Table Of Content(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
Anna Gotlib
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology
Edited by Shannon Vallor
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Science Online Publication Date: Nov 2020
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190851187.013.17
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter offers a critical analysis of the place that evolving technologies (and espe
cially bio-technologies) are beginning to occupy in our ideas about who we are and who
we might become. This chapter’s general claim is that we cannot consider the nature,
function, and role of technology without taking account of its impact on personal and
group identities, and especially the identities of vulnerable others. The chapter addresses
the difficult questions about how the impacts of emerging technologies, while in many
ways positive, can also be sources of further othering of already vulnerable populations,
and how the promise of human progress through enhancement (including everything
from novel biomedical treatments and all the way to artificial intelligence and transhu
manism) can also lead to a deepening liminality of the oppressed. The direction in which
we ought to be heading as a technological species, the author suggests, should be moti
vated as much by considerations of identity-constituting effects of technological innova
tions as by the adventurism of techno-evolution itself.
Keywords: biotechnology, identity, vulnerable populations, emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, enhance
ment
1. Introduction
Technological innovation, whatever its forms, has occupied both the imagination and the
efforts of generations, whether in the pursuit of quotidian human convenience, or in the
more abstract goals of pushing the edge of what is conceivable. While the dawn of the
twenty-first century has brought nothing if not an acceleration of the pace and complexity
of these ever-evolving technologies, it has also widened the schism between what I call
techno-optimism and techno-pessimism—the views that these innovations will in signifi
cant ways either save humanity (from disease, from external threats, from itself), or else
destroy it if not in body, then definitely in many of the ways that matter. This paper makes
a case for a third position—techno-incrementalism—that argues for caution, and for an
optimism tempered by care about empirical facts, consequences, and moral worries about
the ongoing re-making of our selves. It focuses on several specific (bio)technologies cur
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
rently at the forefront of both scientific and philosophical discourses, and offers a critique
of the often unearned and uncritical reception that they receive from professionals and
the lay public alike. I say “uncritical” not because I take techno-pessimism to be the prop
er attitude toward innovation—indeed, I take technological innovation to be necessary to
human development. However, I do believe that unbridled techno-optimism can also place
us at risk for innovating beyond our ability to fruitfully incorporate our new inventions in
to a well-lived human life, to contribute to the sense of human well-being. That is, we
ought to look, hard and carefully, before we leap.
Yet the desire for biomedical enhancement is a powerful one. Although a number of crit
ics have focused on our competitive, striving selves that demand technological advance
ment (Smith 2014; Kenwright 2018), I suggest a reason that is perhaps a bit more mod
est. Indeed, while the stories that human beings might tell each other, and themselves,
about why they want to be different—to be “better”—may differ, a common thought un
derwrites many of them: the wish to be more at home in the world and in one’s body; to
be more comfortable and capable navigating the numerous challenges with which life
presents us; to be able to cope with whatever befalls us that we could not predict; to sim
ply suffer less. And so we seek novel technological solutions for the individual and com
munal struggles inherent in finding ourselves in an increasingly complex, demanding, and
often unforgiving world that thrives on competition, hierarchies, and expediency while
making little allowance for the idiosyncrasies, abilities, and needs of diverse individuals
and groups. Least of all is the modern human allowed the time and space for self-reflec
tion, considerations of larger meanings, (inter)dependencies, for questions of personal
identity itself. But these things matter enormously. This paper addresses some of the rea
sons why.
Specifically, we ought to consider the impact of the nature, function, and role of evolving
technology on personal and group identities, and especially the identities of vulnerable
others. Difficult questions remain about how these technologies, while in many ways posi
tive, can also be sources of further othering of individuals and populations, and about
how the promise of human progress through enhancement can also lead to a deepening
human liminality. I begin by considering three unique areas of biotechnological innova
tion: First, I discuss developments in neuroscience, primarily research addressing memo
ry modification. Second, I examine the recent innovations in virtual reality environments.
Third, I focus on robotic assistance for the elderly. Finally, I suggest some ways in which
these technologies could be re-envisioned as less othering, more inclusive, and less dam
aging to our sense of who we are. While my arguments are not strictly directed against
the further growth of these technologies—in fact, I think that they have much to offer that
is an overall social good—they are precautionary in nature. But the direction in which we
ought to be heading as a technological species, I suggest, should be motivated as much
by considerations of powerful othering and identity-constituting effects of technological
innovations as by the adventurism of techno-evolution itself.
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
2. Manipulating Memories, Othering the Self
2.1 The Quest to Forget
Our memories define us. Our identities, our selves, our lives would be unrecognizable
without them. But when things go very wrong—in times of war, or after acts of violence,
and other physical and psychological wounds—these same memories can become not just
a burden, but a debilitating barrier, an ongoing trauma that haunts the sufferer daily. The
result is self-estrangement, as well as estrangement from others—a sense of irreparabili
ty of the self, the inescapability of one’s demons. In the face of such ongoing trauma, cog
nitive and behavioral therapy are not only too often ineffective, but lead to devastating re
lapses, often leaving the patient broken, rudderless, and hopeless about any possible re
lief (Bell 2008). It is then that we begin asking whether there is a way to avoid the suffer
ing, to lessen the trauma—in other words, to forget.
These memories of fear, love, hatred, despair—the powerful ones that tend to dominate
our self-concept—differ from implicit, procedural memories (the “how to” memories of
how to drive or how to tie one’s shoe, for example); or from the conscious, visual memo
ries of, say, appointments, or the words to a favorite song, which can be found in the hip
pocampus. The manipulation of these more powerful memories has been the response to
these memory-related fears and anxieties of the biomedical and neuroscientific communi
ties (Miller 2004; Glannon 2006; Donovan 2010; Gräff et al. 2014).
Memory manipulation is a general term for a number of developments in neurobiological
research (Evers 2007). Very generally, there are two kinds of memory manipulation tech
nologies that I address here: (1) neurobiological memory blunting, and (2) memory eras
ing, currently in various trials. I suggest that they both are grounded in the idea that
memory-driven, identity-constituting narratives, whether of individuals or groups, are ed
itable, revisable, and, importantly, now open to a kind of deliberate fictionalization not
available to us at any previous point in human history. I emphasize the “deliberate” in
part because fictionalization of both our memories and our narratives is quite common:
indeed, we forget, confuse, lie, change ourselves into the wronged protagonist rather
than the offending villain, and so on, all the time. However, it is one thing to forget—be
cause forgetting is what human beings do all the time—and quite another to deliberately
blunt or remove unwanted memories in a way that is similar to the moral difference be
tween deliberately lying (while still knowing the truth) and remembering incorrectly. I
thus suggest that it makes a moral and political difference when these practices of memo
ry manipulation are granted the normative imprimatur of powerful biomedical institu
tions. And as current research has taken us from a place of wondering about the Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry et al. 2004) to a place of its reification, the phe
nomenon of memory modification is precisely the sort of bio-adventurism that calls atten
tion to itself as a paradigm-changer, as something that alters the conditions of possibility
of how we conceive of the world and of ourselves.
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
Before proceeding any further, a few disclaimers: My note of caution about memory ma
nipulation is not in any way intended to ignore, or set aside, the very real suffering of
those with PTSD and related conditions, nor is it to suggest that research that tampers
with the contents of, and access to, our memories needs be stopped. My argument is sim
ply that we proceed carefully, incrementally, and, most importantly, that we pause just
enough to ask the necessary questions about the relationship between memory tampering
and personal identity and other worries about where the biomedical and the moral tend
to intersect. And although I will set aside questions about the importance of collective
memory—this complicated issue deserves its own separate treatment and is a bit outside
of the scope of this paper—I will focus on worries about how memory manipulation might
affect our concept of who we are, and thus of the moral and political significance of our
personal identities.
So, what specifically is meant by memory manipulation? Primarily, it is about two things;
attenuating the relationship between our emotions and our memories (thus avoiding the
traumatizing effects of conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder; PTSD), and, more
radically, removing troubling memories altogether. The idea of a manufactured lacunar
amnesia (the loss of memory about one specific event) unites both of these possibilities,
as it leaves a gap in one’s memory.
Some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time
they're activated. Studies on rats suggest that if you block a crucial chemical
process during the execution of a learned behavior—pushing a lever to get food,
for instance—the learned behavior disappears. The rat stops remembering. Theo
retically, if you could block that chemical reaction in a human brain while trigger
ing a specific memory, you could make a targeted erasure. Think of a dreadful
fight with your girlfriend while blocking that chemical reaction, and zap! The
memory's gone (Chadwick 2004).
