Prepare the following article for translation (in the tutorials).
Empathy – the latest gadget Silicon Valley wants to sell you
The tech world wants us to believe that virtual reality will unlock human
understanding on a global scale. But it’s also a business strategy
The other week, Mark Zuckerberg visited Puerto Rico without leaving California.
He stood on the roof of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park with a virtual
reality (VR) headset strapped to his face, and immersed himself in a flooded
street 3,000 miles away.
Zuckerberg was livestreaming the event to promote Facebook Spaces, a “social” VR
app. But it backfired, badly. Using a humanitarian crisis for a marketing stunt
made many people angry. So did the tasteless incongruity of Zuckerberg’s
grinning cartoon avatar set against a landscape of profound human suffering.
When Zuckerberg apologized the next day, he clarified his intentions. “One of
the most powerful features of VR is empathy,” he wrote. By cultivating empathy,
VR “can raise awareness and help us see what’s happening in different parts of
the world”.
It would be easy to see this statement as a canned bit of damage control, as
another in a long line of half-hearted mea culpas mass-produced by Silicon
Valley publicists for their frequently offending bosses. But it’s worth taking
Zuckerberg seriously. When he talks about empathy, he means it.
Empathy is a word that suffuses the tech industry. The ability of an engineer or
a designer to put themselves in someone else’s shoes is widely considered
critical for creating a successful user experience. But with VR, empathy isn’t
just a design value – it’s a sales strategy.
Empathy is the cornerstone of the tech industry’s masterplan for mainstreaming
VR. It’s the “killer app” that Silicon Valley hopes will transform VR from a
fringe curiosity into a technology that’s as deeply embedded in our daily lives
as smartphones and social media.
VR enthusiasts often describe it as an “empathy machine”. By creating an
immersive and interactive virtual environment, a VR headset can quite literally
put you in someone else’s shoes. Text, image, or video offers only partial views
of a person’s life – with VR, you can get inside their head. And this
high-fidelity simulation, the argument goes, will make us better people by
heightening our sensitivity to the suffering of others. It will make us “more
compassionate”, “more connected”, and ultimately “more human”, in the words of
the VR artist Chris Milk.
Now, this isn’t necessarily true. There’s no reason to assume that a virtual
rendering of real suffering will generate empathy. But, as Ainsley Sutherland
explains in a recent piece for BuzzFeed, it’s a very useful idea for the tech
industry. Tech needs the myth of the empathy machine for two related reasons: to
enhance VR’s reputation, and to expand its audience.
Violence and sex have long supplied VR with its most obvious use cases. It’s an
excellent platform for gaming and porn. But these specific strengths actually
damage VR’s chances of becoming a mass medium, since the technology risks
becoming linked with somewhat embarrassing subcultures. Silicon Valley isn’t
pouring billions of dollars into VR to give nerds a better way to play games and
masturbate – and if those are the only activities that people associate with the
technology, it’s dead on arrival.
Empathy offers a more promising approach. Rather than marketing VR as a gaming
rig or a sex toy, Silicon Valley can pitch it as a catalyst of deep
interpersonal connection. It also suits Silicon Valley’s oft-expressed desire to
make the world a better place. By lending you the eyes and ears of someone
suffering in San Juan, tech helps you to develop a greater sense of
responsibility for them. You feel compelled to act. This is connectivity not
merely as a technical concept, but a moral one.
Lately, however, this faith in connectivity has been harder to sustain. In
recent months, the media and the general public has gradually awakened to the
fact that using technology to connect people doesn’t automatically make the
world a better place. In fact, it sometimes seems to make the world considerably
worse. Trolls, racists, and fascists are using the connective capacities of
Google and Facebook to inject their poisons into the body politic with alarming
success. As a result, for the first time in its history, Silicon Valley is
facing something of a backlash.
VR offers a way to reset the narrative. At a moment when Silicon Valley sorely
needs good press, both to burnish its public image and to forestall a possible
regulatory response, the myth of the empathy machine has an important role to
play. It helps rehabilitate the idea that connectivity produces socially
beneficial outcomes, and that Silicon Valley is an essentially humanitarian
enterprise.
With VR, this humanitarianism can be quite explicit. Charities are already using
the technology to coax dollars from prospective donors. At black-tie fundraisers
in New York, attendees have used VR headsets to travel to destinations as
distant as a Lebanese refugee camp and an Ethiopian village. And the United
Nations has built its own VR app that teleports users to Syria, Liberia, Gaza
and elsewhere, while encouraging them to donate money or time.
VR philanthropy supplies the tech industry with valuable rhetorical ammunition.
Companies can point to these initiatives, and partner with the organizations
behind them, to boost the technology’s reputation – and their own.
But the empathy machine isn’t just about driving better PR. It’s also about
selling headsets – and Silicon Valley needs to sell lots of headsets. Zuckerberg
recently said he wants to get one billion people into VR. This may sound
impossibly ambitious, but it expresses something of the scale required to recoup
Facebook’s enormous investment in the technology.
Of course, VR philanthropy probably won’t become a popular pastime. It may
appeal to certain users, but it’s unlikely to spark widescale adoption.
Suffering might, however. Extreme situations are good ways to demonstrate the
affective capacity of a medium. A Holocaust movie shows us the emotional power
of cinema; a Facebook Live broadcast of the police murder of a black man shows
us the emotional power of social video. These representations of pain, by
eliciting an intense response from their viewers, teach people what a technology
can do. If a medium can make you cry – as VR can, famously – it works.
This isn’t to suggest that crying is all people will do in VR. The purpose of a
killer app isn’t to exhaust a platform’s potential, but to offer an entrypoint
into it. Once you get a critical mass of people using a technology, they figure
out other things to do with it. But VR needs a gateway drug – and virtualized
misery can perform that function.
Imagine a VR live stream of a police killing. This, tragically, will soon cease
to be science fiction: within years, you will be able to experience an extremely
convincing simulation of what it’s like to be murdered by a cop. Will this lead
to the cop’s conviction, or to meaningful criminal justice reform? Recent
history suggests the answer is no. But the content will probably go viral, as
its affective intensity generates high levels of user engagement. And this
virality will generate revenue for the company that owns the platform.
This is a far likelier future for VR than the mass moral awakening envisioned by
evangelists of the empathy machine. It’s a world where VR enables us to consume
ever more realistic depictions of human anguish, whose viral circulation
enriches a few big companies. It’s a world where capitalism has found yet
another way to monetize its waste – where the suffering that results from a
society organized for profit becomes itself a source of profit, and pain is
repurposed as a site of economic production.