Of "Middle Classness" and Popular Culture

I have recently been giving some thought to the idea of what it means to be "middle class."

The criteria for middle class status vary from time to time and place to place, but these days, at least, to be a middle class adult seems to mean their one's being a college-educated, salary-earning white collar worker with a career rather than a mere job, affording that worker a certain standard of consumption providing a minimum of comfort, mobility, security and opportunity for their children (home and car ownership, health insurance, college for the kids, retirement, a few extras here and there like a night out or a vacation).

Crunching the numbers it seemed to me that the percentage of Americans who have the full package in even basic form is probably in the single digits; and especially if one insists that, as the mid-century expectation had it, the household gets it on one income, in the low single digits, and likely declining with incomes stagnant and much of the package becoming ever more exorbitant. (Given what college now runs, even those one might judge to be very well-off at a glance can looking needy.)

Considering that it seems there is a great difference indeed between middle class and "middle income" (mixing of which two very different categories does not always seem a slip-up on the part of those who do it).

It seems, too, that popular culture is way off the mark in presenting what is in fact wealth as mere middleness is a universal norm with anything less (the actual norm) a shabby aberration popular culture is way off the mark. This makes the obvious question just why it does it do so.

Obviously popular culture, as Thorstein Veblen already had occasion to note a century ago, caters above all to the upper "affluent middle class," which is, after all, the group living something like this for which all this is not so remote as it is to others. Significant, too, is the extent to which the people who make pop culture in Hollywood and elsewhere have generally inhabited a bubble of privilege for generations, with all that implies for perceptions. (When Chris Pine speaks of his background as "blue collar" I do not get the sense that he is being ironic.) And there is the dramatic convenience that people who have little money find the range of possible activity they can undertake very limited--too limited for a TV writer's convenience, certainly. (That working class, really blue collar family? We won't be seeing an episode about their wacky adventures on vacation anytime soon.)

Yet it seems to me undeniable that we would not see so much of this were audiences not receptive to it.

Simply put, there are stories and characters people follow because they relate to them, because they see themselves in them and connect with them--and others they are attracted to because they represent a fantasy of what they wish they were, how they would like for their life to be, and I think the latter is what is relevant here. In reality the viewer may not have a very attractive home--but when looking at the screen they would rather see the spacious, lavishly appointed house rather than cramped and less appealing surroundings like those in which they actually live. Indeed, it may well be that the worse off they are materially, the more they want the escape.

Transportation as a Service and the End of the Romance of The Car?

As those who follow such matters are well aware, the conventional wisdom regarding self-driving cars has changed profoundly in a few years' time--from matter-of-fact expectation that they will shortly be a large and swiftly growing part of everyday life, to sneering dismissal of the prospect of their appearing anytime soon, and perhaps ever.

To be fair, I do not know that those who dismiss the technology are wrong. Indeed, I acknowledge that the present lowered hopes reflect our having painfully acquired a better understanding of just how tough a task it actually is to develop a car that can drive itself as safely as a competent human driver given the present state of the art in the relevant areas (perhaps most obviously, the power of the computers that must do the "deep learning" on which we are relying). However, it does seem to me that the dismissal is as exaggerated as the earlier hype, for a lot of reasons--one of which is the distaste many seem to have for one of the more transformative possibilities the self-driving car brings with it, namely a turn away from individual vehicle ownership to "Transportation as a Service" (Taas).

Those who have sneered at the prospect (often, giving the impression of fear of a shrunken auto market's implications for their particular business) have given many reasons besides technical feasibility. These have prominently included the satisfactions cars render besides transport--what one can call "the romance of the automobile." Exemplary of the tendency, ex-BP CEO Lord Browne emphasized in his Washington Post op-ed that cars are not "simply [a way] to get around," but also "signal our values and extend our private space--things a shared service cannot offer."

Fair enough--except that "signaling our values" to the world at large and "extending our personal space" are comparative luxuries which mean more to some than others, and which some can more easily indulge in than others (facts to which the privileged consistently display an extreme obliviousness). People need transport, pure and simple, and buying such cars as are within their limited means is something they do to meet that need, with any question of immaterial pleasure of far less consequence. Indeed, given how the costs of car ownership weigh on household budgets (any household making under six figures, certainly, is very hard-pressed to afford two vehicles), to say nothing of the other hassles involved (from maintenance to legal liability in the event of accident), it is easy to see many people regarding a transport service merely adequate to meet their needs at a fraction of the price they pay to own and operate a car of their own as a relief.

It is easier still to picture people happily abandoning the hassle of car ownership in favor of Taas when we consider the behavior of the younger age cohorts (from early thirtysomethings on down), in whose lives driving has simply not been so big an element, or even their prospects, to the point of so few of them bothering to get licenses. Some see this as a matter of the preference of many young people for urban over suburban living, and the extent to which, wherever they happen to be, they live their lives online (shopping, socializing, recreating through a screen). However, it is also because they see less point to getting a license when their hard-pressed parents are less able or willing to get them a car, and when their buying a car with their own money is a remote prospect (used vehicles are averaging $25,000 these days--all as the minimum wage their college degrees do not save them from still runs $7.25 an hour)--while the same poverty is, after all, a major reason why they spend so much more time doing things online than going out.

Driving later and less even when they have owned cars, something far more of them will have not done and may not even expect to do, they could be expected to let go of the idea of personal auto ownership that much more easily. Indeed, were Taas to come along in any economic circumstances like the present, I suspect that many would embrace it and never look back, while private auto ownership (which would, of course, be self-driving auto ownership) would become something like a private plane--a luxury purchased only by the wealthy few, mostly because they can.

Why Did the Press Get Solar So Wrong?

As I have remarked before, techno-hype seems to periodically go boom and bust--and we are living in a moment of bust as recent expectations surrounding carbon nanotube-base chips, self-driving vehicles, virtual reality, and much else come to naught. Yet looking at the expectations that proved exaggerated I also find myself noting the less publicized technologies that progressed rather more rapidly than the purveyors of hype expected, with renewable energy, and especially photovoltaic solar, the outstanding example--to the point that the fossil fuel and nuclear sectors may now have trillions of dollars in "stranded" investment on their hands.

Why did the press get solar so wrong? It seems to me there are three reasons.

1. Solar energy represents a solution to a major problem. The press trafficks in fear, not hope. This actually gives it a reason to belittle anything that would be a solution--and of course, believe and repeat any belittling thing that is said about them, of which there has been no shortage, and which has by no means all been a function of thoughtful analysis.

2. As a disruptive technology up against sustaining technologies (a lot of interests feared and hated the thought of an energy transition) solar faced a profound PR battle, compounded by the ecological, political, and even "culture war" implications of the associated choices. (Bluntly put, there was a lot of investment, far beyond Big Oil, in a fossil fuel-powered economy; a lot of hostility to any notion of government shifting its weight from subsidizing fossil fuels to trying to accelerate an energy transition, a prospect the more plausible if renewable energy looked promising; and in general a lot of enmity toward the idea that the prerogatives of business might have to be compromised for the environment's sake.) Naturally there were plenty of people who did everything they could for a very long time to persuade the public that solar power was just a flaky hippie fantasy, and tough-minded, practical people had better keep their minds on good old king coal instead--and never mind that global warming stuff they were hearing about. And they were the kind of people to which the press was inclined to listen. They treat Goldman Sachs with far more respect than Greenpeace, after all--but it was Goldman Sachs which turned out to be wrong.

3. Last, and perhaps least, is the fact that solar, hugely consequential as it is in technical, commercial and ecological terms, is simply not that exciting from the standpoint of the gadget-happy consumer. When it comes to personal, immediate experience, utility-scale solar (and it is this which has smashed the records--not the domestic kind that can mean never paying an electric bill again) still delivers electricity the same way as fossil fuels or nuclear or anything else. People flick the switch and the lights come on, with the actual cause of their coming on far away and unseen. There is thus not much for the purveyors of gadget hype to get all excited about the way they did over the Segway scooter (I still remember when they were telling us this would "change the world!") or virtual assistants. And so this could not and did not offset factors 1 and 2.

