XR, Agency, & the Gaps Between Worlds

Jordan D. Kokot (jdkokot@bu.edu)

Prindle Institute, June 28, 2022

Questions:

1. What was most striking about these clips?
2. What do they have in common? How do they differ?
3. What ethical challenges do they present?

VR, XR, & Transitional Objects

Definitions

XR/VR/AR/MR: Technologies that allow users to enter a virtual world space, or insert virtual objects into an existing world space

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World/Reality: a (mostly) self-contained system of expectations, potentials for action, and experiences, governed by its own rules Usually highly visual, if not also spatial.

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Transitional Object: a virtual object that appears in a non-virtual world, or a virtual modification of a non-virtual object.

“Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be... the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency” � –C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art

“We call a certain set of experiences a finite province of meaning [or world] if all of them show a specific cognitive style and are – with respect to this style – not only consistent in themselves but also compatible with one another...”� -Alfred Schütz, “On Multiple Realities”�

Technological Mediation: There is no “pre-given subject in a pre-given world of objects, with a mediating entity between them. Rather, the mediation is the source of the specific shape of that human subjectivity and the objectivity the world can take…Technologies, to be short, are not opposed to human existence; they are its very medium.”�� -Robert Rosenberger & Peter-Paul Verbeek

Ethical and Social Challenges of Emerging XR Technologies

• The technology is roughly at the state of development that cell phones were in early 1990s. It is already in broad use at major corporations like Chevron, Toyota, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, etc.
• It has enormous practical and commercial benefits.
• Federal governments and industry leaders are investing billions (e.g., U.S. Army invested $22 last year).
• Industry leaders like Meta (Facebook) are developing consumer directed XR and multiverse/multi-user platforms.
• An ever-increasing portion of people are spending large amounts of time on digital platforms, especially on social media.

So, it is crucial begin theorizing about the ethical and social ramifications of XR technology, and how it might change both who we are and the world around us.

Ethical and Social Challenges of Emerging XR Technologies

General Ethical Concerns:

• Environmental Issues/Industrial Waste
• Data/Privacy/Surveillance
• Consumer relationships to market mechanisms, advertisements, commodification of experience
• Psychological effects of increased screen/social media time
• Class and the “Technology Treadmill”
• AI bias and other AI problems

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XR Specific Ethical Concerns:

• Changing relationships to objects (cognitive offloading)
• Changing relationships with the natural world (Environmental Justice/Control Fetishism)
• Changing relationships with each other (avatars and filters)
• Racial bias, lookism, and gender discrimination
• Gamification/metric manipulation
• Behavior and value manipulation—perhaps more directly than any other emerging technology, XR has the potential to directly change our systems of value. This is especially concerning given how current technologies are unregulated and controlled by dubious corporate actors.

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Central Concern

XR can problematize the boundaries between worlds and make more malleable and manipulatable our ethical “affordances.” The rules change when we transition between worlds, and objects imported from one world to another change our behavior, goals, and even our values The infiltration of transitional objects into non-virtual worlds will also likely increase cultural anxiety about value by diminishing our sense of the divisions between worlds while serving powerful actors and hindering individual autonomy.

Technology, Affordances, & XR

• Affordances: “What an environment offers the individual” in terms of meaningful or viable choices. World designers are “affordance engineers”—they create worlds which are designed to produces specific kinds of actions among its inhabitants.

• All technologies create new affordances because they mediate between users and the world. In mediating, they change our values by changing what is available for action and directing our goals.
• However, most technologies are either “regional” (they function in a particular world for a particular task) or “invisible” (e.g., glasses). Transitional objects are neither. Instead, they covertly problematize the traditional real/virtual distinction.

Transitional Objects, Liminality, & the Gaps Between Worlds

Transitional objects are “covert.” They are often designed to fit seamlessly into the non-virtual world. Consequently, they have the potential to surreptitiously manipulate our goals, aims, and ethical affordances.

Next Steps

• Theory
• Public Policy
• Education

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Thank You!

Jordan D. Kokot

jdkokot@bu.edu

www.jdkokot.com

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TikTok + XR

Imagine a (fairly likely) scenario where a company like TikTok or SnapChat creates a filter app for XR glasses like the HoloLens. Would might some of the consequences be?

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