Thus, two unique processes of memory modification are currently being investigated:
First, research has demonstrated that the off-label use of the beta-blocker propranolol, if
taken a short time after a traumatic event, can reduce the intensity of a given memory
and the subsequent risk of PTSD. It attenuates one’s emotional reaction to unwanted, dif
ficult memories in ways that make living with those memories more bearable without
erasing them altogether. When we recall a long-term memory, the memory is un-written
and re-written—this process is reconsolidation. Propranolol administered during recon
solidation attenuated the connection between the memory and the emotional reaction to
the memory (Parens 2010; Chandler et al. 2013).
Second, researchers in Brooklyn’s SUNY Downstate Medical Center (and at other re
search facilities) have recently delivered a single dose of an experimental drug to that
part of the brain which deals with specific memories, emotions, motor skills, and spatial
relations, blocking the activity of a substance that is required for the brain to retain what
it has learned. And although the experiment has only been attempted using animals, this
research might very well work on people. (Carey 2009). More recently, new approaches to
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
total bad memory blocking are being developed in ways that invoke the plasticity of the
brain—its ability to forget a fear reaction, and thus a fearful memory, in response to ex
ternal rearranging of a given set of neural connections:
[In] a 2014 study … a team from RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics
were able to change bad memories to good in male mice. Using a technique called
optogenetics, in which genetically encoded, light-responsive proteins are inserted
into cells, the scientists were able to pinpoint where a mouse's negative memory
of a shock to the foot was formed, in the neural circuitry that connects the dentate
gyrus in the hippocampus to the amygdala. The researchers then manipulated
those neurons with lasers. Each time the mice ventured to a certain part of their
enclosure, the negative memory was reactivated, and they quickly learned to fear
the area.
The male mice were then allowed to frolic with female mice, while the same neu
rons were tapped, helping to switch their messages from one of pain to one of
pleasure. The next time the male mice ventured into the chamber, their fear reac
tions had vanished (Lu 2015).
In an earlier study that worked to identify the neurons supporting a particular memory,
“the resulting memory loss was robust and persistent, which suggests that the memory
was permanently erased. These results establish a causal link between a specific neu
ronal subpopulation and memory expression, thereby identifying critical neurons within
the memory trace” (Han, Kushner, Yiu et al. 2009).
Quite certainly, this is biomedical and neuroscientific progress which offers some hope
for those caught in the trap of PTSD and related traumatic conditions. What is less cer
tain is whether we have taken the time and care to examine some of the more problemat
ic aspects of memory manipulation. I now turn to a brief consideration of this worry.
2.2 Deliberate Forgetting as Othering
We often want to control our memories—sometimes badly enough to change them. Even
before biomedical science has revealed possibilities for doing so, we have been fantasiz
ing how it might take place. In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel Barish
is treated by Dr. Mierzwiak, the head of a local memory erasure clinic, Lacuna Inc., in his
attempt to erase not only a bad break-up, but also the entire existence of his ex-lover,
Clementine Kruczynski, after finding out that she had done the same to him. As the proce
dure progresses, Joel begins to regret his decision, but by that time, it is too late, and
Clementine fades from his memory.
In Paul Verhoeven’s (Schwarzenegger et al. 2001) film Total Recall (a loose adaptation of
Philip K. Dick’s short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), it is the year
2084, and Douglas Quaid, a seemingly happily married man, is beset by recurring dreams
about Mars, where he has never been, and a woman he has never seen. Deciding that he
needs a “vacation” from his life as a construction worker, he visits Rekall, a company
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
which specializes in selling imaginary vacations by implanting false memories, and pur
chases a fantasy vacation on Mars, where he will instead be a spy. However, the Rekall
procedure seems to unlock some part of his psyche that belies his notions of himself as an
ordinary family man, and reveals that, indeed, he is not who he thinks he is at all. In fact,
Quaid comes to find out that the past eight years of what he has taken to be his “real life”
are nothing but more inserted false memories, and he himself is actually a secret double
agent named Hauser. In this way, Douglas Quaid’s biographical identity and his sense of
personal meaning are not just broken—he literally does not know who, what, or why he is.
