If there's one trend I'm glad is actively dying out, it's VR. I remember when the Oculus Rift was announced my high school friends were freaking out, saying Star Citizen was going to make other games completely obsolete because everyone would be so engrossed, saying "it's been compared to the Oasis" (i.e. from the book Ready Player One) and that everything would be VR. Of course I was skeptical. My PC could barely render one screen at 60 fps, much less two screens, much less two screens at high resolutions like WQHD or whatever they used back then. Then when the Rift came out, there was a bit of hullabaloo that quickly quieted down. Star Citizen was not released, stuck in development hell and kickstarter grift land. Since then Facebook purchased Oculus and renamed themselves to Meta Platforms, Inc. trying to play off the VR trend. Zuck's infamous picture from the Meta talk striding above the plebians in suits wearing VR headsets was pretty much tell-all. VR was portrayed as a long march toward Progress - unstoppable, inevitable, whether-you-like-it-or-not. And if you weren't ready to jump on board with Progress, you'd be left in the dust.

Fast forward almost 9 years since the release of the Rift and I still don't know a single person who's purchased VR to play a VR game like Half-Life: Alyx (though I know many who purchased VR for its own sake) so it seems penetrating the mainstream computer market is not working out great. They also tried to push the phone VR thing with Google coming out with an adapter, but it also flopped and I've straight up never seen someone use it.

I'm far more concerned because of what VR represents - it's in the name after all, a slide from reality into virtual reality, with Facebook wanting people to come into work on VR. Mind you, the only difference between coming into work on VR and playing pool on VR is that you think one of them is fun, and the other you don't. Looking back on the quote, it's almost as if my friend said that because he wanted it to be true. He wanted the Oasis to exist. That way everyone can stay holed up in ISO half shipping containers and eat soylent green while living in VRland. It's not problematic because it's a computer game or something like that. I play computer games from time to time like most people here. It's the idea that a virtual interaction between people contains just as much moral, asthetic, and entertainment value as really touching a flesh-and-blood person. The inevitable conclusion after that point is a regress to something even worse, just taking the other person out, leaving an individual locked up in a virtual world with only simulated people