Voices of VR

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a rousing speech at the World Economic Forum on January 20, 2026 about the rupture of the rules-based order of the globalized economy, and he emphasized the need to build new coalitions to sustain the pressure coming from the United States' emerging authoritarianism. Carney said, “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” Just as globalized, economic integrations are being weaponized by the United States, then Big Tech's integrations woven throughout our lives will continue to become the source of our own subordination, especially as surveillance capitalism heads towards its logical conclusion of an all-pervasive, AI Big Brother, perhaps eventually explicitly tied into authoritarian governments. The AI Big Brother has already started within the context of private companies, but with the outdated Third-Party doctrine of the Fourth Amendment, then any data given to a third party has "no legitimate 'expectation of privacy'." From UNITED STATES v. MILLER (1976): "The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities." So the US government can request almost any data shared with a third party without a warrant, and given Big Tech's cozy relationship to a democratically-backsliding US government, then who knows what kinds of backroom deals are being made to automate data sharing. We're already in an era where almost all data given to a third party is not considered to be private, and you can start to see some early indications for how this can go wrong in Taylor Lorenz's interview with 404 Media's Joe Cox about ICE's surveillance technologies. It seems likely that we are entering into the very early phases of Orwell's worst nightmare of a 1984 surveillance state powered by Big Tech's AI. In this op-ed podcast episode, I connect some dots between Carney’s Davos speech about the hegemonic forces in the geopolitical sphere and the parallels with Big Tech's push towards "contextually aware-AI," which is just an always-on AI that is surveillance capitalism on steroids. Carney's speech provides a lot of insights for how Canada is navigating this new reality where the rules-based order on the International stage seems to be dissolving. One of his deepest insights is to simply name the truth, and to describe precisely what is happening. He refers to a powerful story from Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless where shopkeepers eventually "took their [propaganda] signs down" during communist rule after they were no longer willing to live within a lie. Carney says: "The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down." Taking down metaphoric signs breaks the spell of the collective performative ritual that sustains the power of an authoritarian regime. Taking a sign down is also the embodiment of the first lesson of Timothy Synder's On Tyranny, which is "Do Not Obey in Advance." This lesson is certainly easier said than done, and I've been surprised how pervasive and powerful the chilling effects to remain silent can be. I find myself self-censoring, going dark on social media, and just generally not speaking the full truth as I see it. So this episode is a step in that direction of trying to name things as I see them, but also drawing the parallels between these broader political contexts and how they're collapsing into the technological contexts.

On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, Ian Hamilton announced on Bluesky that "I've been fired from UploadVR." He was the editor in chief at UploadVR, and he wrote a Substack post titled "Ian is Typing" on January 30th detailing how is co-workers were pushing to do a test of a "clearly disclosed AI author for UploadVR," and that he had three specific concerns that it be brief, for the ability for readers to turn off and hide all AI-authored posts, and for human freelancers to have the right of first refusal. Hamilton claims to have tried to raise these concerns in the context of Slack, but that the experiment was going to proceed regardless. He writes, "Unable to shift the direction of my colleagues and out of options to affect what was coming, I stepped out of Slack and sent a final email to them on Wednesday morning with a number of my contacts in the industry copied, raising some of these concerns. Not long after, I was called by my boss and fired." I spoke with Hamilton last Friday after his Substack post in order to get more context that led to his departure. Hamilton claims that UploadVR Editor & Developer David Heaney and UploadVR's Operations Manager Kyle Riesenbeck were behind the push to test this clearly disclosed AI author on UploadVR, and that ultimately the proposed test was a business decision made by Riesenbeck. It was a decision that Hamilton ultimately disagreed with, and he cites it as the