This reminds me of conversations I had with Brian Mack, the Black transgender man who helped found Prism & Pen with me. (The truth is he talked me into me to starting Prism & Pen when I really didn’t want to.)

Anyway, before he died a few months ago, Brian was an avid gamer. He was disabled and had a hard time doing much of anything physically, and gaming gave him a important social outlet.

The way he talked to me about it, the gaming world was pretty analogous to AR or VR as proposed by Meta and other organizations, at least in the sense where people gather together with avatars as representations and so forth.

Brian often found himself deeply uncomfortable and even traumatized in the gaming world because of prevalent, outspoken racism and mocking of queer people.

Nothing about gaming’s move toward VR technology made him any more comfortable. Nothing about the technology made people less apt to be cruel to him. He had to seek out communities that would accept him, and that was not easy, though he persevered right up until his last hospitalization.

I don’t see anything getting better because of technology. I see VR or a metaverse being a reflection of a toxic society, and I don’t see how for-profit corporations will possibly choose to do anything about that.