Let’s Create Better Realities: Level 3

The Real Cautionary Lessons Of Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a cautionary tale: A world where an incredibly immersive virtual reality, the OASIS, causes or accelerates the demise of global civilization by engulfing most people into its deeply absorbing universe, abandoning the real world.

This story feels genuine and prophetic because is seems disturbingly close to our own reality where our kids, our loved ones, and even we get sucked into our screens or too often substance abuse or other types of addiction, leading to a downward spiral.

Yet as the first two posts of this series hint, technological addiction isn’t quite why the world of Ready Player One is a dystopia and thus, isn’t the real cautionary tale of Ready Player One.

Let’s quickly recap the last two posts:

First, the virtual reality simulation of Ready Player One, the OASIS, isn’t inherently a bad thing like classic addictive substances or behaviors. The OASIS doesn’t turn humanity into a bunch of rotting couch potatoes addicted to some video game. The OASIS actually proves itself to be a platform that in some ways comes close to human utopia, fulfilling many human needs ranging from the immediate gratification of shallow desires to the fulfillment of purpose-seeking needs. The OASIS allows people to develop their full selves, hone their social skills, explore their individual identities, enhance their abilities of delayed gratification, engage in long term planning, and exercise their creativity. It even allows for an active lifestyle, keeping everyone physically fit and healthy through the use of their bodies as controllers for their avatars. Finally, by digitizing almost all human activities, the OASIS allows for the elimination of almost all the negative externalities of human activities such as pollution, material consumption, intense energy use, etc. without sacrificing choice, access, or duration of these activities.

Second, virtual reality is nothing new for our species. While our bodies exist in the physical world, our minds are almost always in various states of virtual reality. Virtual realities have always played a big part in our existence as a species. From social virtual realities where we are mentally focused on what other people are thinking and feeling, to listening to stories around the campfire, reading books, or watching movies, to reliving some episode in our past or worrying about some future possible heartbreak, humans are rarely living in actual reality. We’re constantly in a state of mental teleportation.

So if the OASIS doesn’t turn humans into mindless couch potatoes incapable of socialization, attention retention, delayed gratification, or physical labor, if virtual reality is nothing new, and if we have historically spent most of our time in virtual reality, and why does the world of Ready Player One become dystopic?

If it’s not a simple tale of the dangers of technological addiction, what is the real lesson of Ready Player One?

Lesson One: The Truth About Addiction

The world of Ready Player One is one where people live in a problem ridden and uninteresting world and are introduced to a deeply immersive and satisfying alternate reality, causing an incredible amount of time to be shifted from the real world into the new, virtual world, which then causes a downward cycle of neglect, blight, apathy, and havoc.

The key here is the double whammy of a depressing real world coupled with an engaging and dazzling alternate reality. One without the other would probably not have been enough to cause such a drastic shift in people’s behavior.

And this is the first lesson of Ready Player One: addiction has way more to do with a shitty reality than an “addictive” substance or activity.

Humans have always had options to quickly and easily escape their current reality: psychedelic plants. Modernity has exponentially increased the palette of available options: social media, porn, gambling, gangs, etc.

Such options alone don’t have the power to lead to ongoing use and abuse, or else we would all have long ago become addicts of one thing or another.

The true cause of addiction is a need to escape from the status quo caused by acute and ongoing physical and/or psychological pain, boredom, lack of purpose, and/or lack of meaningful human connections.

For far too long, we’ve had a very flawed view of addiction. We’ve seen addiction as a result of an utterly irresistible nature of alternate realities such as drugs, sex, gambling. This has been a profound and disturbing misunderstanding:

