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How was it that, in the mid-2010s, virtual reality came to be seen by some as a technology that could repair the ever deepening rifts in social reality? The answer to this question lies in Los Angeles, where a vibrant community of storytellers and innovators posited that VR could bring about a better world by leveraging embodied experience as a way of knowing – and empathizing with – another. Such VR experiences simultaneously validated different realities while suggesting that, in forging understanding across difference, a common reality could be re-established. This talk draws from In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke 2024), focusing on VR and the community that celebrated its “good” potentials as a prism through which larger questions about shifts in reality can be examined. “The unreal” is proposed as a way to think about reality’s fracturing, a condition that those in LA’s liberal, creative class felt acutely in the wake of #MeToo and amidst the barrage of Trump’s first presidency. While VR may no longer be the darling emerging technology, this recent historical example contains ample cautions as AI fills the slot VR had occupied and the cultural and political salience of Trumpism is as deafening as ever.

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