The extensive discussion and financial success of Alex Garland’s latest film Civil War, set in the United States of the near future, are a testimony not only to the quality of the film but to the profound dis-ease that characterizes the current state of American society and politics. It is unnecessary to characterize at any length the particulars of our anxiety, and besides, what there is to be concerned about is part of what divides us. Suffice it to say that as “revolution” was in the air in the 1960s as a bogeyman for some and a goal for others, today the corresponding mantra is “civil war.” And if there is little consensus, except within our varied bubbles, about what ails us and why, there is less about what needs to be done. The enemies of the American experiment — and, of course, we can’t even agree about who they are — have cause to rejoice.
At the same time, there are powerful voices coming from the world of technology urging us to “optimism.” If we can only hang on a little longer, we will see a world of unprecedented material plenty achieved with less human work, better health, longer lives. Where once biotechnology or nanotechnology would have figured prominently in such discussions, now the focus is on artificial intelligence and robotics. There are risks, and no few people trying to point them out. But the upside, according to the techno-optimists, is almost unimaginably up.
Of course we cannot know the future, and so their argument is not obviously wrong. Whether they are aware of it or not, these optimists are tapping into a powerful current. One of the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that if you can solve the problem of material scarcity, you can go a long way to solving the problem of free and peaceful coexistence among equals. Modern technology has been essential to that dynamic from the start, a key driver of “development” and the success of democratic regimes. The West, and large parts of the rest of the world, are what they are today in great measure due to this project.
However, on this basis it is hard to understand why in the West, the first home of modern liberalism, we are also seeing, seemingly increasingly, the rise of illiberal ideologies, political parties, and politicians. Where Marxism and socialism promised to achieve liberal goals better than liberalism could, illiberal politics are based on the premise that the liberal understanding of human beings was mistaken from the start. Liberalism, it is said, puts too much emphasis on our material existence, for example, or is mistaken to give such central roles to human autonomy and equality. Despite technology’s crucial role in the success of liberalism, it now seems to be contributing more to illiberalism. Digital technology allows, indeed encourages, people to live in self-reinforcing information (or misinformation) citadels that frame the issues of the day in entirely different ways. When the fringe can get exposure rivaling the putative mainstream, is there a mainstream anymore? People on different sides hardly seem to be living in the same world, but that is because, in a very real sense, they are not.
By and large, the Silicon Valley optimists cannot help us here. It is a problem that so few of them speak in a way that is informed by a serious understanding of politics, let alone a self-critical understanding of the historical and normative foundations of their arguments. When AI technologist Brendan McCord premiered the Cosmos Institute at the beginning of 2024, he positioned it as filling a gap in the discussion of our technological future — although it must be said also that The New Atlantis has been operating in that gap for over twenty years now. But his insight is no less valid: “only through philosophy — which is to say, the quest for the truth — can we liberate ourselves from the dogmas and prejudices that motivate our judgments, the schools of thought that rule us.”
Because of this renewed sense of urgency to deal with the philosophical and political underpinnings of the technological future, it is well worth revisiting Bruno Maçães’s 2020 book History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, which shows him well able to take up this challenge, in particular the role virtual reality may play in addressing our present ills. Since the book was published, both its political and technological visions have only become more salient. Certainly our political divisions have deepened. While commercial success is still elusive for virtual-reality consumer products, the brain–machine interfaces that will likely anchor the next generation of their development have only become more sophisticated. And in Silicon Valley, the dream of virtual polities replacing national ones has been growing too, most notably through the influence of Balaji Srinivasan, whose 2022 book envisions the rise of the “network state,” “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
Bruno Maçães, who hails from Portugal, has served in various distinguished positions at home and in E.U. institutions, and has a six-figure following on Twitter, where he is an outspoken commentator on international affairs, has by his own lights written a hopeful book. American political life, he argues, “continuously emphasizes its own artificiality,” blurring the distinction between fact and fiction going back at least to Watergate. Now our politics seem like a soap opera, while Hollywood drama feels more real than today’s headlines. Liberalism used to be based on the principle of freedom; America today is based on what Maçães calls “the principle of unreality: everyone can pursue his or her own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real.”
