ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lisa Messeri is faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University and author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“With careful, easy, and fun-to-read prose, Lisa Messeri examines the efforts to build and promote a new technology and related industry, thereby introducing readers to current hot-button concerns in our culture: about the role and power of technology, the changing nature of the real and fantasy, and the assaults on truth and humanity. A compelling ethnography.”

-- Alexandra Juhasz, Distinguished Professor of Film, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

“In the Land of the Unreal is a fantastic, groundbreaking, and beautifully written ethnography covering the nexus between place and technology. Lisa Messeri meticulously examines how Los Angeles, a hub for the entertainment industry with a rich history of urban fantasy, uniquely influences the virtual reality industry. She also provides a comprehensive yet precise vocabulary for grappling with thorny epistemological questions related to reality, the unreal, the virtual, the hyperreal, and fantasy. Her concepts shed light not only on virtual reality and digital life but also on American political culture in a post-Trump era, when ‘reality’ has itself become a battleground, as Messeri argues so persuasively.”

-- Gabriella Coleman, author of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous

"Absolutely one of the best books I've read about virtual reality, full stop."

-- Kent Bye Voices of VR podcast

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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