Well, maybe not Virtual Reality Pornography exactly, but David Foster Wallace talks about that in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself and I think it is a beautiful metaphor for the problem of being passively entertained to death. The challenge is that with the barrage of pleasurable bits from our various electronic devices we need to develop some machinery for being able to defend against pure unalloyed pleasure so that we can, ya know, go out and grocery shop.
Here is a pretty seriously revised passage from the book that talks about how passive entertainment like TV and even email is comparable to masturbation or candy, and how it could, in a meaningful way, kill us:
Passive entertainment is not bad or a waste of your time any more than masturbation is bad or a waste of your time. It’s a pleasurable way to spend ten minutes. But if you’re doing it twenty times a day—or if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand—then there’s something wrong. I mean, it’s a matter of degree.
What you’re doing is running a movie in your head, and having a fantasy relationship with somebody who isn’t real in order to stimulate a purely neurological response.
I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I can see them, they can’t see me. I can receive from the TV. I can receive entertainment and stimulation without having to give anything back except the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.
The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up, but there’s something nourishing about it because I think, as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be in the same room.
And so TV is like candy in that it’s more pleasurable and easier than real food. But it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food. And as the Internet grows, it’s going to get better and better and better. It’s going to be easier and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen. Which is all right in low doses. But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, then you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
DFW goes on to predict that eventually companies are going to face the ingenious double bind that they are going to have to make their stuff less entertaining because their customers’ absenteeism from work is going to hurt their revenues.
I think that’s half-right economic logic, and maybe in some rare corners of certain markets we will see companies trying to make their products less good, but the thing is that the companies are competing with other companies and so, while they might like to, they cannot afford to make their stuff less good.
The tobacco companies are a good example. Tobacco companies have a huge incentive to prevent their products from hospitalizing or killing their customers, because that hurts revenues in a pretty serious way. But if a tobacco company all of the sudden decided to make their stuff less potent, their revenues are going to be hurt even worse because people will switch to competing tobacco products.
There’s a similar story for World of Warcraft, which, if I may get a little drippy on your ass, has probably taken a not insignificant number of people’s lives, albeit in a very different way than the tobacco companies. World of Warcraft cannot afford to make their product less pleasurable because then their customers will switch to other, more pleasurable games.
That’s why I honestly think it might make sense from a policy perspective to have a tax on certain forms of (or all?) entertainment. But hot damn I can think of nothing more useless than me sitting behind my keyboard and thinking “from a policy perspective.”
The best we can do is get back in our bodies and build up some machinery to defend against the various forms of Virtual Reality Pornography. How we do that, I’m not sure. Do we read self-help books about “Enhancing Willpower Now!!”? Do we do some mental strength training exercises? Do we just try to surround ourselves with the right influences, or at least the people who won’t let us get too deep into the wrong influences? That’s the challenge of growing up, says DFW.
But I’ll use my last paragraph to say that I’m not necessarily sold on the underlying philosophical argument that giving one’s life away to passive entertainment is necessarily bad. I grant that it goes against our ancient need of real companionship, or else manipulates that ancient need in a significant way. I grant that something feels existentially empty about it. I know that I, personally, at least as a second-order desire, would rather have the “nourishment” than the Virtual Reality Pornography. But that’s just the thing: whenever we hint at something being “addictive” or in some crucial ways “bad,” we are almost always talking about a conflict between first- and second-order desires, i.e., wanting something (e.g., a cigarette or World of Warcraft) vs. wanting as a second-order desire to not want those things. So the issue is not ultimately about good or bad but about resolving conflicts between first- and second-order desires.