All the same, solar has arrived. And if you've been looking for good news about the climate crisis, well, here it is--the best hope yet that we can actually do something about the problem. Hopefully it won't be the last piece of such news.

Why All the Hate for Self-Driving Cars? Seven Reasons Why the Self-Driving Car Bashing Has (Probably) Gone Overboard

Just a few years ago it was the conventional wisdom that self-driving cars were here, in a big way (almost), with people investing a lot of time and worry in how we would deal with the fact.

Today it seems the conventional wisdom that they are very far away at best, and perhaps never coming at all.

Putting it bluntly, the complacent, credulous optimism of 2015 has given way to smug, know-nothing sneering.

It is a swing from one extreme to the other--with a good deal of irrationality involved in the current, pessimistic appraisals, maybe as much as was to be seen in the past, more optimistic appraisals.

I suggest that there are at least seven reasons why the media is, for the time being, so relentlessly sneering in its attitude toward self-driving cars.

1. The Media Exaggerates Everything.
What we collectively call "the media" is, of course, an overwhelmingly commercial enterprise which makes its profits by fighting for and winning your attention in an exceedingly crowded and brutally competitive "attention economy." From this vantage point simple statements are preferable to long ones, which go right along with crude exaggeration being preferable to nuance--while surprising statements are preferable to what people expect.

The short, exaggerated, surprising statement is, of course, particularly commonplace in the area of technological reporting. Of course, my experience is that this tends to an exaggerated impression of how far some technology has come along, or will come along very soon--and this was indeed the case with the self-driving car a short time ago. Yet we also get the opposite, as with renewable energy, which the media was fairly relentless in dismissing . . . until photovoltaic solar became the cheapest energy source in the history of the world, with the price still dropping.

There were reasons why the media got that one so wrong, and just as in that case, numerous factors can seem to impel the media to treat self-driving cars in the same manner that it treated renewable energy--reasons currently more powerful than the earlier gee-whizzery.

2. Self-Driving Cars Scare a Lot of People in the Business.
Those who have followed technological R & D in the past may be familiar with the terms "sustaining innovation" and "disruptive innovation." Sustaining innovations are cases of improvement in the performance of existing products, according to the metrics by which it is already routine to judge them. Disruptive innovations are cases of qualitatively new products that might fundamentally change the market. New technologies aiding fossil fuel extraction (for example, new artificial lift technologies increasing the flow of oil and gas from wells) would be examples of sustaining innovation. By contrast renewable energy technologies like solar or wind are disruptive innovations, because they change the principal game from the ongoing one of "Who can deliver fossil fuels most efficiently?" to "Which energy source can give us electricity most efficiently?"--possibly driving fossil fuels out of this particular market (with coal already looking like a casualty).

Right now the car industry is looking at the prospection of such disruption, in multiple ways, with self-driving one of them, and the more worrisome because of the prospect it raises of "Transportation as a Service" (Taas). Taas would mean that rather than everyone who can afford it getting their own car, cars would be just something they would call up when they actually want one. This would mean a lot less cars out there (and those made by someone other than their company, should it fail to keep up in a competition they are by no means guaranteed to win). There would also be a lot less demand for everything that currently goes into cars, from the steel, rubber and glass supplied for the making of those cars (if less publicized than IT, do not underestimate the economic significance of the automotive-industrial complex), to service stations and car insurance (goodbye Flo?), to the oil companies which fill those cars' tanks (if they even run on gas anymore). Naturally a world where Taas replaces the current model of car ownership is something they would be inclined to dismiss or belittle. And the media being what it is, it tends to eat up, and mindlessly repeat, anything such people say. Still, it should be admitted that lately they are even more than usually open to the doubters.

3. The Romance of the Car.
On top of the reality that a great many powerful interests are massively invested in the current model of individual ownership of traditionally "manned" vehicles, there is the reality that many more have a less practical, but not necessarily slight, emotional investment in them.

Consider the place of driving in American culture. Getting one's driver's license is a "rite of passage," and getting an actual car to drive--in the eyes of most Americans a great step toward personal independence and recognition as an adult, the more in as so much that goes with being an adult (finding and holding down a job, dating) is very difficult to do without a car in the country's pedestrian-hating, transit-deprived metro areas (and still more outside those areas). Proving oneself as driver and car-owner means that one has truly taken that step successfully. The make of one's car is a significant indicator of socioeconomic gradation, two cars in the garage of one's own house bespeaks solid middle classness, and being able to buy one's child a car of their own when they turn sixteen an indicator that one has provided a genuinely comfortable upbringing, while in the fantasies of wealth that lend credence to the image of a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," possession of still more luxurious vehicles tends to be prominent. Indeed, the indulgence of a passion for cars--maintaining one's car oneself, collecting cars, restoring some favorite classic car if one has the time and money for such a hobby--has, like the viewing of spectator sports, long been one of the few leisure activities considered seemly for an adult male.

It is all such that the "new car smell," which is basically the smell of a bunch of health-endangering industrial chemicals that a great many people actually find repugnant, is a well-known object of fondness (unshared by their counterparts elsewhere).

Of course, not everyone, even in America, is equally invested in this romance. For many driving is a stressful experience, car ownership burdensome financially and in other ways, and the rewards of less tangible kinds few. (Perhaps their car make is a testament to poverty rather than wealth, and it stings; perhaps they find no pleasure in tinkering with the innards of their car.) But enough people, even people who should know better, are sufficiently invested in it for this to also be a factor here. And for those who think in such terms a world where people do not sit behind the wheel of their own car, and maybe do not even own a car, is unimaginable--or at the very least, depressing--and they accordingly dismissive of the prospect.

4. We Are in a Moment of Downturn in the Technological Hype Cycle.
The idea of a "cycle" of technological hype, where early inflated expectations are often disappointed, leading to disillusionment, followed by recovery, "green shoots"--and perhaps inflated expectations again--has been popularized by the Gartner firm's much-publicized "cycle." That cycle, of course, tracks attitudes toward individual products, but one may speak of such a cycle being evident in regard to technological change more generally.

The '90s was a period of high expectations regarding technologies like artificial intelligence--and the '00s a period of bust that soon had even the ever-ebullient Ray Kurzweil backing off from predictions that clearly did not come to pass. Of course, there was another resurgence by the mid-'10s regarding many of the same technologies, but now we find ourselves in another period of bust.

Of course, a particular technology may make headway even in a period of bust. (Were this not the case we would see no recovery.) Yet common expectations--and this is what we are talking about here--are colored by the general mood, especially to the extent that the unknowns involved in prediction leave observers relying on "judgment" rather than analysis grounded in hard fact. Their gut feeling would seem more likely to err on the side of "Won't happen" than "Will," with all this implies for the broader conversation at the moment.

5. Cynicism is a Good Cover for Ignorance.
Added to these reasons for pessimism (the bad-mouthing of self-driving cars by prominent figures, the old romance of cars and car ownership, the lower expectations of technological change), there is the fact that striking cynical poses helps a journalist who is actually far out of their depth look as if they are not out of their depth. They do not actually understand the technology sufficiently well to render a judgment about it one way or the other (even to the extent that a layperson could) but sneering at least makes them look like they are resistant to a sales pitch--and thus possess a sophistication they do not really have, and never earned.

Put simply, they are the "pseudomature" kids that dimwitted conformists think are "cool." ("I don't get excited by anything. I've seen it all. You can't impress me!")

Of course, part of the "cool kid" package is being a mean-spirited little bully making those who do not say and wear and do the "right" things feel bad about themselves, as publicly as possible, to affirm that they are indeed the cool kid. Right now self-driving cars seem like an easy target for their kind. ("Oh, you were hoping for a self-driving car? Ain't happening. Ha ha!" It does not seem unimportant that many of those who might have most hoped to see self-driving, and especially Taas, make their lives a little better are the old, the young, the disabled, the poor--people who happen to be marginalized in one way or another, and thus favorite prey for bullies.)

6. Elon Musk is Making Self-Driving Cars (and the People Optimistic About Them) Look Bad.
As if all this were not bad enough there are those who make the cynicism easier still, especially a certain "tech billionaire."

Of course, it was never the case that Elon Musk was the only figure from the car industry talking up self-driving vehicles. But he was always beat out the rest of the competition when it come to the sheer aggressiveness of his predictions--starting with his claim that his company Tesla would deliver a truly autonomous vehicle by 2017.

Because the predictions were so startling, and because of his high personal profile (higher than that of any CEO of the established car companies), it was those and not the more cautious predictions that others made that monopolized public attention.

Of course, those predictions, which were as near term as they were dramatic, were not forgotten when the day came, and Musk proved very, very wrong--none of which stopped him from making similarly aggressive predictions again and again. (2017 saw Musk simply say 2019, and then when 2019 came along all he really had to offer were more promises that likewise failed to come to pass.) Soon he was even making claims that the cars had already arrived on the market in the form of his Teslas' Full Self Driving when what had been delivered was actually very far from that. To put it mildly, those dismissive of self-driving cars have been having a field day with this track record.

7. Commentators Are Overcompensating for their Earlier Gullibility.
Even beyond the exaggeration built into the business, the cynical poses, and the rest, there is the reality that the media was--as noted previously--telling a very different story a short while ago. Our remembering that makes them look very foolish. And now they are anxious to shore up what credibility they think they have in the public's eyes on this matter. "I knew it!" they want to say about the way self-driving cars failed to materialize by 2019, 2020, early 2021--but this is practically an invitation to check up on what they said before, a thing doable with a few clicks, which would give away the lie. And so instead they thunder on about the impossibility of the machines so loudly and so passionately and so lengthily that recollection that there had ever been anything different would soon slip from the feeble memories of most.

So far as I can tell, this has already happened for most.

NASA's "Technology Readiness Levels": A System Worth Learning

Back in the 1970s NASA developed a nine-level system of "Technology Readiness Levels" (since widely adopted by other American and foreign agencies) as a way of measuring just how far a technology has progressed from concept to reality.

Level 1, the lowest, indicates that the "basic principles" of the technology have been "observed and reported"--that, at the risk of putting it crudely, someone is telling us that a technology is feasible "in theory." This is, of course, very, very far from such a technology actually becoming "a thing," as reflected in NASA's definitions' document having the exit criteria from Level 1 "[p]eer reviewed publication of research underlying the proposed concept/application."

By contrast a technology at Level 9 is one which has already proceeded through the "validation" of key elements in a "laboratory environment" (Level 4), demonstrations of a "prototype in an operational environment" (Level 6), and even the completion and "flight qualifi[cation]" of an actual system "through test and demonstration" (Level 8), to the system's being "proven through successful mission operations" (Level 9), proper documentation of which means that the system has fully "graduated" from development.

When you read a great deal about technological research and development you quickly find that a very great deal of journalism talks about technologies that are on Level 8, or 6, or 4, or 2 (or even 1) as if they were on Level 9. Consider, for instance, the media reports about a paper in the Journal of Plasma Physics last year discussing a concept for a plasmoid-based thruster that might deliver an exhaust velocity of over a million miles an hour. (When Mars is at its closest this would get us to the red planet in under two days--less time than it took the Apollo missions to make the far shorter trip to our moon, while it would get us to the moon in less time than it probably takes you to get to work in the morning.)

Exciting stuff for those of us who follow space technology? Absolutely. But the wording of the mainstream media reports, which used the word "invented" in reference to the thruster (a term associated with the actual physical existence of a thing) gave the false impression that a technology that would seem to be at Level 2 (published paper) is on Level 4 (key elements being validated), or even higher (some pieces giving the impression that the thing is on its way to the launch pad for its first flight). Perhaps it will be, someday, but the point is that it is not there now, or even a sure thing in the near term. (The design uses a tokamak fusion reactor to generate those plasmoids, after all. They've been working on those since 1958, and have yet to reach "fusion breakeven"--a fact unacknowledged in the pieces I have read.)

The strong contrary impression the writing on the matter offers is just one (if particularly blatant) example of the illiterate and irresponsible tech journalism in which we are awash. There is no excusing it, especially in this age where R & D so often entails such massive investment, and so many of the major problems we face require, as at least part of the solution, our investing in the right technologies.

It seems to me that the popularization of the Technology Readiness Levels system, or at least something like it, could be helpful in clearing these things up because of its admirably clear benchmarks. (Either the paper has been published, or it hasn't; either the prototype has been completed, and tested, or it hasn't.) Perhaps it could become something like the use of the famed star system when critics talk about movies--the Level a technology is on, maybe even the Level it might be on at such and such a date, given as a matter of course. In the absence of such a courtesy on the part of the author we can consider what they have to say in terms of that system--judging for ourselves whether they are presenting something of substance, or subjecting us to the simple-minded gee-whizzery of which there is always too much about, eternally distorting a very important conversation.

What Keir Starmer's Rhetoric Tells Us About 2021

In writing about the records of specific political figures I have tended to focus on those heads of government whose tenures ran their course years ago, such that the subject of their record is more or less complete, and we have a measure of perspective on it, aided by the accumulation of a journalistic and scholarly literature that had sme opportunity to take in the whole. Thus did it go with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and even Barack Obama.

However, while writing about Blair I could not totally ignore the crisis in the party caused by austerity, Brexit and General Election defeat after General Election defeat, all as opponents of neoliberalism endeavored to retake the party from the Blairites. This endeavor seemed to have been defeated by Jeremy Corbyn's fall and Keir Starmer's election as leader, widely read as a Blairite restoration.

But was it?

I decided to check two of Starmer's more significant statements, namely the ten pledges he made during the February 2020 leadership contest, and his "New Chapter for Britain" speech of a year later.

After looking at them I have to admit that Starmer departed a good deal from the Blairite script. Much as Blair's defenders deny that he was a neoliberal, the fact remains that not only was Blair a neoliberal policy, but he was that too in his rhetoric, and indeed, reading the Labour Party's 1997 General Election Manifesto I was struck by his eagerness to persuade his audience that he was a neoliberal--as might be expected at that high water mark for the ideology, with its New Economy boom peaking and its hosannas to globalization.

By contrast in 2020, almost a generation away from that peak, and association with this never-really-popular-and-often-subject-to-backlash ideology thoroughly discreditable in the eyes of the broader public, Starmer went to great lengths to persuade his audience that he was not a neoliberal. This was not only the case in his rhetoric (Starmer was unafraid of the word "Socialism," and saluted Old Labour where Blair had only sneered at it and everything it ever claimed to stand for), but in his declared policies (which promise higher taxes on the rich and corporations, the end of Universal Credit, the return of free college, the renationalization of key services, and a Green New Deal, among much else).

Of course, Blair quickly justified the confidence that anyone who voted for him wanting a neoliberal government placed in him by delivering a decade of such policy (in fiscal and monetary policy; in maintaining and advancing the Thatcherite line on privatization, unions, the social safety net; in his commitment to high finance; etc.). Starmer is not in a comparable position (never mind the prime ministership, even a General Election is still quite some way off), but has not inspired much confidence that he could do the same (indeed, he was already toning down such leftishness as he displayed in the leadership contest, and sounding more like Blair in the February 2021 speech), and not unsurprisingly.

The simple truth is that if neoliberalism is more unpopular than ever the climate remains such that mainstream politicians have yet to challenge it in ways other than ill-considered and disruptive gestures like Brexit, or emergency patches like the stimulus seen in the wake of the pandemic (which pale in comparison with the extreme lengths to which governments and central bankers have gone to prop up the neoliberal growth model--the ultra-loose monetary policy, the quantitative easing, the bailout money, dwarfing the already vast efforts of the Long Recession).

All this would seem to bespeak a situation in which anyone near the center of politics remains a neoliberal, simply refuse to admit it, and hope no one notices--a policy which works entirely well with the mainstream media. But then the mainstream media remains squarely for neoliberalism. The general public, however, is quite another matter--while, one might add, its confidence in that media is ever-plummeting, a fact going for the left as well as the right. Naturally it would be complacent to assume that its reaction would be the same.

The Increasing Allure of the Virtual

Recently I found myself revisiting those ideas current a decade ago about the possibility of an "exodus to the virtual world" in which, finding playing MMORPGs far more satisfying than our daily offline existences, millions of people forsake this world for some other.

I have to admit that I found such arguments implausible, simply because economic necessity forces us to stay stuck in this world.

Still, considering the history of science fiction it does seem to me that attitudes have changed over time, and particularly after we had our first contacts with "virtuality." Conventionally the response we were conventionally "supposed" to have to the thought of a life online as an "alternative" to reality was suspicion and revulsion, in line with the old sci-fi trope of a virtual world as something used by an oppressive system to obscure reality for its own selfish ends--a tradition going back at least to Olaf Stapledon's classic Star Maker (1937).

However, in Ready Player One (2011)--published years after online, virtual life became a common experience--while the narrator piously acknowledges the "real," offline, world as our proper focus, the only place where, as Anorak tells our hero at the end, we can really find happiness, the fact remains that the adventure was really all about saving the virtual one which was the only thing that made bearable existence in this broken and oppressive real world that the book's hero and his generation inherited. (And the sequel, 2020's Ready Player Two, in spite of the twists and turns the story took, ultimately doubled down on that line, escalating the escapism with high-tech neural interfaces treated as, in the end, a positive development.)

It seemed to me that the shift in attitude implicit here attracted little comment at the time, or since--and that in the decade since its appearance, in which immersion in virtuality has only become deeper and more widespread, I have noticed nothing giving the impression of our moving in any direction but the one I discuss here.

I suppose that actual, lived experience of virtuality has done something to erode the old prejudices. This includes, of course, experience of the technology. That experience, it might be admitted, has not been wholly positive. But at the very least it has offered enough people enough pleasure, enough comfort, to make them rethink their prejudice--while I can't help thinking that this has been the more pronounced because of how the century actually did go. Every era has its share of misery, disappointment, fear--and for some, catastrophe. This is all the more obviously the case when we look away from the pampered upper strata by, of and for whom history generally is written, and to whom the media is so hopelessly devoted. In the United States, at least the twenty-first century has, by modern standards, been especially painful and discouraging in ways that are statistically measurable--from economic disaster that game-playing young people have felt particularly keenly, to incessant war, to climate catastrophe, and now pandemic, with worse expected on just about every score, and the media complex blasting the bad tidings at us with ever-greater intensity 24/7 despair for all it is worth under the pretense of "informing the public."

People are hurt, frightened, and made to feel helpless all the time (ironically, while often being made to feel guilty in spite of their powerlessness, which is of course making it still worse), and amid it all going somewhere else does not look so bad as it might have, perhaps the more in as the conveniences our gadgetry affords us--substantially a matter of easy distraction or escape during unpleasant commutes, dull classes, the tedium of working when the boss has his back turned, and so much else we find onerous--can seem like just about the only good thing this century has brought into the lives of non-billionaires. And in the process it becomes harder to resist a pleasant virtual world over the real one--and harder for even those who do not make the same choice to judge those who choose this form of escape as harshly as they might otherwise have been inclined to do.

Rethinking the Virtual Reality Bust

About a decade ago I was coming around to the conclusion that, certainly as judged by the expectations of the '90s and the unceasing hype inflicted on us by the press, the actual rate of technological change has been wildly overhyped.

I have, of course, found that not only is this not a popular opinion, but that people tend to jump right down your throat when you express it. And sure enough, right after expressing exactly that opinion on a radio show I received an e-mail contesting it. As I had pointed to virtual reality as an example of how technological developments were falling far short of commonly held expectations, they did not fail to dispute that particular point, insisting that all the popular video games "these days" were based on "virtual reality."