In both cases, the intuition that I am after here is this: although we are certainly both
ered by voluntary memory modification undertaken for what some might consider frivo
lous reasons, such as a bad love affair, and while we are bothered by Rekall-style third-
party machinations for nefarious purposes, we might be most bothered by the freedom,
the choice, to alter one’s memory altogether. I want to offer two reasons to be a bit suspi
cious of memory manipulation: first, a potential for othering the self; second, a potential
for othering of others. Before turning to these two claims, however, a brief summary of
the memory modification debate thus far.
Ever since propranolol began to gain some popularity in treating PTSD and other memo
ry-implicating disorders, theorists from a number of disciplines have disagreed about its
technical and moral merits. Some, like the President’s Council on Bioethics, have viewed
this new technology as ethically worrisome—something akin to Homer’s lotus flowers,
which made Odysseus’s men forget everything they ever knew and, indeed, made them
somewhat less human (President’s Council on Bioethics and Kass 2003). Others worried
about the overmedicalization of trauma—of medicalizing memories themselves (Hurley
2007). Still others took the opposing view and suggested that “as long as individuals us
ing MMTs [memory modifying technologies] do not harm others and themselves [… ]and
as long as there is no prima facie duty to retain particular memories, it is up to individu
als to determine the permissibility of particular uses of MMTs.” (Liao and Sandberg 2008,
96). Finally, arguments were voiced, claiming that the approach to “general” trauma, and
traumatic memories, did not take sufficient account of the idiosyncrasies of particular cir
cumstances (such as, for example, memories of sexual assault versus memories of war).
Any criticism or support of memory modifying technologies, these arguments noted,
needs to be tested in specific cases before we are able to have any confidence in our con
clusions about their moral merit (Chandler, Mogyoros, Rubio, and Racine 2013).
So who is right? I now return to my two objections to memory modification via deliberate
forgetting: the othering of oneself and the othering of others. My concerns about the oth
ering of the self echo those of David Wasserman, who focused on the break with our past
—and, in fundamental ways, with our identities—that such technologies might make pos
sible (Wasserman 2004). But how—and why?
The answer has something to do with how our selves are constituted by examining the re
lation of memory to identity. If we assume for a moment a narrative view of personal iden
tity (Lindemann 2001; Charon et al. 2002; Gotlib 2014), then first, second, and third-per
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
sonal stories told by and about us, create this idea of who we are, what we can do (and
why), to what we are entitled, what is expected of us, and so on. As Marya Schechtman
notes, this narrative identity includes “a sequential listing of life events [and] a story of
how the events in one’s history lead to other events in that history” (Schechtman 2007,
160). In other words, one’s life is not an episodic one—it is not constituted by atomistic,
unrelated events—but is diachronic, requiring narrative explanations of how its events,
thoughts, actions, and so on are connected to each other, and to a coherent version of a
self (Gotlib 2014). For this, one requires memories. Moreover, “having a narrative is nec
essary for engaging in certain sorts of complex, person-specific activities…for instance
autonomy, moral agency, prudential reasoning, or other kinds of higher-order
capacities” (Schechtman 2007, 159). For this, too, we need access not only to our roles in
our life’s events, but a way to connect event-specific knowledge to the rest of our lives in
a way that creates not only sense, but meaning—thus memories, again.
Given this sketch of a narratively-conceived notion of personal identity, Wasserman’s wor
ry about what I call the othering of the self becomes clear. When we mute, or erase com
pletely, our memories, we might very well remove the pain of PTSD and other traumas.
But what we also might do is lose the diachronic connection with ourselves, with the nar
ratives of our own lives. He asks:
Will dulling the emotions associated with memory encourage a cavalier attitude
towards our own pasts? Would anesthetizing ourselves to the recall of such memo
ries make us more or less whole? (Wasserman 2004, 18)
But the worry does not end with the loss of our emotional connection to our past selves.
In choosing to fictionalize who we are by removing the unwanted or feared parts of our
life’s narrative, we might very well create one with more narrative appeal, one which we
endorse because it offers the version of ourselves that we prefer over the one that actual
ly exists. It might be a self that never was assaulted, never fought in a war, never experi
enced a painful break-up, never became seriously ill. It very well might be a self which
sounds like a character we admire—not Lady Macbeth, unable to wash away her crimes,
not someone who found herself choosing a less unbearable choice out of untenable possi
bilities, but someone who did the right thing, who triumphed. Or else someone who did
not have to face such choices, and their consequences, at all. Wasserman notes that
[t]he availability of memory-altering drugs will, so to speak, shift the balance of
power in our extended temporal relations to ourselves ever more to the present
and future. It will allow us to break or weaken the grip of the past, while leaving
us in the present with the uneasy awareness that our capacity to shape ourselves
by what we chose to do, experience, and remember is tentative and indefinitely re
visable. We will have more freedom to re-invent ourselves, but less security about
who we are, or will end up being (Wasserman 2004, 18).
