“This would be sweet in VR” * : On the discursive newness of virtual reality

Abstract

When virtual reality (VR) entered the consumer market in 2016, it was accompanied by claims of its potential as a “revolutionary” new technology. This article examines these claims of newness by focusing on statements made by industry leaders and other professionals. The findings suggest repetitions of problematic discourse, in which colonialist language of “pioneering” expansion appears to be used to mobilize developers who are dominantly young, White, and male. I argue that recontextualizing the “newness” of VR opens opportunities to contest its depoliticized histories and to question its imagined futures. Situating VR within a much longer history of digital and non-digital technologies not only challenges the notions of newness that are foundational to industry-led VR discourse, but also offers a critical alternative.

Keywords

Colonialism Facebook Google Meta metaverse Oculus virtual reality VR

Introduction

It is tempting to think that virtual reality (VR) is new. Pronouncements from developers, industry leaders, and journalists claim that this is “just the beginning” (Abrash, 2018) of a “revolution” (Kickstarter, 2012), and anyone developing for contemporary VR is a “pioneer” (Recode, 2016) in a technological “wild west” (Reimer and Schwartz, 2014). It is true that there are new headsets and new privacy policies, but VR is not new. VR has a long history of remaking the real, and it has many possible beginnings. For example, although the Association for Computer Machinery calls Ivan Sutherland’s three-dimensional (3D) head-mounted display (1968) the “first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system” (Burton, n.d.: para. 9), it was preceded by Morton Heilig’s (1960) patent for a stereoscopic head-mounted display, which he had filed in 1957. Even a more recent novelty like the Google Cardboard viewer, introduced in 2014 (Google Developers, 2014), was preceded by a cardboard VR viewer from the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (Belman, 2012). Non-digital VR—that is, VR that is not powered by digital technologies—can be traced back to the View-Master in 1939, or to the stereoscope of the 1800s (Gurevitch, 2013), or to the zograscope of the 1700s (Blake, 2003). VR is not new.

In this article, I argue that industry-led claims about the imminent and revolutionary newness of VR can be understood as frames (Entman, 1993; Lindekilde, 2014) that reaffirm a social status quo by targeting dominantly White, male developers with the colonial and exclusionary language of “pioneering” expansion. While the use of these frames appears to be an effort to mobilize VR production and adoption, repetitions of problematic discourse limit the change that VR is said to offer. Situating VR within a much longer history of digital and non-digital technologies not only challenges the notions of newness that are foundational to this discourse, but also signals an opportunity for a critical alternative. Because frames are constructions, I conclude with an exercise in reframing, expanding the boundaries of one possible beginning of VR to show what is not normally shown: a gendered and racialized history of money, opportunity, and institutional power, and a decontextualized reference to a story about a young man with a sword hanging over his head. Recontextualizing the “newness” of VR offers a way to contest its depoliticized histories and to question its imagined futures.

Context: situating the new within the old

For industry leaders, VR is defined by the headset, a visual apparatus that provides (primarily) visual stimulus, which in turn stimulates the proprioceptive and vestibular systems as well as physical sensations. Whatever the headset is used for—whether it is for film, games, social media, broadcast sports, news, or events—it is understood to be VR. Recent academic work reflects these broad applications, including examinations of the use of VR for cultural heritage (Champion and Foka, 2020), games (Harley, 2020), theatrical and cinematic productions (Atkinson and Kennedy, 2018), documentary media (Rose, 2018), and social media (Blackwell et al., 2019). Broadly speaking, a central focus in this research is the social and cultural implications of VR use within a changing media landscape. Without dismissing scholarship that is identifying what is new about today’s VR, there is also an opportunity to emphasize the ways that VR is also very old.

