Sacasas describes the concept of “reality privilege” to whic...

Sacasas describes the concept of “reality privilege” to which Andreessen’s statement responds: an acknowledgement of a massive and unbridgeable gap between the fortunes of the world’s elites—who live in rich, stimulating real-world environments—and the masses, for whom online life will presumably be “immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.” Surprisingly, the preferred solution to this rift isn’t to undertake the hard work of improving reality itself, or even just making it more user-friendly, but instead an absurd, defeatist pronouncement that reality stubbornly refuses to “get good” and a subsequent attempt to reframe escapism as a form of primary existence—to burrow deeper into abstraction.

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www.joshbeckman.org/notes/230954047