algorithm as a cybernetic feedback loop. This detail is that the user-algorithm dynamic is actually a 2nd order feedback loop. To illustrate this difference, consider a first-order loop: a thermostat. In this loop, the thermostat measures the temperature (input), calculates the difference between this and the desired temperature, and emits heat/coldness until the room is the desired temperature.
The trouble is that human beings and our desires are not so similar to a room and its temperature. As we've already seen in Facebook's emotional contagion experiment, what we see online influences what we do online. Now consider a platform like TikTok and its algorithm. By using the app, the user provides the algorithm with behavioural data, and the algorithm responds by refining what the user sees to better align with the data. However, the user is in turn changed by seeing the new content, and thus transforms along with the algorithm. Now imagine this process repeating over, and over, and over, and over again. Not only are the algorithms becoming more aligned with us: we are also becoming more aligned with the algorithms.