Situating VR within a longer historical trajectory reveals more than old curiosities that sought to depict 3D space. The parallels go beyond the technological: again and again, the precedents of VR seem to promote a totalizing Western gaze, centring the perspectives and experiences of those in power. For example, Erin Blake (2003) argues that the zograscope of the 1700s—an optical device that magnified images to create depth—presented an idealized image of the public and the world. Blake writes, “Zograscopes told a story of public space as available, accessible, dynamic, and vibrant, but controllable, clean, and polite” (p. 5). Viewed from the detached position of the domestic sphere, the zograscope was an exclusive instrument of a limited elite, a tool to assert control over physical spaces and physical bodies. These mediated fantasies continued into the 1800s with the stereoscope, which magnified two images, one for each eye, creating the illusion of a single 3D image. As Brooke Belisle (2013) writes, “By creating the perception of virtual co-presence, stereoscopic representation supported colonialist fantasies about collecting all the world’s diversity and its historicity under the auspices of one coordinating point of view” (p. 5). Building on Belisle’s analysis, Alfio Leotta and Miriam Ross (2018) use examples from VR travel documentaries to show that very little has changed, with experiences that position the viewer as the privileged tourist whose gaze is a raced and gendered enactment of colonial “visual dominance.” For centuries now, even as the apparatus changes, much of the experience remains the same.

Whether scholars situate VR along a historical trajectory of documentary media (Rose, 2018), early cinema (Golding, 2019; Ross, 2020), or the early Internet (Nakamura, 2020), similar themes of power and exclusion can be found. Lisa Nakamura (2020), for example, offers a reminder of who is positioned to be the first creators and consumers: “This new VR shares many of the traits of the early internet: high-cost equipment, limited usage, and target audiences as well as developers and users who are predominantly white men” (p. 51). As Nakamura describes, “newness” comes at the cost of racialized and gendered labor, problematic representations, unequal access, and a “toxic embodiment” of another person’s experiences under the guise of empathy and connection. Taken together, the historical precedents of VR act as a warning: the promises of supposedly transformative, visionary technologies have come before, and with VR they are repeated.

Data and methodology

Recent contributions to the study of the social and cultural politics of technology (e.g. Benjamin, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020; D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020; Noble, 2018) have applied intersectional feminist theory (Collins, 1990, 2019; Crenshaw, 1991) to reveal some of the ways that technology can contribute to unequal experiences of power in relation to intersecting identity markers (e.g. race, class, gender, ability). Within this broader context, if historical and contemporary applications of VR reflect and/or extend exclusionary sociopolitical arrangements, a feminist perspective highlights a need to identify and understand power differentials within discourse promoting its current adoption and use. This critical orientation offers a foundation for my qualitative approach to frame analysis (Entman, 2003; Lindekilde, 2014), which I use to identify and analyze discursive frames that surround industry-led claims about the “newness” of present-day VR. Although I narrow the focus to industry leaders and other VR professionals, these individuals are also representatives of companies and corporations, playing an active role in shaping how VR is designed and understood.

My data derives from a larger project in which I gathered sources over the course of a 2-year period (2016–2018), with a timeframe for sources ranging from 2012 to 2018 (chosen to precede and follow the launch of consumer VR). As Lindekilde (2014) describes, because frame analysis is concerned with particular “movement actors” (in this case, industry leaders and other VR professionals identified within the broader dataset), text or speech acts about or by these actors was intentionally sampled, meaning that once I identified an industry leader, I would search for additional news articles, blog posts, and/or industry conferences specifically featuring that industry leader within the study timeframe. Although I reached a point of saturation at approximately 100 sources during analysis, my data collection was like Foxman’s (2018) “stockpiling” strategy in that I sought to engage with an “interconnected media environment” (p. 64) that spans developer blog posts, news media, promotional media, videos, and talks at developer conferences published online. For example, my subscription to the “news round-up” from enthusiast website Road to VR dates to May of 2016, meaning that during my data collection period, I had received over 800 emails linking over 2000 articles, which helped to confirm themes and trends across the industry, and which often reported on and/or provided links to industry events and conferences.

