Reality privilege and the online thick markets
expanding psychological richness and meaning
People who are surrounded by beauty, stimulation, and meaningful relationships in the physical world often look down on virtual spaces and communities. They treat online life as escapist or lesser, a poor substitute for what they already have in abundance. But for many people, the online world isn’t an escape - it’s an entry point. It’s a way to access ideas, community, and opportunity that aren’t available where they live, or given the circumstances of their life.
In the late ‘00’s I discovered a virtual world called Second Life. Second Life was and is (as far as I know) a 2-D virtual reality. I never went much past setting up an account and looking around the landing room. Second Life’s membership peaked at about the time Facebook and other major social media sites came online, and those other sites drained away most of the membership. Second Life is a synchronous experience – people interact through avatars in a virtual world in real time. I think this is part of why asynchronous social media like Facebook work better – you don’t have to be on at the same time as the people you are interacting with. With asynchronous systems, you can dip in and out without coordinating times, and without missing the action.
So what is the draw of Second Life? It’s a second life, hence the name. It is a virtual world you can explore. It has a range of places created and maintained by its users. It has malls and churches and schools and other public spaces where you can interact with other people through your avatar. Although membership has collapsed, there are still some 170,000 daily users according to one recent source I found. Importantly, you can become anyone you want in Second Life. You can create an avatar to represent the you that you want to be seen as. This has great advantages for people who have disabilities, for example. It also opens up a world to explore for people who may be mobility limited, either through disability, geography, or poverty. An anthropologist from UC Irvine estimates 40-60% of the active members of Second Life have a disability. One user with a panic disorder reported the value of having Second Life as an option:
“Second Life has been a kind of lifeline for me, allowing to socialize and interact with other people from the comfort and safety of my own home,” Bouevier said over email. “When I feel a panic attack coming on, I can teleport to my own little hideaway and listen to calming music, or log out if I want to unplug completely. It isn’t that easy in real life.”
I’m not a Second Life user – I just find the site interesting for what it offers to people who need it. Like I said, I poked around in it once or twice but never stayed long enough to find a community. When I first gained access to the internet through AOL back around 1995, it felt like a godsend. I was a few years out of college in my first tour with the Army and I felt profoundly the loss of shared discourse about things that I cared about – literature, philosophy, art. The Army is great, but it doesn’t necessarily attract people who spend a lot of time reading and talking about poetry. I remember when I was at my ROTC summer camp between my junior and senior years, at some point we were sitting as a class together and one of the instructors asked if there were any philosophy majors in the audience. I was the only one to raise my hand. At that point, this instructor had asked this question to about half of all the juniors in ROTC in the country. He laughed and said I was the first one he had seen that year. Again, that isn’t to say there aren’t incredibly intellectual individuals, some with advanced degrees in philosophy, in the Army. It’s just that that the organization tends to attract people who want to live in the real world and do real things. I’m sort of a weirdo who has always had more of a virtual life, in the sense that I have always been drawn to the virtual, even before the virtual was a thing we could share.
In 1996 I started a web site for would-be science fiction writers. I manually wrote the HTML and it was extremely simple, but it attracted a small community of about 50 people at any given time from around the world. We had a listserv and shared our writing and critiques, and offered each other support and joked around. The site is long gone – I think it made it into the mid-00’s before it folded – but I am still connected with a handful of those people almost 30 years later. This sci-fi community layered on top of my real world experience, making my life richer. I was busy with my real life, and there was no way I could take time out to attend writing classes or some sort of writing group in the real world, but the virtual world made this possible for me. Those people helped me become more competent, I made a contribution by helping them, and I both supported them and they supported me – in other words, I got some of the 3 C’s of Meaning from them. Today, although I no longer aspire to be a science fiction writer, I live a robust part of my life in online discourse between this newsletter, social media, and various other outlets. It continues to make my life richer.
I share all this because I came across an interesting concept last week – Reality Privilege. Coined by Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape – the original web browser that democratized the internet in powerful ways – I think this idea is powerful, and it ties into my discussion of psychological richness that I started last week. Here’s Andreesen:
A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date... Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege -- their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world… We should build -- and we are building -- online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.
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I have a lot of reality privilege these days. The pic above is where I am sitting right now, writing to you from the LHH. Where else could I want to be? Also, I have TLW and a beautiful family, I get to work with interesting people, and I get paid to talk and write about ideas. I go kayaking whenever I feel like it, and I have my jiu-jitsu bros to keep me humble. It is literally everything I ever dreamed of having. And yet the online world adds immensely to that life.
I have a lot of interests, and the online world helps me indulge in them. We can think of the online world as a thick market for almost anything. A thick market is a term economists use to describe when there is a concentration of many sellers and buyers for a good or service. Why do you see restaurants and shops cluster together in a downtown rather than spread evenly throughout a town or city? A downtown area is a coordinating point where buyers and sellers come together. As a buyer, I get the most choice in a thick market. As a seller, I know there will be lots of buyers, so I want to set up my operation downtown, even though there will be lots of competition. In a more general application of the concept, a thick market is one with many participants interested in the same thing, making it easier to find the right people to learn from, collaborate with, or connect to—whether for work, hobbies, or relationships. Online spaces create thick markets for even the most niche interests, overcoming the limitations of geography and local opportunity.
The online world, in short, offers access - access to people, ideas, and opportunities we might never encounter in our physical world. I have learned so much from people I have only interacted with online – from my science fiction writing colleagues to the photography community I found on Flickr, to the artists I follow on Instagram that I study for inspiration. For those without reality privilege, it creates a way in. Even for those with reality privilege, it offers ways to go further and deeper. Either way, it enables something central to the Worthy Life Model: the pursuit of meaning through competence, contribution, and connection.
Online thick markets allow us to build competence by finding others to learn from, to contribute through the exchange of ideas or creative work, and to connect with people who care about the same things we do - even if they live halfway around the world. For many, these virtual spaces are not an escape from real life, but a platform for living a richer, more psychologically rich and meaningful ones. For some people, this may be the only access they have. We shouldn’t disparage the online world.
If you’ve ever found your people online - people who challenge you, support you, or simply get you - you’ve experienced this. That’s not a second life. That’s part of a worthy life.