But, he contends, virtual reality can save liberalism from itself by allowing us all to flourish in virtual worlds of our own choosing. Though in the book his focus is on the already “virtual” nature of our current “post-truth” society, the narrower technical meaning of “virtual reality” — of the illusion of actually inhabiting virtual worlds by technological means — seems to be the obvious endgame he has in mind. The clearest indication of this is Maçães’s 2021 “Manifesto of Virtualism” on his Substack, declaring a “new political philosophy” that serves as a “sequel” to the book.
Some of the measures the manifesto calls for sound pretty wild. For example: “The government must have all available tools to create virtual or imaginary worlds that feel entirely real to those experiencing them….” People should be able freely to choose among and inhabit such virtual worlds as are comfortable for them, and leave what we now call reality pretty much behind. Standing on its own, such a program would be the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But in History Has Begun, Maçães presents a provocative and intelligent case that from early on America has been on a path to virtualism. Since long before the phrase “the American dream” came on the scene, he argues, we have been a nation defined to a significant degree by turning our dreams into realities that had once been unbelievable. Political virtualism, of a sort, has long been haunting America; given new technological capabilities, Maçães argues, it is time to bring to life what could only have been a specter in the past.
Yet it is not clear that Maçães’s sense of international politics ultimately serves him well in this instance. Whatever momentum there might be behind virtualism, he does not present a particularly convincing case that it is an answer to liberalism’s ills, or that it would avoid the nightmarish possibilities that virtual existence would present.
The seeds of virtualism, Maçães argues in the first two chapters of the book, have not always been obvious in the American polity, nor in America’s self-understanding. This is because we have inherited a flawed image of America’s relationship to Europe. The Framers saw themselves as putting European political ideals into action, creating an extension of the Old World while also breaking away from it. We fail to see the significance of this break with Europe, Maçães argues, if we let ourselves be guided by Tocqueville. By seeing in American democracy the future of Europe, Tocqueville told an essentially Eurocentric story that failed to appreciate forces at work in America that would create something entirely new, particularly the forces of technological innovation.
What we have been witnessing in America over the last several decades, Maçães writes, is the end of an old history but, at the same time, the growth of long-germinating seeds of a new one: “The current moment in American history is both a moment of destruction and a moment of creation.” Under destruction are “the values inherited from modern European culture” that largely guided the first century of American existence. Under creation is “a new way of looking at the world” that “slowly extends to every facet of individual and collective life.”
Maçães’s critique of Tocqueville, while brief, allows him later both to reveal and justify virtualism as the American future. Tocqueville warned of “individualism,” by which he meant the dangerous if natural tendency in democracy for people to withdraw into small circles of family and friends, leaving us isolated from each other and leaving public matters to lovers of power. Individualism would seem to have more than a passing resemblance to the idea that we should all be able to occupy virtual worlds of our own choosing. If it is problematic to withdraw into such limited human association in the real world, how much more so to leave it behind entirely.
But Maçães dismisses Tocqueville’s warnings rather cavalierly. “We now understand,” Maçães writes, “that individualism is indeed a fundamental trait of modern democratic societies,” as Tocqueville argued. But then Maçães continues that “we understand better than Tocqueville that it can be regarded as a virtue just as easily as a vice, that social ties can limit creativity and individuality.” And again, we “also know that the link Tocqueville saw between individualism and the loss of political freedom is much weaker and [more] doubtful than he argued.” The book has endnotes, but who “we” are in these statements is not sourced, so that these carefully phrased formulations remain completely unsupported assertions. While they hold open the possibility that Tocqueville might have been correct to warn about individualism, Maçães’s argument will not attend to that possibility.
Instead of using Tocqueville as our guide to democracy in America, Maçães suggests we consult philosopher William James. Maçães says James’s liberalism aims at a world where people can lead their own lives by their own lights not only as a practical matter, but because there is no one truth to guide such choices. Rather, there are many truths that “are equally good and wholesome, even when they contradict each other.” In a stunning metaphor drawn from James’s writing, Maçães presents a picture of society as a “palatial hotel” in whose rooms people are pursuing many different and contradictory ways of life. While the metaphor would seem to imply common spaces like a lobby or restaurant or swimming pool, Maçães (following James, who is following the Italian writer Giovanni Papini in turn) explicitly mentions only the corridors, “the space necessary to keep the rooms separate, nothing more.” In this picture of things, a rather extreme version of Tocquevillian individualism is no longer a bug but a feature of the new America.
It is James, then, who inspires Maçães’s presentation of the rise of American power in the twentieth century. Where Europeans sought to reform and reshape society as a whole, Americans sought a world where a multitude of private visions of happiness can be achieved. Maçães draws the lesson from Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt that “Americans of all ages and classes engaged in the pursuit of a private dream.” Hence, as we learn in Chapter 4, after World War II it is the “dream world of California” that becomes the locus of what Americans want out of life, first via Hollywood and now also Silicon Valley. “For the next four decades, American politics and American business would never cease approaching the ideal point where they would be indistinguishable from Hollywood.” Maçães is of course aware that this development could be presented as a critique of what happened in those postwar years. But he celebrates the confluence of reality and unreality; it is an “unmasking of bourgeois belief in objective reality” such that “any meaningful struggle against reality has become absurd. Why would the individual continue to battle the world of social institutions and conventions when this world has so obviously lost all authority?” So in a world that is already molded by Hollywood stories, Americans seek the chance to live their own chosen stories.
The Internet only makes us more willing and able to bring our own fantasies to life, to explore and find our place in the “possibility space.” At the same time, this is not an enterprise that is undertaken only in the private sphere. Maçães points out that it was not a trivial fact about President Ronald Reagan that he had been a movie actor — the great communicator first got practice pretending. But, Maçães notes, Donald Trump’s success came largely from playing Donald Trump, business tycoon, on a television reality show. From this point of view, therefore, we should hardly be surprised that President Trump inhabited a “possibility space” where “lying to improve reality is not really lying.” His world of grievance and conspiracy is so much more interesting than reality — and after all, as Maçães writes, “in this vision, the world exists to provide a stage for our fantasies.” Of course, for many the very example of Trump suggests that it might be better for all concerned if we were to live more firmly rooted in reality. But for Maçães “we’re now seemingly past that.” The truth of virtualism, it would seem, is that we are all to become master storytellers, self-consciously developing the stories that define our realities at least in part because that is the direction in which things are already going.
However, the tone of inevitability that Maçães at times adopts is not the whole story. In Chapter 6, we come to the normative heart of the argument. Liberalism, he argues, saps the meaning from our lives. It is true that liberalism encourages diversity of private belief and action, and, as we have seen, Maçães is sympathetic to the same. But the cost of that diversity in the private realm is conformity of public political principles — for example, in order for this kind of diversity to be tolerated, you must be a liberal in public. Believe what you want, but don’t try to impose those beliefs on me! Maçães doubts that this situation is tenable: “human beings do not have a bicameral mind.” The private beliefs will tend to encroach on the public, and the public attitudes encroach on the private beliefs, and thereby enervate them. Is it really enough to be against racism privately, or drunk driving, or abortion? Surely in such cases the private sense of justice struggles to achieve some kind of public recognition. And if it does not achieve it, is it not a rather weak conception of justice that forbids one personally from being a racist, or a drunk driver, or having an abortion, but doesn’t care if other people make different choices?
If Maçães is right here, what we would otherwise see as factionalism and partisanship is really just people trying to achieve meaning in the face of untenable liberal bicameralism. What is needed, therefore, is a way for people to be able to live out the full consequences of their beliefs single-mindedly, yet without imposing those beliefs on others. Maçães makes a quasi-Madisonian move. You deal with the problem of faction not only by increasing the number of factions; now, virtual technologies, beginning with television and culminating in the Internet and streaming, allows those factions to get just what they want while remaining entirely insulated from one another.