• I smell a rat: Our flawed view of addiction was cemented by flawed animal studies: “Many studies have shown rats and monkeys will neglect food and drink in favour of pressing levers to obtain morphine (the lab form of heroin). With the right experimental set up, some rats will self-administer drugs until they die. At first glance it looks like a simple case of the laboratory animals losing control of their actions to the drugs they need” (Source: BBC).
  These studies seemed to lay the causes of addiction at the feet of the addictive substances themselves, which were theorized to hijack the brain’s neuro-chemical reward systems.
  Yet a less well know follow-up study completely debunked those initial experiments and their conclusions. The rats in the first experiments were locked up in cages without any other rats to interact, play, or mate with, without much space to move around in, or any toys be entertained by. Since rats are social, active creatures, the experimenter, Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander, repeated the initial morphine water experiments with rats in a more pleasant, humane setting: “…he built an enclosure measuring 95 square feet (8.8 square metres) for a colony of rats of both sexes. Not only was this around 200 times the area of standard rodent cages, but Rat Park had decorated walls, running wheels and nesting areas. Inhabitants had access to a plentiful supply of food, perhaps most importantly the rats lived in it together” (BBC).
  The results? These happier rats weren’t all that interested in the morphine water. They did dabble here and there, but almost none of them got addicted to it. And why would they? They were too busy enjoying a pleasant reality to be constantly subjecting themselves to the roller coaster ride that is a morphine high.
• Viable alternatives usually break addiction: Similar to the happy rats in Rat Park, Iceland was able to successfully curbing its growing substance addiction problem among its youth by simply giving teens fun and meaningful alternatives such as music, dance, hip hop, art, martial arts classes. (The Atlantic)
• Shouldn’t we all be addicts? The final nail in the coffin of our misunderstanding of addiction is the simple observation anyone can make: most people who have tried “addictive” substances or actives aren’t addicts. Almost everyone has been drunk. Almost everyone has seen porn and had sex. Many people have tried pot or played poker. Yet most people are not alcoholics, sex addicts, potheads, or gambling addicts. Why? Because most peoples’ realities are not abysmal. Most people have something going for them, whether it be interesting friends, a loving family, fun hobbies, a well-paying job, a significant other, etc. They don’t live in a reality they desperately need to escape from.

As well known researcher Columbia University professor Carl Hart puts it:

“What I now know is that the drugs themselves are not the real problem. The real problems are: poverty, unemployment, selective drug law enforcement, ignorance, and the dismissal of science surrounding these drugs.”

So addiction occurs only when reality is too painful, boring, or meaningless. A drug alone does not an addict make. You need the combination of a terrible reality, an alternate reality (drugs, sex, gambling), AND no other obvious alternatives.

Likewise with our growing technological addictions: the small, yet pitiful burst of satisfaction provided by Instagram “likes” are no match for the satisfying and nourishing feelings of being lost in conversation with an interesting person, working on a meaningful project with your kids, or playing an intense game of basketball with old friends. Might the reasons for growing technological addiction be our current reality (to be discussed this in the next post)?

So, as alluring as video games or social media might be, they alone would not cause a mass exodus from reality if reality itself were not dull or dreadful. But what about a rich, computer generated virtual reality like the OASIS? Would the OASIS have the power to rip people away even if their realities were not unbearable?

I think the answer is no. But as I hinted at in Level 1 of this series, the story of the OASIS isn’t quite an obviously open and shut case of addiction.

Acute addictions are generally temporary, shallow, and unhealthy and they are medicines that are worse than the disease. So much so that almost anyone unlucky enough to become an addict eventually recognizes that their new reality is worse than the old reality they were trying to escape from.

However, as described in Level 1, the OASIS is not temporary or shallow and it does not turn players’ reality into a living nightmare as acute addictions do.

The OASIS is a nearly complete alternate reality, not just a crude and forceful dopamine substitute. Players can certainly choose to engage in shallow or unhealthy activities in the OASIS, but over the long run, most choose to live in the state of near utopia described in Level 1: fun, social, engaged, creative, and expressive lives. And most players don’t seem to really regret their decision to spend so much time in the OASIS. In fact, when the OASIS is threatened by IOI, many vow to save it, and not in the desperate ways that drug addicts try to get their next fix, but in healthy, intelligent, creative, long term ways.

But if the OASIS isn’t a classic addiction story, why did I spent so much time talking about addiction??

Because addiction is a spectrum.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as:

…a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

People can be addicted to or get sucked into all sorts of realities and they can be addicted to different degrees. Excessive shopping, tanning, exercising, eating non-food items, caffeine, sugar, work, hoarding are all recognized as addictions.

But if the OASIS is essentially a near-complete alternate reality, what makes choosing to live in the OASIS any different than, say, simply moving to a new city in search of a better reality?

Well, for as much as I praised the OASIS in Level 1, it does lack several deeply fundamental features of reality that are crucial for long term wellbeing and can disqualify it as the virtual equivalent of moving to a different city. These themes were not explored in Ready Player One (a good thing from the point of view of a reader interested in an entertaining story):

• Lack of long term relationships: As much as players of the OASIS can find like-minded people who they can connect with on a deep emotional or intellectual level, the ease with which one can make new friends virtually is the ease at which one can lose existing friends. The virtual nature of the OASIS allows anyone to walk away from a friendship as easily as they walked into one. In the physical world, ditching friends, romantic partners, and family is much more difficult. This mutuality assured connection allows the strongest, most meaningful, and most fulfilling forms of bonds to form between people. It increases self confidence, reduces stress, and allows people to feel like their life is more than just about their own petty wants.
• Too much choice: “When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable…But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear…the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.” –Barry Schwartz.
  This paradox of too much choice seems superficial, but it’s actually runs deep. How much can you enjoy anything you do when in the back of your mind you know there’s probably something more fun or exciting you could be doing? These feelings can cause a great deal of emotional chaos leading to never feeling satisfied or contented. The modern world has brought to light this side of human nature with more choices than ever before. A virtual world would completely engulf us in endless choices and would probably be profoundly psychologically destabilizing.
• A lack of long-term sense of meaning: Even though the gamification aspects of the OASIS give players goals to attain, providing some sense of purpose, virtual and purely self oriented goals do not sustain humans over the long term. Deep meaning comes from a sense of long term responsibility towards others and/or a cause. That is why, for all its costs and difficulties, raising children is so deeply satisfying. That is why a noble fight for say, women’s suffrage is such a meaningful, lifelong project, even if the goal isn’t achieved in the lifetime of the first suffragists. Service and responsibility doesn’t sound terribly sexy, yet it is the place where the deepest gratification is be found. In a virtual setting, there is really no need for long term struggle. And even if there was the need, having the option of teleporting away from long term responsibilities and lack of real consequences doesn’t quite provide much long term fulfillment. The quest to save the OASIS does qualify as such a struggle, but that was a one-time exception rather than the rule.
• Lack of permanence: This point is more on the speculative side. But I wonder what the negative psychological consequences are when your entire reality is so impermanent (I don’t mean prone to hacking and deletion, because the real world equivalent of that is your town or village being wiped out by war). But what does it mean to live in a world of bits and bytes when entire planets can be recoded and memories of your past are altered with such ease? What happens to player’s identities or sense of history in such a fluid environment. What happens to your childhood memories? We are embodied creatures and have been for millions of years. So what sorts of profoundly disturbing instability would such an impermanent virtual world inflict on players?

The OASIS definitely sounds like a ton of fun and tremendously appealing. It would without question attract millions of players each no doubt spending dozens if not hundreds of hours in it.

But the discussion here isn’t about whether or not people would or would not spend time in the OASIS. This isn’t a winner-take-all hypothetical. As we covered in Level 2, humans have for hundreds of thousands of years lived in and benefited from virtual realities. Beyond utility, enjoyment of the real world is enhanced by all kinds of virtual realities from listening to a gripping story to feeling a good dinnertime buzz to experiencing a profoundly dazzling mushroom trip. Moderate uses of “addictive” substances/activities are reality enhancing.

The argument here is that if the prevailing reality is shitty, those reality enhancers become more and more appealing until they become addictive.

So if reality was pretty good, there would be no reason to permanently swap it with a semi-permanent existence in the OASIS since it is poor replacement for a full, fulfilled life. As with all other virtual realities, it would be used for fun, for bonding with friends, for a quick adrenaline rush, and so on.

OASIS induced collective abandonment of this world occurs when humanity’s collective reality becomes darker and darker and the OASIS stands out as the least worst escape.

Lesson Two: Virtual Reality Divorced From Reality Is The Culprit

It might seem self evident that dystopia is inevitable if most people in the world begin spending most of their time in a virtual reality simulation like the OASIS.

However, this is not necessarily the case.

First, as we discussed in Level 2, humans have existed in and benefited from virtual realities for hundreds of thousands of years without causing perpetual states of dystopia.

Second, as we also considered in Level 2, an alternate virtual reality could easily be used to create an environmental utopia instead of a dystopia. When almost all externalities of human activities are digitized, an environmental utopia could easily be created.

If dystopia didn’t arise from the fact that the OASIS is virtual reality, then why did it?

The second reason Ready Player One is a dystopia stems from the degree to which the reality of the OASIS is divorced from the real world.

As Wade Watts explains, the exodus from the real world causes mass neglect of the real world. The reason this neglect occurs is because the OASIS is almost completely disconnected from the real world. Almost all actions in the OASIS do not translate into real world actions or consequences and vice versa. As a result, the stewardship of the real world that all of us engage in on a daily basis quickly disappeared, turning an already unbalanced world into a dystopia.

This might seem at first with a distinction with out a difference.

To clarify, let’s imagine different scenarios where the OASIS and the real world were less divorced from each other. Instead of creating a completely separate universe for example, the OASIS could have been designed as massively multiplayer augmented reality where some actions in the real world and the virtual worlds had similar effects in both worlds. Where smashing a window, say, would reduce experience points from the OASIS as well as get you arrested. Another example could be an the OASIS were those activities that resulted in the most experience points were gamified versions of jobs in the real world, where players’ actions controlled real world robot avatars which performed real world jobs like farming, washing dishes, building buildings, etc (Yes, such constraints would have made the OASIS way less engaging and imaginative, but the point of this thought experiment is isn’t to increase hypothetical OASIS engagement, but simply to demonstrate ways the OASIS could have been less divorced from reality).

