Charles T. Rubin in The New Atlantis: 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.
More here.
