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's new book In the Land of the Unreal offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an 'empathy machine' that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities.

Messeri 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 marginalised voices – could bring about a better world. She 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 theorises 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.

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.

Duke University Press, 312pp, 15cm x 23cm, illustrated paperback, 2024