Michał Krzykawski
Centre for Critical Research on Technologies
University of Silesia, Katowice
Virtual Reality and Its Boundaries. An Organological Perspective.
The most amazing thing about Virtual Reality is that it lets our brains be deceived. For the first time in the history of technologies – which is, in all actuality, the history of mankind – we have become capable of making the human brain believe that it is in a different location from the factual one. By employing a technological stratagem, we are tricking an organ whose pliability we have discovered only recently, and whose activity does not, on the other side, remain unrelated to technical environment transformations occurring at unprecedented speed.
Concurrently, we have begun tricking the human brain in a very specific political and economic reality of (digital) platforms capitalism to which these disarranging transformations are subjected. “Virtual Reality has potential for becoming the most social platform ever, because it actually makes you feel as if you had another person there”, said Mark Zuckerberg in 2016. No wonder he is attempting to turn Facebook into a “metaverse company” (combining the virtual world with the physical one) today by trying to convince nearly three billion users that “metaverse is the ultimate expression of social technology”.
Can Virtual Reality be conceived as socially and aesthetically desirable in the face of psycho-social consequences of physical world undergoing virtualisation? Can Virtual Reality be socialised to avoid exacerbation of “symbolic poverty” (Stiegler) and systemically preclude the “distribution of the sensual” (Rancière)? Wherein lie the virtual illusion boundaries? We will ponder these and other questions in the spirit of general organology proposed by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, which explores relations between three types of organs: the psychosomatic, as the material foundation for mental structures; the artificial, as technological system components; and organisations (institutions) forming social systems.