Recent VR scholarship demonstrates the importance of a data collection strategy that crosses a wide-ranging variety of sources, venues, and platforms. Nakamura’s (2020) examination of industry empathy claims show convergence between tech-focused publications, developer statements, and VR content produced and promoted on news platforms. Carter and Egliston’s (2021) examination of problematic data collection in VR education and learning shows the discursive influence of founders and CEOs whose claims are reproduced across outlets like developer conferences, news articles, and websites. In a study on industry-led discourse at Oculus, Egliston and Carter (2020) note that the forward-facing developer conference is a key platform for communication: “[W]hile the conference is attended principally by developers—and is aimed at recruiting developers into creating software for the platform—its wide diffusion also allows it to tap into a broader audience of prospective end users” (pp. 4–5). Foxman’s (2018) examination of ‘‘early adopters’’ corroborates this observation, noting that accumulating, interpreting, and ultimately relaying the variety of information disseminated about VR is part of the process of adoption. Robert Entman (2003) might call this “cascading activation,” whereby discursive frames are hierarchically disseminated and adopted.

While the coding process in this study lacks inter-rater reliability, I used iterative cycles of hand coding to analyze the data, combining deductive and inductive strategies when noting words, concepts, and themes repeated within the data, with broader deductive codes derived from prior scholarship. This iterative process helped to identify industry leaders whose presence was repeated, despite a lower public profile, as was the case with Michael Abrash and Clay Bavor, in comparison with more prominent figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey. This strategy of following statements by industry leaders meant I also followed the sources that they referred to, which resulted in the inclusion of two science fiction books in my analysis. Ultimately, the frames I identify emphasize the narrow lens through which VR is defined by industry leaders, revealing what (and who) is included and/or excluded as they communicate and promote their interpretation of consumer VR.

Framing belief, “pioneers,” and the “wild west”

In the years leading up to the release of consumer VR, industry leaders seemed to draw on a similar set of interlocking ideas. Presenting these ideas at industry conferences and events, their audience included developers within an industry that is statistically skewed White and male (Myers, 2018). Recent statistics show that little has changed in this regard—women make up only 33% of the total workforce at Google and 37% at Facebook, with lower percentages for women working in leadership roles and in tech-related jobs (Richter, 2021). In this section, I weave together some of the claims presented to this audience to reveal a logic in which discourse about an idealized first experience seems intended to produce an evangelist “pioneer.” It is a logic that establishes a common narrative with identifiable stages, from a transformative first experience to a shared goal of charting “new frontiers.”

For industry leaders, the initial experience with VR is framed as pivotal: all it takes to believe in VR is to put on a headset. At Oculus Connect 2, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Michael Abrash (2015) claimed, “Once you’ve experienced it, it’s obvious that it’s going to change the world in a big way” (00:34). Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, had been using similar rhetoric as early as 2014: “The people who try virtual reality headsets are the ones who are most excited about the technology because they see the promise and they see the future” (Sonne, 2014, 2:18). These future-oriented characterizations are not relegated to promotional work at Oculus. When Clay Bavor, head of VR at Google, framed the first experience as transformative, he suggested it was integral for an understanding of VR: “there’s no substitute for actually being in one of these demo rooms” (Google Developers, 2016, 00:46). Throughout the session, Google employees categorized the idealized experience in VR as “immersive,” which can be understood here as a promotional buzzword. As Leighton Evans (2018) describes, although “[t]he implicit and often explicit marketing of the medium depends on immersion as a game-changing aspect of VR . . . there is no intrinsic immersion from VR” (p. 66). Here, the shared language is what matters: emphasizing a common terminology and a common experience creates insiders and outsiders—those who have tried it and those who have not, those who can describe the appropriate experience and those who cannot.