primary factor that led to behavior that ultimately led to his firing. (UPDATE Feb 5, 2026: It is worth noting here that UploadVR has yet to run this AI bot author test, but that it was the proposed test that was the catalyst for Hamilton’s behavior). The specific reasons and circumstances around Hamilton's firing are publicly disputed by Heaney, who reacted on Twitter after Hamilton's Substack post went live by saying, "It is indeed only one side of the story. And an incomplete telling of it, with key omissions and wording choices that serve to paint a misleading picture." In another post Heaney says, "I can't get into it more at this point for obvious reasons, but don't believe everything you read, especially a single side of a complex story." I asked Hamilton for his reaction to Heaney's claims that he's being misleading during our interview, and he did provide more context in our conversation that lead up to his firing. Ultimately, it does sounds like the proposed AI bot author test was the primary catalyst for Hamilton, and that this disagreement may have led to other behaviors and reactions that could also be reasonably cited for why he was fired. UploadVR may have a differing opinions as to what happened, but no one from UploadVR has made public comments beyond what Heaney has said on Twitter. I have extended invitations to both Riesenbeck or Heaney to come onto the podcast for a broader discussion about AI, but nothing has been confirmed by the time of publication. My Personal Take on AI: Technically, Philosophically, Legally, and Culturally Public discourse around AI has split into a binary of Pro-AI vs Anti-AI, and while my personal views can not be easily collapsed into one side of the other, I'd usually take the Anti-AI side of a debate if given the opportunity. I do think some form of AI is here to stay, and will be around for a long time, but that right now there is a lot of hype and deluded thinking on the topic. I see AI as a technology that consolidates wealth and power, and so a primary question worth asking is “Whose power and wealth is being consolidated?” Karen Hao's The Empire of AI elaborates on how the past patterns of colonialism are replaying out within the context of data and the field of AI, as well as how scaling with more compute power has been the primary mode of innovation in AI, and that Gary Marcus has been pushing against the "Scale is All You Need" theory for many years now. Technically speaking, I'm more of a skeptic in the short-term around LLMs along the lines of Stocha...

I interviewed Andrew M. Davis about his forthcoming book titled Whitehead's Universe: A Prismatic Introduction on Thursday, December 4, 2025. It's absolutely the best introduction to Alfred North Whitehead's work in Process Philosophy, and I can't recommend it enough. The worst part is that it isn't set to release until sometime next year, but you can get an early look at some drafts if you sign up with some of Davis' upcoming Whitehead's Universe courses that are being offered in January and February 2026. Whitehead's Process Philosophy centers the human experience at the center of it's philosophy, and therefore focuses on the dynamic flux and flow of experience as we inherit past memories, anticipate the future, decide what actions to take moment to moment, and synthesize it all through our feelings which help to solidify our core memories through the peak emotional experiences of our lives. Davis helps us navigate through Whitehead's neologisms, which are attempting to rewire our brain to think about the nature of reality in a completely new and different way. The subject-predicate and noun-emphasized object-oriented structure of the English isn't doing us any favors, but thankfully the immersive experiences that are offered through immersive art and entertainment is very much oriented into the dynamic flux of our experience, through what is theorized as presence theory in virtual reality. I have my own elemental theory of presence, and in this conversation with Davis I discovered that there's a lot of resonance with how Whitehead is reconceptualizing the nature of reality into a more verb-based event ontology. This is my fifth deep dive on Process Philosophy, and so be sure to check out my other conversations here: #965: Primer on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as a Paradigm Shift & Foundation for Experiential Design #1147: Thirteen Philosophers on the Problem of Opposites: Grant Maxwell’s Integration & Difference Book & Archetypal Approaches to Character #1183: From Kant to an Organic View of Reality: Scaffolding a Process-Relational Paradigm Shift with Whitehead Scholar Matt Segall #1568: A Process-Relational Philosophy View on AI, Intelligence, & Consciousness with Matt Segall #1708: How Process Philosophy Centers Experience. A Prismatic