Bogost: "Metaverse..."
1.“The fantasy is bigger, though. CEOs in tech know that billions of people still live much of their life beyond computer screens. Those people buy automobiles and grow herb gardens. They copulate and blow autumn leaves. Real life still seeps through the seams of computers. The executives know that no company, however big, can capture all the world. But there is an alternative: If only the public could be persuaded to abandon atoms for bits, the material for the symbolic, then people would have to lease virtualized renditions of all the things that haven’t yet been pulled online. Slowly, eventually, the uncontrollable material world falls away, leaving in its stead only the pristine—but monetizable—virtual one,” (p.4).
Bogost: "Dystopian..."
1.“VR was a complete reality that subsumes “real” reality—or at least threatens to do so. But the great irony of today’s real virtual reality is that it bears no risk of overcoming and dispensing of real reality. VR, it turns out, is far less holistically immersive than our dreams (and nightmares) of it have ever been,” (p.6).
Schlembach and Clewer
1.“For Anderson, this ‘reminds us that “neoliberal subjects” do not equate to the rational subject’ (Anderson, 2016: 738). Instead, ‘affect becomes a material to be manipulated or moulded to form subjects in conformity with neoliberal polices [sic] or programmes’ (Anderson, 2016: 738). What is at stake in what we analyse as belonging to the ‘immersive turn’ in critical theory, therefore, is not just the production of an ethical encounter, but the self-transformation of subjectivity in digital capitalism and its manipulation for a variety of political purposes,” (p. 832)
- This manipulative use of affect feels gross. It ties in with the predatory practices by these large corporations creating VR cash-grabs. My immediate reaction to the neoliberal policies was thinking about how History is being manipulated by politics at the moment. Selective histories are being used in order to argue political points but information is being left out as needed. All of this feels unethical, the forced empathy, corporate greed selling abstract possessions, etc.