In other words, while we might gain the freedom to narrate alternative, non-traumatized
versions of ourselves into reality, we might also create epistemically spectral selves that
bear very little resemblance to either our actual phenomenologies, or to versions of our
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
selves known to others. Unlike the more quotidian ways in which we, deliberately as well
as without intending to, forget, reinterpret, and revise our narratives about who we are,
this medicalized forgetting is less about creating a more appealing version of ourselves,
and more about constructing a self that is less burdened by all that it does not wish to re
call. Yet regardless of the success of these more quotidian narrative manipulations, it
seems plausible that unless we are incredibly skilled at self-deception, some part of us
will still be the bearer of a more honest story of what took place, despite our own inner
protestations. But medically-mediated forgetting seems different: it not only allows the
kind of self-fictionalizing that worries Wasserman, but it does so without leaving the kinds
of traces of the deliberately-forgotten versions of ourselves that, without such interven
tions, might still remind us about those unwanted, yet, vital, selves. And so we will re
main on shifting sands, with neither others, nor ourselves, knowing whether this new
identity before us has anything like a diachronic connection to the past, whether it can
tell a coherent story of who it is—or whether it is an other, a selected character sketch,
awaiting yet further revision.
As for the othering of others, Elisa Hurley, correctly, worries about
cut[ting] off access to the emotions experienced at the time of trauma, access that
might be important for holding oneself and others accountable for moral wrongdo
ing (Hurley 2007, 36).
While the clear cases of not desiring criminals to be able to forget their wrongdoing are
more obvious, what is less immediately evident, but just as important, is that we do not
want to lose the kind of moral language, a moral vocabulary, among ourselves, that allows
us to regret bad things that we, and others, have done. Or even perhaps to be bothered,
to feel guilt—to remain moved—by failed relationships, mistakes, missteps, and so on. We
need bad memories, in other words, not just to stay connected to ourselves, but to each
other—empathetically, compassionately, fully acknowledging that our lives are comprised
to a great extent not of what we choose to do, but of what happens to us. To see each oth
er not just as choosing agents (who choose, among other things, what they desire to re
member), but as human beings who must cope with circumstances, accidents, bad
(moral) luck, unfortunate choices, and so on. Our traumatic, unwanted memories keep us
in the same moral universe, working with the same flawed moral understandings of our
world and of each other. The alternative—the chosen forgetting, the selective dampened
memories—not only have the capacity to erase those bonds, but quite literally, like Eter
nal Sunshine’s Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski, to mutually write others out of our
lives and re-cast them as strangers to whom we have never made ourselves vulnerable.
What I mean is this: by deliberately forgetting, I am rewriting not only the story of my
life, but the story of all those other lives whose social, political, and personal realities
have intersected with my own in ways that mattered to them. But because my actions are
exclusively self-regarding, these others, as they become epistemically vague, also grow
increasingly morally-insignificant—I have chosen to write them out. And thus, the shared
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(Bio)technology, Identity, and the Other
moral universe in which we move through each other’s identity-constituting stories
shrinks—as do our capacities for mutual moral, political, and other undertakings.
But of course, I am arguing for techno-incrementalism, and against techno-optimism—not
for a kind of a neo-Luddite avoidance of technological innovation. My worries about the
othering of the self and of others must be balanced against concerns about human flour
ishing, which PTSD and other responses to traumatic experiences often make very chal
lenging, if not impossible. To force an assault survivor to remain locked up with her debil
itating memories, or to leave a veteran with his psychological wounds, would not only be
a kind of political othering in the sense of abandoning the vulnerable as socially unwant
ed and uncared-for outcasts—it would clearly also be cruel. There are cases, many of
them, where worries about memory modification will be overruled by the possibilities for
healthier, more fulfilling, more endurable, lives. Thus what my call for techno-incremen
talism encourages is a kind of a balancing act between two ambiguities—between cases
where memory modification would be potentially destructive, and those where it offers a
glimmer of hope. But we must consider the consequences before we leap, not just for the
individual patient, but for all those who might be affected by the choice to forget—and
that number, it seems to me, is significant enough to give us pause.
