The Oculus Rift headset provides a glimpse into a future that will likely be dominated by Mark Zuckerberg.
When Facebook bought the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for $2 billion (Time.com, 3/25/14), it probably flew under the radar for most people who aren’t already interested in gaming or technology. After all, “virtual reality” is a strange, science fiction-y concept that seems unlikely to ever break into the real world beyond a small, particularly nerdy niche.
But just like the smart phone, social media sites and the personal computer, virtual reality is an idea that’s more poised for major social takeover than the layperson might realize, and Facebook’s control over its future is, given the website’s relationship with its users, cause for concern.
The knee-jerk reaction is to be defensive about the possibility of VR headsets becoming an indispensable piece of technology. You might insist that virtual reality will never replace real, interpersonal interaction, and in most circumstances you are correct. Everyone from contemporary adolescents to senior citizens agree that in terms of friendship, romantic interactions, and friendly sports, virtual reality is not poised to replace real life.
There will always be people who prefer holding real footballs to holding controllers, chatting over a beer to talking through a headset, and even as online dating becomes more prevalent and accepted, it still functions as a means to an end, and that end is a real-life, human relationship that is built with facial expressions, physical contact and intimacy. Humans are not about to disappear into their smart screen phones forever, and the dystopian future of Pixar’s Wall-E, which showed rotund, unitard wearing doofuses struggling to remember how to talk face-to-face, is at least…uh, two generations away.
But everything I just listed is recreational, and based on an innate preference. The worlds of business and academia aren’t dictated by preference, but by convenience and necessity, and those are two circumstances where technologically-based connectivity has an immense advantage. Why pay to have your employee fly from Dallas to Miami for a meeting, when you can use a speakerphone to make them appear there? And as broadband becomes more and more common, why should anyone work in the same office–why not have all meetings held over video conference calls?
Welcome to your new workplace: the view through Oculus Rift.
Or, once Oculus Rift becomes cheap and prevalent enough, why not just have your meetings in a virtual space? In both the professional world and the world of academia (online colleges don’t have the prestige of real-world universities yet, but that won’t always be the case), it will very soon be cheaper and easier to hold classes, meetings, even job interviews in the virtual world rather than the real one. After all, is going to work by putting on a headset really that different from going to work and sitting in a cubicle? Is it less dignified?
So if virtual reality is the future, what does it mean that Facebook is poised to control a large portion of it? As the second-most popular website in the world and single-most-popular social media site (Alexa.com), Facebook already possesses the infrastructure that everyone using VR is going to need to make the technology interesting and worthwhile: the ability to connect quickly and easily to all your friends.
We’ve already told Facebook where we live, what we look like, what we like and how we spend our time—it’s only natural that the virtual world it builds for the Oculus Rift will be the first one we’re likely to go to, because everyone we know is already there. And, of course, since Facebook is a company, it’s going to need to make a profit here. When we go into VR meeting rooms or classrooms or football stadiums, we’re going to be telling Facebook even more about our lives than we already are, and it would be an objectively terrible business decision for them to not sell that information to corporations, and take every chance they had to exploit their users.
Compounding that problem is the fact that the general population has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to privacy on Facebook. That website has done a marvelous job of creating the impression that they’re a safe, comfortable oasis in the emotionless, exploitative wastelands of the internet, even though they aren’t that at all (ArsTechnica.com, 10/10/13). This might be because of apathy, entitlement or the simple fact that the website first “caught on” with a younger generation that didn’t fully comprehend the implications of sharing private information with the Internet, but whatever the reason, we now live in a world where privacy is a luxury we’re happy to surrender.
So far, this is a pretty bleak picture. It seems like VR technology will creep into our lives with such patient and inexorable slowness that we won’t have the opportunity to wrest control away from people who want to exploit our personal information. But that’s not the only option, and, in fact, video gamers have been dealing with this very problem for decades—for as long as virtual worlds have existed.
Back in 2000, prominent game designer Raph Koster drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Players (RaphKoster.com, 8/27/00), in which he reminded us that rights don’t exist until we demand them. As more and more of our lives move online, video gamers may end up being the thinkers we learn from most, due (if nothing else) to the fact that they’re already comfortable in that environment.
So while corporations are going to build the servers that provide a digital home for an ever-increasing portion of our lives, our voluntary participation in that world is going to be the only thing that gives that investment any value. The corporations will have the control–that seems more-or-less inevitable–but the user will still have leverage. We can have privacy and fair treatment in an increasingly digital world, but only if we demand it.
J.F. Sargent is a columnist and editor for the comedy website Cracked.com.
SIDEBAR:
Open Source VR: Possible, But Unlikely
The future of virtual reality doesn’t seem too promising: With Facebook at the helm, it’s likely to become an absolute professional necessity while staying firmly controlled by a corporation that isn’t exactly known for respecting its users privacy. But hasn’t every computer revolution happened in a garage? Might a grassroots VR movement assert control?
There are two big problems with that: First, unlike any other piece of novelty technology, VR has to be absolutely perfect to work. If Facebook goes down while you’re using it, that’s a bummer, but not a deal breaker. If a video game lags, you might get frustrated, but unless it’s utterly broken you can learn to deal with it.
VR doesn’t have that buffer: to be useable, it has to be perfect. When you’re wearing a VR helmet, any lag between your head’s movements and the visual input will cause your visual and vestibular system to disagree and literally make you sick (Wired,5/20/14). It’s certainly possible for someone to replicate this without the resources of a major tech company, but it’ll be far more difficult. The bar is just way, way higher–it’d be like trying to film Avatar 2 with an iPhone and a copy of Adobe After Effects. Or build a Dodge Charger from scratch, with no tools.
The other problem is, indirectly, the Heartbleed Bug (heartbleed.com). For those that don’t know, Heartbleed was essentially the biggest security flub in internet history, and it’s all the fault of Open SSL Cryptographic software. Open SSL is a piece of software that almost the entire Internet relies upon for security, and it was developed and has been maintained almost entirely by volunteers since its creation in 1998. But after the security flaw that was exposed a few months ago, big companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon have stepped in to fund the project (CBC, 4/24/14), inevitably exerting their influence .
Why does this matter? Because now, more than ever, the argument against open-source, community-controlled technology sounds pretty convincing. We may not see T-shirts adorned with the Heartbleed Logo above “Never Forget” written in a suitably mournful font, like Comic Sans or Vivaldi, but that will be the implication.
A free and open-source VR future, like what we saw in classic cyberpunk novels like Snow Crash and Neuromancer, is probably possible. But the deck is stacked against it.—J.F.S.
