[Linganth] Lisa Messeri's new book, In the Land of the Unreal

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
CaMP anthropology blog is so pleased to announce that Lisa Messeri's book
has just been released.  We are celebrating In the Land of the Unreal:
Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles with an interview conducted by
Stefan Helmreich.

You can find the interview here:
campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based
storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual
reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri
offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized
VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social
realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash
against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was
imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring
about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this
vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR
experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social
truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy
collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With *In the Land
of the Unreal*, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology,
and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic
forces attached to gender and race.
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