3. Avatars, Virtual Spaces, and Being “Other
wise”
In choosing to address virtual reality as a kind of (bio)technology, I am making two
claims: first, that these technologies are becoming intimately connected with human em
bodiment; second, that they are powerful shapers of the social relations that shape this
embodiment. My focus is both on virtual reality more generally, and on a specific applica
tion of virtual spaces and avatars called Second Life (hereinafter SL). I must note that al
though virtual reality is gaining in popularity, SL is not. My reasons for addressing SL
have more to do with its initial promise and its resulting failures, for in those failures, we
can glimpse some of the reasons for worries about virtual technologies as means of
(bio)enhancement that is meant to allow human beings to experience, and perhaps even
understand, life in a way that is not otherwise possible. I begin by addressing the broader
uses, and narratives about, virtual reality.
3.1 Virtual Reality as “Empathy Machine”
What I mean by “virtual reality” (VR) is a kind of phenomenological experience, mediated
by technologies that give the user the illusion of being in, and engaging with, environ
ments that range from the ordinary to the unusual to the imagined to the seemingly im
possible. These spaces, accessed through VR glasses or other technology that the user
usually wears over his or her eyes, have offered entertainment, “travel” to distant places,
and, as Chris Milk, founder and CEO of the VR company Within, argued in his 2015 TED
talk, the “ultimate empathy machine” (Kang 2017).
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What he meant was echoed in several recent efforts to employ VR technologies as a
means of helping people (mostly from the Global North) empathize with those situated
differently from themselves by virtually “experiencing” what it is like to be otherwise. For
example, in a recent New York City fundraiser by the International Rescue Committee,
headsets offered experiences of a refugee camp in Lebanon (Bloom 2017). Stanford Uni
versity VR simulations attempt to offer the experience of getting evicted and becoming a
homeless, disabled, schizophrenic (Bloom 2017). Moreover,
Clouds Over Sidra, the U.N.’s first virtual reality documentary, follows a young
Syrian refugee named Sidra who lives in a refugee camp in Jordan [ … ]The user is
able to look out across the desert in all directions, up to the sun, and down to the
sand below her. If the user looks directly down, she doesn’t see her feet or the
base of the camera, but a collection of footprints, whose tracks span across the
desert around her. She has no feet in this world, no physical form at all, but the
marks of multiple feet are beneath her. Disembodied, she occupies the point at
which all the footprints meet (Hamilton 2017).
In promoting the “transformative” effects of VR experiences, Mark Zuckerberg, using an
Oculus Rift and Facebook’s virtual reality platform, Facebook Spaces, “traveled” to,
among other places, Puerto Rico after the destruction of Hurricane Maria, using the pur
ported immediacy of the experience to argue for aid relief (Kastrenakes 2017). Building
on the promises of phenomenological access to the other (or the “othered”), the Frontline
VR documentary “After Solitary” (Mucciolo and Herrman 2017) focused on the life of Ken
ny Moore, who was found guilty of aggravated assault, burglary, and theft as a teenager,
and spent twenty years in and out of prison—five of them in solitary confinement (Muccio
lo and Herrman 2017). The viewer is sometimes left alone in the cell, her Oculus Rift at
tempting to place her in the middle of the suffering that is part and parcel of the carceral
experience, and, in the end, elicit something like empathy. Indeed, Frontline, in advertis
ing the program, asks: “What's it really like to be locked up in solitary
confinement?” (Kang 2017). But has the “empathy machine” experiment worked? Has vir
tual reality, in its emerging guises, served as not simply a means of new entertainment,
but what its proponents argued was its greater purpose?
Not so far—or, at least not to any extent where the VR-as-access-to-the-other claim can be
a justification for its continual development. At best, VR might generate certain sympa
thies—but this is far from being the empathy-generator that its proponents have suggest
ed (Ramirez 2018), and can greatly depend on the extent to which individuals already
identify with those whose experiences or persons the VR technology is attempting to reify
(Avenanti et al. 2010). While I think that it is not a dispositive argument against the fur
ther development of VR—after all, entertainment is an important part of the human expe
rience, and a number of VR creators are genuinely interested in its more altruistic uses—I
would argue that no clever technological tools can force empathy. In other words, one
cannot make another care against their will.
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