Lisa Messeri: Unreal Realities in Los Angeles and VR | Urgent Futures Ep. 8

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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Lisa Messeri is an associate professor in sociocultural anthropology at Yale University. Her research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. She is the author of In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2024) and Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016). Her research has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, PBS’s Nova Next, and Wired. Messeri received her Ph.D. from MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society.

All of the conversations I host on Urgent Futures are personal; they’re conversations with people I think understand something about the shape of things to come. But this conversation with Lisa was especially personal for me. In the Land of the Unreal is an ethnography of the VR community in Los Angeles in 2018. All three of these details hold great significance in my life.

I see my work in the VR community—in Los Angeles—starting in 2014, as the beginning of my professional career. Or at least my professional identity. Much of how I now understand reality and the real were also forged during this time. It’s an inevitable outcome of working in an industry that is making active claims about reality (however correct or not). Looking back, 2018 is when the first inklings of my ideas about Postreality started to come into view, when the initial VR hype had simmered, and when political realities came crashing into the tech’s utopian ideals.

I’ve spent the past few years reflecting on this time, feeling a little sheepish about the ways I was magnetized by some of these grand visions. Lisa’s book really captures what all of that felt like—in my view, it’s as close to being there as we’re going to be able to get. And most importantly, her elaboration of the concept of the unreal, this interplay between fact and fantasy, feels more relevant now than ever. Do yourself a favor and go buy the book!

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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

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