So what seems at first glace like an unimportant detail, the interplay between virtual and actual realities, makes all the difference in world.

Let’s explore this interplay between virtual and actual realities.

As with addiction, the overlap between virtual and actual realities is on a spectrum. Virtual realities are never 100% divorced from reality and they are never 100% in congruence with reality. And the relationship between the virtual and actual is always in flux.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this dance between the real and the virtual. A story recounted about a particularly embarrassing episode during a village feast between two friends can transport narrator and listener into a temporary virtual reality, one that is divorced from actual, present reality, but one that is a representation of an event that did occur in reality. The retelling of that story takes place in actual reality, where narrator and listener are sitting down under an apple tree say, resulting in real laughter, producing real sound waves, etc. This retelling effects the relationship between narrator and listener (an augmented reality), bringing them together closer as friends, in turn affecting their future real world actions, producing situations that will be remembered and retold in the future (resulting in new virtual realities). This cycle repeats itself ad infinitum on micro and macro scales.

But nowhere on the spectrum of overlap do virtual realities ever completely divorce from actual reality. Even totally fictional stories such as myths and religious stories, are not divorced from actual reality. Such stories are always grounded in qualities of the real world, from being explanations of natural disasters like lightning or flooding to containing stories of dramas between deities, which are analogous to human dramas observed in the real world. These stories then effect human behavior in the real world, motivating behaviors such as burying the dead or sacrificing an animal, which then affects future myths or stories (future virtual realities).

Thus, this interplay between the real world and human generated virtual realities, the relationship between the objective and subjective is a complex tapestry with our minds constantly weaving together fibers and patches of the real world and the virtual worlds.

Human virtual realities have always been constrained by the real world, by nature, by physics, by the seasons, by limited food supplies, etc. While a whole village could conceivably choose to spend all of its time crafting a new epic poem and then spend all of their days reenacting said epic poem, their food resources would quickly diminish and they’d perish. History is full of examples of groups time and again participated in such collective “insanity,” but sooner or later their actions crash into real world realities. Humans have never been powerful enough for our virtual realities to cause havoc on a global scale.

Over the last few millennia and especially the last few centuries, our understanding of the real world has increased thanks to the scientific revolution, our technological abilities have increased exponentially, as have our numbers and the sizes of our groups. We have attained an unprecedented degree of control over the real world. This mastery over the real world has ironically buffered our civilization more and more from the forces of reality that used to keep our virtual realities in check. This, in turn, has allowed our virtual realities to grown in scope and to become evermore disjointed from reality. And while these stories never fully divorce from actual reality, over time the degree of separation has increased more and more. These virtual realities have also begun to serve only to perpetuate themselves.

At this point it is when things begin unraveling. It is when politicians and political systems begin believing in the reality of their own importance rather than the campaign promises they made or the original functions they meant to serve, is when decline begins. And it is when these grander virtual realities clash with each other or the real world, that results in catastrophes: from religio-polical Crusades, to nation-state World Wars, and ideologically fueled nuclear/economic arms races, to consumption fueled ocean-choking plastic binges and growth fueled catastrophic global climate change.

It’s not too much of a stretch to suspect that almost all human caused local dystopias such as wars or slavery are the result of virtual realities straying further and further away from actual reality.

The OASIS is the ultimate incarnation of a virtual reality almost completely divorced from reality. It is this near complete divorce that ultimately results in the mass neglect of and deep apathy towards the real world, which ultimately leads to the Ready Player One dystopia, of sad stacks of trailers, poverty, random cities blowing up, and power hungry corporations.

The Real Lessons Of Ready Player One

So the real lesson of Ready Player One, whether intended or not by author Ernest Cline, isn’t that technologies like television, the Internet, social media, YouTube, and ultimately virtual reality are so alluring that they will inevitably lead to dystopia.

First, the real lesson of Ready Player One is that technological addiction only happens if reality itself is uninteresting and/or unbearable.

And the second lesson is that computer generated virtual reality isn’t what brings about dystopia. We’ve always lived in virtual realities. Things only get problematic when virtual realities stray further and further away from actual reality and when they shifts from their original purpose, keeping the human group strong and cooperative, to self-perpetuation.

These two insights have deep implications for our current state of affairs, our current reality.

In the next post I will talk about how the conditions that lead to dystopia in Ready Player One are not in some distant future, but are actually baked into our present reality.

Level 4 Coming Soon:
A World Long Neglected Is Our Own