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Second-Best Life: Real Virtuality

Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relationships. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial mass society: not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized.

In this context, it is striking to note that the original usage of "virtual" was as the adjectival form of "virtue." Virtual reality (VR) is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider...