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Unless I'm mistaken, the most popular fiction in which VR is wildly popular is.. Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and Neuromancer. And in all of them, VR is only popular because people are trying to escape the hellscape that unrestrained capitalism has turned the planet into.
I dunno. Give it a few more years, maybe.
That's also because in VR you could build, inhabit, and explore worlds that felt real, giving you a sense of liberty in a world largely without. In the real world, VR has already been tainted by the capitalism - indeed, Decentraland specifically is largely a collection of vacant lots, half-finished projects, and corporate playgrounds. The most functional areas are those owned by megacorps.
Capitalism beat us to VR. The choice will be live in the real world, where there are at least some spaces for you outside of the system, or dive into a constructed one run by the people you were initially trying to escape.
That’s also because in VR you could build, inhabit, and explore worlds that felt real, giving you a sense of liberty in a world largely without.
In Snowcrash/Necromancer the VR world is just as corrupt as the real world.
These tech bros read those books and think, "cool, let's make this."
I felt major Snow Crash vibes the first time I tried VRChat. Some of the servers are totally The Black Sun, without the hacker-programmed bouncers. But it also felt like a lot of the people were there escaping a reality they couldn't deal with.
We could go the Electric Sheep route and make a weird religion out of it
How about going full Dune, and destroying all computers and AI's to replace them with human calculators and autopilots?