This common language is bolstered by the shared motivation to be part of what is characterized as a “revolution,” which can be traced at least to the Oculus Kickstarter tagline, “Join the revolution” (Kickstarter, 2012, 4:40). Abrash (2016) reinforced his call to participate in a revolution with flattery and a sense of shared purpose:

If there’s one thing you take away today, this should be it. The way technological revolutions actually happen involve smart people working hard on the right problems, at the right time. Take a good look around this room, because when it comes to the future of VR, that, my friends, is us. (31:19)

Circuitously, Abrash was quoting a blog post by Oculus Chief Architect, Atman Binstock (Oculus, 2014), who was paraphrasing personal communication with Abrash. In the post, Binstock described how Abrash convinced him that VR was worth pursuing. Now the same phrase that moved Binstock from skeptic to believer (the promise of a revolution propelled by “smart people working hard on the right problems”) was used again to mobilize this audience: VR was the “right problem,” and this room of developers was presented with the opportunity to be forerunners of an important “revolution.” As Abrash (2016) put it, “We are on the leading edge of one of the most important technological revolutions of our lifetime” (31:02). For Abrash (2017), the technological challenges of VR would come to represent “new frontiers,” a “vast space waiting to be explored” (paras. 90-91).

For some industry leaders, these “revolutionary” developers are also “pioneers.” In 2015, Brenden Iribe, then a CEO at Oculus, said, “It’s such an early day that we view everybody as pioneers” (Recode, 2016, 13:56). Similarly, opening his keynote at Oculus Connect 2, Abrash (2015) said, “I urge you to take a moment now and then to remember how unbelievably fortunate we all are to have the opportunity to be VR pioneers. We’re creating a whole new way for people to interact with technology” (03:07). Again, the use of this language is not company-specific. Within a single session at Google I/O in 2017, a product manager for the Google Daydream VR headset referred to the “pioneering spirit” of their industry partners; a director of product management also referred to “pioneering” industry partners; and a program manager referred to the “pioneer program” of their educational Expeditions VR project for children (Google Developers, 2017). Shared language, then, is accompanied by shared purpose and shared identity.

One related factor is an imagined lack of rules among developers. In a talk at the Steam developers’ conference, designers from games studio Owlchemy Labs (which was later acquired by Google) said, “We call this talk the wild west of VR and there’s a reason for that. The rules haven’t been written yet” (Reimer and Schwartz, 2014, 03:48). As Foxman (2018) describes, this was a prevalent fantasy among early enthusiasts, who saw VR as “a digital gold rush in a Wild West” signaling “unregulated freedom” (p. 329). Importantly, notions of “no rules” and “unregulated freedom” disregards decades of academic literature on VR while framing these developers as the ones to “write” the rules. “We have not learned every single rule,” Chris Milk (2016) said in a popular TED talk about his early VR efforts. “We’ve barely learned any at all, but we’re already trying to break them to see what kind of creative things we can accomplish” (07:29). By 2017, developers were still repeating the sentiment that there were no rules, thus enlisting themselves as potential pioneers: “As developers and artists, we have the opportunity to make up the rules” (Oculus, 2017: 00:15). To these privileged few, not only do “rules” not apply, but their responsibility in writing or “breaking” the rules is taken for granted.

This language of “pioneers” participating in the “wild west” of VR is not quite the same as the characterizations of individuals as pioneers (more on that soon) in news media about VR (e.g. Crecente, 2016; Ewalt, 2015; Robertson, 2017; Volpe, 2015). Instead, it is a movement, a grouping—a “spirit” in Google’s terms—that employs the language of transformative belief while echoing the gendered and racialized discourse of settler colonialism (Perry, 2000). As a discursive frame, it is nothing new. Within digital contexts, critiques of this kind of colonialist language can be traced to the presumed “borders” and “frontiers” of cyberspace (Nakamura, 2002). Similarly, in his analysis of VR discourse between 1984 and 1992, Chris Chesher (1994) documented a reliance on frontier myths, pioneers, and colonization, arguing that this discourse ignored victims of colonization, obfuscated barriers to access, and showed that VR was an “extension of a tendency in western capitalist societies to commodify human experience” (p. 26). To repeat fantasies of the mythic conquering of the West is to repeat and retrench old justifications for shared exploitative goals based in ethnocentrism, racism, violence, and colonialism. Ignoring this history, or naively presenting it as desirable, does not negate its present-day impact. Settler colonialism is ongoing: it is a logic, a structure, a system of beliefs and resultant actions that continues to affect gender and race relations while perpetuating notions of White supremacy (Arvin et al., 2013; Bonds and Inwood, 2016). Whether the framing is deliberate or not, the majority of these “pioneering” VR developers are White, looking upon territory that is old while claiming it is new.

Framing fictional futures: the metaverse and the meat

Although VR has been a staple of science fiction since at least Stanley Weinbaum’s Pygmalion’s Spectacles (1978/1935), for Michael Abrash and Palmer Luckey, the contemporary vision of VR appears to be shaped by two novels: Neal Stephenson’s (1992) Snow Crash and Ernest Cline’s (2011) Ready Player One. These books were apparently seen to have strong communicative potential. Describing early adopters’ conceptions of consumer VR, Foxman (2018) writes, “Many enthusiasts endorsed Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and insisted each other read it” (p. 223). As enthusiasts themselves, Luckey and Abrash would repeatedly endorse both books well before consumer VR was released to the public, and to some extent, these books became endorsements of VR. A story that Abrash told in 2012, of reading the book in the early 1990s, meeting John Carmack (who would later become CTO at Oculus), becoming persuaded by a shared enthusiasm for 3D virtual worlds, is the same story that he told in January 2014 to describe how he joined Oculus, again in March 2014, and again in 2016 (Abrash, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2016). Snow Crash is a key factor in each account, but in the March 2014 account, Abrash’s reading of Ready Player One coincides with his meetings with Luckey and Carmack, which reportedly influenced Abrash’s decision to move from augmented reality (AR) to VR. For Luckey and Abrash, the books had become communicative tools, texts that are intertwined with their own conceptualizations of VR, presented as narratives that inspired them and offered as inspiration for others.

As a communicative device, the audience of these endorsements is—at least initially—comprised of employees, prospective employees, and enthusiasts, framing an interpretation of how VR should be understood and defined. In 2013, when Palmer Luckey invited Ernest Cline to Oculus for a demo, he promoted the visit by suggesting that Cline’s work directly inspired the employees at Oculus:

I’m a big fan of Ready Player One and so are most of the other engineers in Oculus. In fact, one of them even joined the company specifically because they were inspired by the book to help make virtual reality possible. (Oculus, 2013, 00:00)

According to Luckey, many of the employees at Oculus already read science fiction, a practice that helped to clarify their future plans: “The goal is clear: It’s to make VR technology that’s as real as real life with none of the limitations” (Urstadt and Frier, 2016: para. 20). By 2016, 2 years after Facebook bought Oculus¹, each new employee at Oculus was given a copy of Ready Player One (D’Onfro, 2016). The book was apparently used to establish a company narrative and to help unify the company’s vision for VR. Similarly, Abrash (2014b) used the book to convince other employees of the merits of VR: “I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR” (para. 7). However, these statements do not clarify what these books offer to these industry leaders, and what vision of VR they communicate.

On the surface, similarities between the two books seem to speak to genre tropes rather than shared worldviews. In both, large, private, monopolizing megacorporations strive to extend their power. The characters escape to the virtual where there is some semblance of personal freedom. In Snow Crash, the virtual is the Metaverse; in Ready Player One, it is the OASIS. In both, the virtual is an escape for millions from the ugliness of the real to the beauty of the simulation. Mirroring this escape from the “reality” of the city, in both books, the virtual body is the anonymous but customizable avatar; the individual escapes the “ugliness” of the body for the beauty of the avatar, or escapes the bounds of the human for the freedom to imagine another form. In Snow Crash, access to technology (“equipment”) is the only limitation (Stephenson, 1992: 36). In Ready Player One, the escape from the self represents a creative opportunity to “change” or “become” someone or something else (Cline, 2011: 57). The parallels across these books (e.g. the “ugly” becoming “beautiful,” the ugliness of the real compared to the possibilities of the virtual, or the escape from the human form) suggest a relatively effortless self-actualization and transformation through the power of technology. It is something made possible by the Edenic virtual rather than the corrupted real, in which socially constructed identity markers are retrenched even as they are presented as malleable. It is a virtual world that is conceived as separate, but that gains its value in relation to the physical.

Again, scholarship from the 1990s could be used to bridge old and “new” visions of VR. Nicola Green (1999) argued that “the politics of ‘becoming virtual’ are also caught up with how gendered virtual bodies and identities are inscribed and elaborated through the social locations in which virtual reality technologies are used/consumed” (p. 168). Craig Murray and Judith Sixsmith (1999) argued that “VR is a cultural and gendered space, and because of this, the potential of the embodied sensory experience within it is prescribed by the confines of the predominantly white, Western, male world” (p. 321). Scholarship nearly two decades later shows that the same critiques can be applied. Shira Chess (2017) writes that because Ready Player One glorifies media that was predominantly designed, produced, and consumed by men, “we are reminded who ‘Player One’ actually is, and has long since been—a white heterosexual, cis-gendered male” (p. 8). At the end of Cline’s book, despite the presence of characters who do not fit the hegemonic norm, or the fact that “it is also white males that run the corporate dystopia, suggesting that (perhaps) this rule of white masculinity is a double-edged sword” (Chess, 2017: p. 8), it is still a young, White man who saves the day. He wins by employing his knowledge of an idealized and depoliticized past that celebrates arcana established by White men. There is a parallel here to Palmer Luckey or even to Michael Abrash: privileged White men employing their enthusiast knowledge of VR technologies to present VR anew.

While these books present VR as a tool to mediate relationships and to make diverse coalitions possible, what supersedes possible social commentaries about race, gender, and class in the books is how the (dominantly male) body is empowered and made visible by the virtual. These moments of digital transcendence are common in cyberpunk fiction and the speculative writings of the 1980s, and can be read alongside work in which the body is presented as an impediment, something to be overcome. In William Gibson’s (2000/1984) Neuromancer, the hackers derisively call the body “meat,” a lower form of consciousness, a “prison” of flesh that is no match for the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” (p. 6). As Katherine Hayles (1999) describes, “Snow Crash creates an infoworld, a territory where deep homologies emerge between humans and computers because both are based on a fundamental coding level at which everything reduces to information production, storage, and transmission” (p. 275, original italics). Not only is computation framed as natural, but humans are framed as data. Even if corporations are denigrated in cyberpunk fiction, this is ultimately a reason for the modern corporation to embrace these books. The books endorse and glorify the escapism that consumer VR is said to provide, and they also endorse a data-oriented ontology in which bodies are made perfect by technology. Although often categorized as dystopias, they are spaces of capitalist wish fulfillment: both protagonists end by owning their own business which directly profits from their knowledge of the virtual. If a VR consumer sees their body as secondary, and sees the virtual as a place to achieve success, it is then that much more easily acquired by the corporation that sees the body as useful data, as storehouses of information that can eventually be uploaded, analyzed, quantified, and commodified.

The sword of Damocles: reframing a beginning

Many of the sources examined in this study suggest an effort to identify a single individual—pulled from a technological, rather than photographic or cultural, history of VR—who is responsible for the conceptualization of the medium. This is predominantly a gendered, patriarchal pursuit. Journalists have identified at least two separate “fathers” of VR (Bernard and Tweedle, 2017; Crecente, 2016), two “godfathers” of VR (James, 2015; Mayol, 2016), one “godmother” of VR (Volpe, 2015), and one “face” of VR (Purchese, 2013). While these possible origins also negate the purported newness of VR, they help to reinforce narratives of male-dominated control and ingenuity, setting a precedent for today’s VR. Each of these individuals has been called a “pioneer.” As Lucy Suchman (2009) describes, to analyze discourses of technology that propose “change” while maintaining existing structures, it is important to deconstruct notions of innovation and innovators. Because histories and futures (imagined and otherwise) feature so prominently in VR discourse, this section returns to one of the histories of VR, not only to recontextualize and then question claims about its past and its present, but to offer a more realistic starting point for its future. Doing so is not an attempt to denigrate specific individuals or their accomplishments. My intervention on one of these histories simply broadens the borders of the frame to focus attention on some additional aspects that are commonly overlooked.