Tour of “Whitehead’s Universe” by Andrew M. Davis This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Karim Ben Khelifa about In 36,000 Ways on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Here are the 26 episodes and more than 24 hours of coverage from my IDFA DocLab 2025 coverage: #1682: Preview of IDFA DocLab's Selection of "Perception Art" & Immersive Stories #1683: "Feedback VR Antifuturist Musical" Wins Immersive Non-Fiction Award at IDFA DocLab 2025 #1684: Playable Essay “individualism in the dead-internet age” Recaps Enshittification Against Indie Devs #1685: Immersive Liner Notes of Hip-Hop Album "AÜTO/MÖTOR" Uses three.js & HTML 1.0 Aesthetics #1686: 15 Years of Hand-Written Letters about the Internet in "Life Needs Internet 2010–2025" Installation #1687: Text-Based Adventure Theatrical Performance "MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery" #1688: Hacking Gamer Hardware and Stereotypes in "Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2" #1689: Making Post-Human Babies in "IVF-X" to Catalyze Philosophical Reflections on Reproduction #1690: Asking Philosophical Questions on AI in "The Oracle: Ritual for the Future" with Poetic Immersive Performance #1691: A Call for Human Friction Over AI Slop in "Deep Soup" Participatory Film Based on "Designing Friction" Manifesto #1692: Playful Remixing of Scanned Animal Body Parts in "We Are Dead Animals" #1693: A Survey of the Indie Immersive Dome Community Trends with "The Rift" Directors & 4Pi Productions #1694: Reimagining Amsterdam's Red Light District in "Unimaginable Red" Open World Game #1695: "Another Place" Takes a Liminal Architectural Stroll into Memories of Another Time and Place #1696: Speculative Architecture Meets the Immersive Dome in Sergey Prokofyev's "Eternal Habitat" #1697: Can Immersive Art Revitalize Civic Engagement? Netherlands CIIIC Funds "Shared Reality" Initiative #1698: Immersive Exhibition Lessons Learned from Undershed's First Year with Amy Rose #1699: Announcing "The Institute of Immersive Perservation" with Avinash Changa & His XR Virtual Machine Wizardry #1700: Update on Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative & Toolkits from MIT Open DocLab #1701: Public Art Installation "Nothing to See Here" Uses Perception Art to Challenge Our Notions of Reality #1702: "Coded Black" Creates Experiential Black History by Combining Horror Genres with Open World Exploration #1703: "Reality Looks Back" Uses Quantum Possibility Metaphors & Gaussian Splats to Challenge Notions of Reality #1704: "Lesbian Simulator" is an Interactive VR Narrative Masterclass Balancing Levity, Pride, & Naming of Homophobic Threats #1705: The Art of Designing Emergent Social Dynamics with Ontroerend Goed's "Handle with Care" #1706: Using Immersive Journalism to Document Genocide in Gaza with "Under the Same Sky" #1707: War Journalist Turns to Immersive Art to Shatter Our Numbness Through Feeling. "In 36,000 Ways" is a Revelatory Embodied Poem by Karim Ben Khelifa This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Khalil Ashawi, Sami Sultan, & Hail Khalaf about Under the Same Sky on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Alexander Devriendt about Handle with Care on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Iris van der Meule about Lesbian Simulator on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Anne Jeppesen & Omid Zarei about Reality Looks Back on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Maisha Wester about Coded Black on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Celine Daemen about Nothing to See Here on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Sarah Wolozin, Scarlett Kim, Julia Scott-Stevenson about MIT Open DocLab's Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Avinash Changa about The Institute of Immersive Perservation on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Amy Rose about first year of the Undershed at the Watershed on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Martijn de Waal about revitalizing civic engagement through immersive art on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Sergey Prokofyev about Eternal Habitat on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Domenico Singha Pedroli about Another Place on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Vitor Freire & Monique Grimord about Unimaginable Red on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Janire Najera & Matthew Wright about The Rift on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Maarten Isaak de Heer about We Are Dead Animals on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters about Deep Soup on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. You can also check out their Designing Friction Manifesto. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality