In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles

by Lisa Messeri

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In The Land of the Unreal , Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

Genres: Nonfiction

312 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2024

About the author

Lisa Messeri is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of four pivotal texts I used in my research on virtual performance. Grateful this text exists, and grateful I was able to get access to it through my library.