Consider Ivan Sutherland, one of the presumed godfathers of VR for leading the creation of a 3D head-mounted display (1968) that became known as the Sword of Damocles. In a talk 30 years after what Sutherland originally conceptualized as “The Ultimate Display” (1965), Sutherland notes that in addition to still benefiting from Harvard endowments that date back to the “triangle trade” (i.e. enslavement in the Americas), his own research had financial assistance from the Air Force (which was not considered controversial at the time) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (which was considered controversial at the time²) (Sutherland, 2017). These connections are a reminder of the close ties between the government and academic institutions for technological development; Sutherland casually mentions that he “made some friends” in the CIA during his time at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in Washington, which later became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This was a time in which the development of computers was predominantly driven by White men (despite female programmers) and bolstered by the military-industrial complex (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, 2009). As Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter (2009) note, the same origin can be identified for the Internet, for personal computers, and for video games, situating each of these “innovations” within a “system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (p. xxix, original italics). Because VR is also connected to Harvard’s history, this “system” also includes gendered and racialized relations.

Given Harvard’s patriarchal origins as an all-male, all-White college, the first African American professor would not have tenure until the year after the 1968 paper on the headset was published (Aspelund and Bernhard, 2015). At the time of Sutherland’s work, women were rarely appointed as professors, and were admitted to the college at a ratio of one woman for every four men (Silverberg, 2006). Amid the settler colonialist language of VR “pioneers,” it is also significant that the first Native American professor to have tenure at Harvard was in early 2018 (Radsken, 2018). If today’s VR “pioneers” are characterized as “smart people working hard on the right problems at the right time” (Abrash, 2016, 31:19), at Harvard in the 1960s, “smart” people were the predominantly White men granted institutional access, and the “right” problems were technologies with military applications. This social and political context, including the gendered and racial norms of Sutherland’s time (or, for that matter, their ongoing effects) are not typically discussed in histories that adopt Sutherland’s display as a beginning of VR, yet this beginning also offers ways to better understand how the differential power dynamics of VR production and adoption are ignored. Quite simply, Harvard in the 1960s created specific opportunities for Sutherland and his students, while foreclosing those same possibilities for others.

A closer look reveals further omissions. Although Sutherland’s head-mounted display is referred to as the “Sword of Damocles,” it is more accurately the name that Sutherland and his students gave to the headset’s ceiling-mounted head position sensor, which looked like a long pole above the user’s head (Sutherland, 2017). The paper from 1968 does not mention the name, and it is unclear whether the name was used “jokingly” (Computer History Museum, n.d.), or “affectionately” (Burton, n.d.). Not only is the pedigree of the naming difficult to trace, but one of the motivating examples for the research is improperly cited by later work. Sutherland (2017) describes how he became interested in virtual displays after hearing about experiments in which a participant watches a head-mounted video feed of two people playing catch, associating their physical location with the view presented by the camera. The National Research Council (1999) incorrectly cites this anecdote as coming from Sutherland’s 1968 paper, rather than his recollection at a 1996 talk (Sutherland, 2017), a mistake that is repeated in Carlson’s (2003) History of Computer Graphics and Animation. These examples indicate that while some details are important, others are not—what is salient in this narrative is a story of a singular innovator, whose “leap of faith” (Sutherland, 2017) led to the invention of a medium. What an ahistorical account achieves is an apolitical beginning; what remains is prepackaged and repeatable mythmaking.

The lack of critical reflection about these origins or the naming of this device suggests an eagerness to find a beginning; the details are made irrelevant. Despite the almost certain offhandedness of its naming, or the inattentive promotion of the name, there are apt lessons in the story that are relevant to contemporary VR. In Cicero’s (1877/45 BCE) version of the story, King Dionysius was a tyrant who gained power at 25 and ruled for almost four decades; he ruled in fear for his own life, suspecting everyone, from friends and lovers to daughters and wives. In Cicero’s account, Dionysius has wealth and power, but after so many acts driven by fear, he is incapable of happiness. Damocles, attempting flattery, praises Dionysius’ wealth, the luxury of his position, and his happiness. Dionysius asks Damocles if he would like to experience this happiness, and Damocles readily accepts. Damocles is given a bed of gold, “handsome” youths to serve him, ointments and perfumes, and tables of food. Then Dionysius suspends a sword over Damocles’ head, hanging it with a single horse hair to show Damocles that there is an ever-present danger in power. Damocles is granted the experience of Dionysius’ wealth and power and is happy for a moment. But upon seeing the sword, he asks to return to his former position, for “now he had no desire to be happy” (p. 186).

Referencing this story, the name of Sutherland’s display inadvertently offers yet another historical parallel for contemporary VR. Dionysius creates a virtual world for Damocles that reproduces a cruel simulation of the power and the danger that he feels. The threats that Dionysius fears feel real, even if they were once imagined; the “happiness” that Damocles is given an opportunity to experience is revealed to be an illusion. Today, the discourse promoting contemporary VR presents a vision of possibility, an apparent wealth of opportunity. For Damocles, the virtual world is disrupted when the threat that Dionysius feels is made visible. If Damocles experienced happiness for a moment, it came at a cost.

Conclusion: reframing a future

The discursive frames outlined in this article suggest that those who lead contemporary technological development, who establish a common identity, as well as those who heed these calls, reproduce the same structures that have already been in place for decades. Each of the frames identified in this article are embedded within the larger frame of newness. There are new frontiers for these pioneers, new rules to be written, new histories and futures to be crafted, new possibilities for “everyone” to participate. As industry leaders frame a default support of hegemonic norms by promoting a colonial desire to participate in a technologically expansionist capitalism, emphasizing an uncritical newness can stifle questions around what is different about today’s VR, especially as the use of VR and its application areas continue to expand. In the United States, for example, VR use is said to have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic (Clement, 2021), suggesting that more research is needed to extend the work presented here and to better understand consumer perspectives of these technologies. For Mark Zuckerberg, the rebranding from Facebook to Meta is also a prioritization of his vision for the metaverse: “We will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” (Newton, 2021: para. 17). Zuckerberg goes on to define the metaverse as an “embodied” experience, signaling an increasingly blurred relationship between the physical and digital (see, for example, Saker and Frith, 2020) while providing corporations with expanded forms of data collection (Carter and Egliston, 2021). Although the promotion of discursive frames does not have deterministic outcomes, to set the parameters of how the technology is framed, including who participates and how, is an attempt to set the parameters of how these spaces are understood and controlled.

A common trope in Oculus advertisements is the upturned face of someone wearing a headset. We do not see what these people see. Mouth open, it is as if these people (typically men) see something awe-inspiring, something profound. Whatever it is, it is hidden behind the veil of the headset. Framed in this way, there is a seductive power to these images: the people in these advertisements are drawn in, immersed in another world to better see our own, seeing newness and change and futures that are whatever the viewer might imagine them to be. Richard Westall’s painting of The Sword of Damocles also shows Damocles looking up at possibility, his mouth also slightly agape. His eyes also show a profound realization. Zoom in on Damocles’ face—hide his eyes, hide what he sees—and there is a ready, open-mouthed parallel to all the advertisements of people in headsets, looking up in apparent awe. Narrowly framed, all context is lost, all the people are gone. Although industry-led discourse can be like an image of Damocles framed to exclude the sword, when it is reframed, the power is there, the danger is there, just as it was.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Daniel Harley

Notes

Author biography

Daniel Harley is an Assistant Professor at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business at the University of Waterloo. His research examines the relationships between digital culture, discourse, design, and interactive technologies.

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