It is not that there are no examples of efforts to achieve like circumstances in American history in, say, utopian experimental communities or monasteries. Maçães eventually mentions the Old Order Amish. But his first and most consequential example of what we can aspire to is Westworld. Maçães has in mind the HBO series, though his observations apply also to the 1973 movie of the same name on which the series is based. Westworld is about an Old West theme park populated by highly realistic androids. Guests are encouraged to participate in various adventures as hero, villain, bystander — whatever you want. Encounter prostitutes and gunslingers, participate in saloon brawls or saddle up for a posse. In the Westworld park, Maçães writes, the “experience is fully immersive, everything feels real, but as much as each guest will be transformed by their time there, they know that this is not reality: bullets cannot kill them” (although the androids can be “killed”). “The principle of unreality” — don’t impose your vision of happiness on others as something real — “is an answer — a specifically American answer — to the shallowness of life in modern liberal society.”
Courtesy HBO
Two chapters follow this extraordinary claim, but they need not detain us long. In each, Maçães discusses at length a case where it would seem that the reality principle would have to triumph over the principle of unreality: first, foreign policy and national defense, and, second, the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first instance he points out how fantasies have already been playing a significant role in shaping American foreign policy, and yet he also believes that, as a superpower, the United States should choose to foster a world of many stories that also makes the American world of stories more secure: “The trick here is to include other consciousnesses in the very task of world building.” In the second case, Covid-19 taught us that the stories we tell even about illness and death can diverge so dramatically that it already seems people are living in entirely different worlds.
But the whole point of Maçães’s argument would seem to be to get us to lean into living in entirely different worlds, to see that future as already implicit in the American dream. Virtualism allows liberalism to have its cake and eat it too. I can (in some sense) live out most of the consequences of the story I want to inhabit, and let you live in your world, no matter how different. We can be at peace with each other because our worlds do not intersect unless we want them to.
Oddly, Maçães does not give much attention to how we transition technologically to such a world, arguing instead in the manifesto that “virtual reality is for us less a technology than a whole way of life.” Nevertheless, as he pictures it in the Westworld example, it is a way of life that depends on technology in very specific and novel ways; he is not talking about old-fashioned voluntary utopian communities. And even though I doubt that Westworld is a paradigm of what most people today would consider to be VR, the more common understanding would be a way of life all the more anchored in specific technological possibilities. We seem to have no choice but speculate about the transition for ourselves. Perhaps Maçães could point to what people already experienced during the pandemic, working, shopping, and socializing online. Add well-developed avatars and some “killer app” version of the metaverse to that, skip a few generations ahead on technology like Apple’s Vision Pro or Meta’s Quest Pro, add a direct brain–machine interface, and you’d be halfway to the grand hotel.
Still, it is extraordinary that, instead of this more common meaning of VR, Maçães offers us Westworld as his technological and way-of-life paradigm. The guests in Westworld experience it through their real bodies, through normal sensoria, as in any existing theme park. They are interacting with physical android bodies grown in vats and animated by AI of varying degrees of sophistication. Westworld is experienced in real time and real space and requires massive real resources (including territory) to sustain its illusion. In that way, Maçães writes, it gives us “danger and excitement,” “unruly and wild” adventures, without the prospect of getting hurt because “there are plenty of safety measures in place.”
At this point, anyone familiar with the Westworld TV series or the original Michael Crichton screenplay will be scratching his or her head. It’s as if Maçães is jesting with his readers, or testing them to see if they are paying attention. For Westworld is a profoundly dystopian story, and not primarily about rich people having a wonderful time being immoral in a theme park. He mentions that there are dangers, but does not specify what they are or what they lead to. In fact (spoiler alert) things go horribly wrong and the park progressively stops working in ways the people who run it cannot change, or are not interested in changing. Nobody is “safe,” and guests are massacred.
Surely Maçães does not believe that this result is some mere accident that could be addressed by yet more safety features? The Westworld story is smarter than that. It shows how, short of some quasi-omniscient and omnipotent artificial intelligence running the show (a problem in and of itself), virtual realities will have to be developed and maintained by fallible human beings with agendas that may or may not be entirely transparent to users, or even to themselves. These systems, like all systems, will have unanticipated failures that leave users at risk. The more realistic they are, the higher the risk.