Equating virtual reality as I did with what we were promised back in the '90s--full bodily immersion in a more or less convincing virtual reality with which we can interact haptically--I thought this was an extreme lowering of the bar on every count, so much so as to leave us not talking about the subject at all. Later, however, I encountered the arguments of economist Edward Castronova, who in books like Synthetic Worlds distinguished between the "hardware" and the "software" of virtual reality. The hardware is the equipment by way of which we experience a virtual reality, like the gear that would enable that bodily, haptic immersion in a convincing reality; the software what renders the world that we would be so persuasively immersed in. Castronova admitted that the hardware had been oversold--but argued that the software, the creation of artificial worlds which people experience, had most certainly arrived in such forms as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). As he acknowledged, people experienced them through a small two-dimensional audiovisual display, but already millions happily spent tens of hours a week there, and in the process became quite deeply involved in their avatars and their doings.

As of early 2021 it seems we have had another boom and bust where the hardware is concerned. The technology has certainly become more developed and more accessible. And certainly it has been making a bigger splash in gaming than its '90s-era equivalents ever did. Yet it seems to be falling short of the everyone-will-own-several-of-them ubiquity supposed to be imminent for the last five, six, seven years. And it is not hard to see why. Inadequate technical performance in areas like resolution and frame rate, "clunky" hardware, and the high cost of the requisite gear, make for a prohibitive combination indeed. And so at the very least the technology's affording the kind of physical immersion a standard part of the vision a generation ago, certainly in a way that would make it appealing and accessible to a really wide audience, seems some years off--awaiting, among other things, still lighter, faster, cheaper computers.

Yet there is no question that the software of virtual reality has only gone from strength to strength. When Castronova wrote Synthetic Realities single MMORPGs had been used by hundreds of thousands. Now single games of the type have had hundreds of millions of accounts opened (Runescape the record-holder here, with a quarter of a billion), and many have millions of active users at once. It might be added to this that much of what was once unique to MMORPGs--customizable characters interacting in a shared online world--has expanded far beyond the mostly high fantasy-oriented role-playing game to become a standard feature of gaming from first-person shooters to puzzlers, considerably lengthening the list of users in the process. (It has also helped that the hardware needed to access them in the more modest fashion we take for granted has gotten cheaper and more convenient. Back when Castronova was writing MMORPGs were still something people accessed primarily via desktops. Now they take the 2-D experience of those worlds wherever they go, on the laptops, tablets, smart phones they consider bare necessities, through cityscapes where everyplace anyone goes is expected to afford satisfactory Wi-fi.)

Indeed, it does not seem for nothing that, realizing early on just how consequential virtual reality software running even on primitive hardware could be, Castronova warned that we would see an "exodus" to the virtual world from this one, driving those concerned with the welfare of this world to make reality more palatable. This is not to say that I think such an exodus--or even the fear of such an exodus--prompting reform to make this world a better place, has ever been very plausible. So long as humans have bodies out here in the offline world, with their requirements for food, protection from the elements (e.g. shelter, clothing) and the rest, and the necessity of paying for the gadgets, electricity, Internet connections and the rest without which they cannot have online fun at all, there can be no exodus, really. Instead people have to submit to the demands of this world, regardless of its terms, something of which may be said of the way one "Worst since the '30s" economic catastrophe has piled atop another, the price of everything but one's own labor seems to go up endlessly, and the word "millennial" is equated with a revolution of falling expectations--with, indeed, life expectancy in America falling for years, even before the pandemic.

Consequently, rather than an exodus to wonderful worlds online, or a happier reality offline, what we have got is a rising tension between the allure of the online and the unavoidability of an ever-less rewarding offline existence. Economic necessity prevails in the end--and will so long as the bills have to be paid. But as anyone who gets out much knows only too well, a good many people steal every moment they can from the onerous duties of offline life for online experience--relying on their devices to make their commutes tolerable, and looking at their screens in class, or even on the job, whenever they can get away with it.