WHAT is virtual reality (VR)? Over 21chapters and three appendices, Jaron Lanier, a tech pioneer, puts forward 52definitions. Some are geeky: “a media technology for which measurement is moreimportant than display”. Others are poetic: “the technology of noticingexperience itself”. And a few are terrifying: “a training simulator forinformation-age warfare”. VR is all of these things and more besides. Yet at atime when the malign influence of social media is grabbing headlines, it is thelast of these that seems most urgent.

Mr Lanier is a Silicon Valley grandee. In1984 he started the first VR firm, VPL Research, which sold early headsets andaccessories, and is widely credited with popularising the term “virtualreality”. He has seen the tech industry go from being a bunch of start-ups runby counterculture idealists to global companies. He now works at Microsoft.

Mr Lanier is also a critic of hisindustry. His first book, “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010), argued that the webwas creating “digital serfs”—users who gave up their data and privacy for nomonetary reward or say in the system. “Who Owns the Future” (2013) railedagainst the monopolistic power of big tech firms. His new book is a memoirabout virtual reality and a history of how the utopian thinking of SiliconValley has brought dysfunction and division. It will be essential reading, notjust for VR-watchers but for anyone interested in how society came to be how itis, and what it might yet become.

Many books about the early days ofSilicon Valley play up the hippie-meets-techie culture that shaped it. Few definethat better than the dreadlocked Mr Lanier, who was raised in El Paso andeducated across the border in Ciudad Juárez. After his mother died, Mr Lanierand his father moved to New Mexico and lived in tents for over two years beforemoving into a DIY geodesic dome. Mr Lanier skipped the end of high school andwent straight to university, but did not graduate. After drifting insemi-poverty and trying various careers, he found himself in Silicon Valley.

This was not an uncommon trajectory inthe Bay Area in the 1980s. Mr Lanier describes one associate as a “hippiephysicist musician”, another as a Wyoming rancher and rock lyricist. In thosedays techie culture was a subset of hippie culture. The first advice Mr Lanierwas given when he moved there was: “Don’t trust the suits.”

Silicon Valley believed everything wouldimprove once coders were in charge. “We better find a way to constrain peoplemore or the world will never get more efficient,” he remembers being told.“We’re creating a kind of power that is much more important than money.”Software, like air or sex, was meant to be “free”.

Today the world’s three most valuablecompanies are tech firms. The web is less wild and more structured. But theshortcomings of techie ideology have been exposed. The obsession with “free”nearly destroyed the music industry and continues to wreak havoc on the media.Tech firms still believe that they do not need to follow the rules—witnessUber’s bruising battles with municipal authorities around the world. And thebiggest, most influential firms resist any regulation that would make themresponsible for the content on their platforms. Web platforms care more aboutthe amount of time their users spend on their sites than the quality of theexperience or what they consume.

Mr Lanier remains optimistic that thingscan be fixed, perhaps by instituting a system of small payments to users fortheir data or by ensuring that artists and writers are recognised and paid fortheir work. Human beings, not algorithms, should be at the centre of theinternet economy, he says. These ideas will be familiar to anyone who has readhis previous books. The business models of big tech firms are, however, toosuccessful and too lucrative to change, so Mr Lanier’s views are unlikely toprevail.

What does this mean for VR? Virtualreality will never be as widespread as the smartphone, but it will beinfluential. Its promise is to make experiences in computer-generatedenvironments feel as visceral as those in the real world. It has philanthropic potentialand may improve medicine and aid education. But it can also be dangerous ifvirtual worlds are designed to manipulate users. Mr Lanier worries that VR maygo down the same route as social networks, becoming, as in another of hisdefinitions, “the ultimate way to capture someone inside an advertisement”.

But that is not a given. Although VR hasflourished of late, and headsets are now available for a few hundred dollars,the industry is still in its infancy. VR is unlikely to be widely adopted forsome time. Meanwhile, Western democracies are debating the merits and dangersof tech, and the need for big companies to police their platforms better. WhenVR goes mainstream, that debate will have intensified—and perhaps ended well.

By the time VR matures, it will be usedby people who have grown up with smartphones and social media. They, Mr Lanierargues, will be more sophisticated than today’s internet users, for whom it wasa new technology. The next generation will see through the manipulation. It isnot much of a hope to cling to, but it is something.

Perhaps the most fitting ofMr Lanier’s 52 definitions of VR is that it is “a preview of what reality mightbe like when technology gets better”. Technology is improving. Whether realitydoes too depends on the technologists in charge and the power of society toshape their vision.

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