Courtesy HBO
One might reasonably reply that a future like that in Westworld does not have to be perfect, only better than the supposedly meaning-drained lives we now have. The number of people killed when the Westworld park fails is a tiny fraction of those lives taken in the real world in the ordinary course of private violence, accidents, civil unrest, or war of a sort that would not happen in virtual worlds. And if we think of virtualism not according to the literal Westworld model of interacting bodies but something more like immersive metaverses with hardware off-switches or panic buttons, the risk to real lives seems even further diminished. However, in that case there would seemingly be consequences flowing from physical wasting and neglect of underutilized bodies, a problem already evident in overcommitted gamers. Dealing with that problem evokes images of AI-run robots caring for our bodies, and ultimately the iconic “brain in a bottle” or minds “uploaded” into virtual worlds. Maçães does not peer so far into the future, so whether he would regard the transhuman implications of virtualism as positive or negative is unclear from History Has Begun.
There is another aspect of the show that Maçães only alludes to and then seems to forget about, and that suggests a more immediate problem: when the park works as intended, many of the human guests are profoundly corrupted by the experience. It is not obviously a good thing to give rich jerks the chance to be rich jerks with impunity, to reinforce their worst inclinations. (The show also suggests it is not obviously a good thing to be a higher-up in a corporation that panders to people in this way, or to be the man who developed it all.) The wealthy patrons are for the most part not purged of those inclinations when they return to real life. In a world of virtualism, presumably all economic classes would have the chance to experience the degrading possibilities of infantile willfulness. And if things start going wrong for you, Maçães insists that virtualism requires that we be able to exit a chosen world at any time, and try another:
Citizens must be at liberty to adopt and abandon different values, to enter or exit different experiments in living. The state must recognize and enforce this right to enter and leave. These are experiments, adventures, storylines. They are not real life….
Like malware authors, we need to include a kill switch in case we lose control over our own creations — in case things get too real.
This is the ultimate form of “that was then, this is now” irresponsibility. Perhaps it would be the case that being a bad person would be less consequential in a virtual world, although on assumption it would be the true world and hence as consequential as possible under the given circumstances. “Not real life,” perhaps, but quite real enough until someone decides to flip the kill switch. So it would still be a problem if getting whatever I want, or doing everything my way in the face of only such resistance as I have chosen to accept, turns out not to be a formula for a meaningful life, let alone a decent one. One might solve this problem if the virtual world were so immersive that the participant does not even realize it is virtual (like the fevered speculation that we live in a simulation), but that situation would seem to violate Maçães’s stricture that participation in a given virtual world be in all respects voluntary.
Yet does Maçães imagine that participation in virtual life itself would be voluntary? As we attempt to think about the regime of virtualism, there is the telling claim already quoted earlier: what is being created is “a new way of looking at the world” that “slowly extends to every facet of individual and collective life.” Another way of saying “every facet” would be that virtualism is a totalizing ideology, or totalitarian in a purely descriptive sense.
Because the whole point of virtualism is to allow people to be free to choose their own ways of virtual life, it might at first seem absurd to suggest that a regime of virtualism might be totalitarian also in the normative sense. Obviously, if you wanted to, you could live in a world where you could play a role like that of Vyshinsky in the Soviet Union, or Eichmann in Nazi Germany, or O’Brien in 1984. Or at least try it out for however long it worked for you. But equally you could just choose virtual living in a simulation of a time and place very like the United States of the twenty-first century, except more “civil,” shorn of the need of encountering MAGAs (or progressives), atheists (or evangelicals), red staters (or blue staters), and so on and so on. The intention of virtualism is to increase the effective (if unreal) freedom available to people, not to force them to conform to one way of life in the classic twentieth-century totalitarian model.
And yet Maçães writes that virtualism will one day extend to “every facet of individual and collective life.” How else could it be if people are going to spend most or all of their time and attention in virtual worlds? But also, the real world would have to be arranged to make that possible: the servers, the software design, the electric grid, the food supply — all production and distribution of goods and services would have to be arranged with a view to the care for people deep in virtual experiences. The complex interdependence of a modern economy would have to be replaced by a largely dependent class and a largely provider class, guests and hosts — recall William James’s hotel. The same point about resources would be true, perhaps even more so, for a virtualism that worked like Westworld. It requires not only vast territory above ground, but a huge network of underground labs, control centers, storage areas, transport tunnels, secret access points, and so forth. Provision of goods and services would have to be ensured in such ways as not to force anyone to engage in unwanted physical labor. It is hard to imagine how any of this could be achieved without a vast centralization of authority, however hidden or benevolent, of the sort present but hidden on a cruise ship, or a theme park, or a grand hotel. The effortless life of the guests contrasts strongly with the highly regimented life of those providing the “guest experience.” And we would be talking about national, or even global, centralization, whether in the hands of some technical elite or of artificial intelligences. (Westworld portrays a panopticon control center.)
It might be that in the real world, politics as we know it would be dead, and all that would be required is what Friedrich Engels called “the administration of things.” “Political power,” states one principle in Maçães’s manifesto, “is the creation of a highly detailed virtual world, including the rules dictating actions and outcomes within each of these worlds.” But successful administration would be a matter of life and death for those who have incapacitated themselves for life in the real world or those living out a fantasy among androids. Would there be some High Priesthood of system administrators who would take a self-denying vow to abjure all virtual goods in order to make sure the hardware, servers, and software keep running? While they’re at it, would they also be the ones in charge of the perpetuation of the species? I wrote of cruise ships and theme parks above, but a better analogy might be to liken those charged with keeping virtual worlds running to the people who keep institutions running that care for patients who cannot care for themselves. We know how difficult it is to prevent abuses of all kinds at all levels in such places. Yet if, for the technical guardians of virtualism’s infrastructure, the pleasures of power include occasional interventions on distracted bodies or in the virtual worlds themselves, who will ever know?
Thus, if only for technical reasons, the system would tend toward the kind of soft despotism described by Tocqueville. In a regime of virtualism, the relationship between those in charge of the infrastructure and those “living” within it would surely be like the relationship he describes where the government seeks
alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications, and to watch over their fate.
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
Would not those who make virtual worlds possible judge their own success by how much people would want to remain immersed in them, leaving all the cares of poor real life to … them?
History Has Begun makes a compelling, although not ultimately satisfying, case that the promise of virtualism is an extension of the promise of the American dream. There is admittedly something appealing about a world in which I could hunt with Xenophon in the morning, fish with Izaak Walton in the afternoon, drive cattle along the Chisholm trail in the evening, and lament the state of the world with Orwell after dinner. But it is a false promise, now as before. The knowledge that I can push the reset button at any time on my virtual life hardly seems likely to be the basis upon which to achieve the meaningfulness Maçães believes liberalism has sacrificed. Nothing is at stake. For better and for worse, meaning requires a world that resists us, that we enter into without having chosen it, still less having created its terms for ourselves. It is very hard for me to imagine how getting the rewards of excellence, or indeed the rewards of viciousness, would be meaningful without having to make an effort to be either excellent or vicious.
But even if the promise were not false, the cost of achieving it would be very high. In a strange regression for liberalism, occupants of virtual realms would be subjects of whoever or whatever keeps those realms up and running, absolutely dependent on their benevolence — a sentiment which, as Adam Smith noted, is not in plentiful supply.
I’m aware that none of my criticisms require great subtlety; most of them would be obvious to anyone who has watched The Matrix (or, as suggested, Westworld itself), or paid attention to how Facebook and Google have developed, or follows the website “Web3 Is Going Just Great.” Why aren’t these problems more obvious to Maçães, who is widely regarded as an astute observer of the modern world? Why does he refuse to acknowledge what Westworld is really all about?
I confess there were moments when reading and thinking about this book that I entertained the idea that it was serious in the way that Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is serious about eating babies, or Trollope’s The Fixed Period is serious about euthanizing everyone at age 67. Read as socio-political criticism (as outright satire it would be pretty dry), the book exposes some key fault lines in contemporary society, and warns us about how past a certain point, or outside of a certain context, the American propensity to think we can all live out our dreams becomes divisive. The book might also be suggesting that the latest technology is unlikely to solve our problems, that the challenge of living together as citizens is a matter of a moral education that arises in part from the experience of actually living in and with a real community. Maçães would then stand, like Tocqueville, as the kind of foreign observer who shows genuine friendship with democracy in America by discussing our faults. But as much as I’d like to think that is true, I’m not convinced.
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