(More) Drivers for Dreams

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 7 Part 2

I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

Last week I started on Dator’s 7th chapter, charting the end of the written word’s supremacy and the role of advertising, credit cards, World’s Fairs, and amusement parks in bringing this about. However, Dator has 5 more drivers to go, and I wanted to evaluate his claims and bring some data into the conversation.

Note: this may be a bit longer than your email can handle so I recommend clicking through to the web article.

Sports

Dator acknowledges that play is a primal human activity, and that organized athletic play (sports) are widespread in ancient societies, mostly as adjuncts to military training. Dator points out that the mass popularity of sports in modern times lines up closely with industrialization, with higher disposable income, more free time, and modern advertising all allowing more time and money to be funneled to the players and leagues. It’s hard to find good data on trends in sports viewership over the last 20 years (let me know if you find some), possibly due to fragmentation of options for viewing, so I’ll just make an observation: nowhere have data and statistics made deeper inroads into public consciousness than in sports, at least for American discrete-event sports like baseball and football, so there’s this weird Information Society overlay on the whole conversation.

Another use for all those statistics: sports gambling has, as you have probably noticed, grown rapidly in the years since PASPA was overturned. This has become a way for people to emotionally invest more deeply in the outcomes of these events, making it a kind of immersion.

Rolf Jensen describes all this connection to sports (again, in 1999) as “emotional jogging” (p. 183) — exercise for our emotions where we feel things deeply but without serious stakes¹. Sports teams sell emotions, and this is how even the Cubs have devoted fans; if they were a car or dishwasher company, they would have gone out of business decades ago.

I’ll also take a moment to call out (and hat tip to

Tim Morgan

for pointing this out to me) that the kayfabe in professional wrestling, where the storylines, characters, rivalries, etc, are presented as real and taken seriously (even when they’re ridiculous) dates back maybe 90 years and is a great example of the Dream Society “inauthentic authenticity” Tim and I discussed earlier in this series.

Electronic Games and War

Dator recounts his family war stories and his own experience living and raising kids through the invention and evolution of video games. His linking of these ideas as a driver for the Dream society has a few interconnecting pieces. First, Americans war deaths are much rarer than they used to be, so each one is its own tragedy².

Sorry, I don’t have the energy to normalize this data, but remember that since WWII the population has nearly tripled, and the number serving in the military has decreased from something like 9% (with conscription) to less than 1%. War is something that happens somewhere else to people we don’t know, and we only see it through our screens.

Next, video games in war and war-adjacent categories are a big deal. Note that in this genre overview, shooters are in 1st place, and battle royale and strategy games are #4 and #5.

Last, the increasing graphical quality of war video games means they are increasingly indistinguishable from real war, making disinformation easy to spread. This is adjacent to the fact that wars increasingly have video game-like elements: more of the work is shifting to the information war online, and the shift to drone warfare is making the two virtually indistinguishable, changing the relationships Americans have with the idea of war:

The war in Ukraine is basically a video game, from this Newsweek article.

This is the only driver in this week’s article that Hines has much to say about in ConsumerShift. He describes how improved connectivity, including the ability to sense a user’s location, has created an increasing blend of the real and virtual worlds. The recent attempts to build a metaverse may have crashed pretty hard, but things like the Fortnite Holocaust Museum³, bringing content to where people already want to be, seem more sustainable.

Jensen, for his part, misses the huge coming (in 1999) expansion in the role of video games in modern life. He mentions them only as gifts for children, a way to show love and care in a society that is increasingly commodifying both.

Drugs

Dator spends just two paragraphs on consciousness-altering chemicals. His first point is that both fermenting alcohol and ingesting hallucinogens are very old activities, and both serve to loosen up our perception of the real world to be more like dreams⁴. Modern chemistry has allowed us to isolate/synthesize these compounds and make new ones. He also notes that drugs are used in modern society both to amplify dream society activities, such as people taking ecstasy at a rave, and to escape from society (or life itself, intentionally or no).

I don’t know why most of the charts I can find are from a decade ago, but there are lots of signals that the rate and acceptance of drug use since the turn of the millennium is up⁵.

Marijuana is now used daily or nearly so by more people than alcohol (though alcohol use is up too, more than population growth alone):

From an article by Caulkins in the journal Addiction.

We’re also in the middle of a research/interest/experimentation boom with regard to psychedelics, the Dreamiest drugs of them all:

From a paper by Meling et al worrying about hype.

Cybersex

Thankfully no personal stories from Dator in this section, other than his sharing in 1972 of a made-up Japanese research project⁶ to create fully immersive tele-sex between individuals (and via recordings of especially excellent sessions). He expresses that AI (and presumably he would include, though he never mentions the self-explanatory term, teledildonics) have certainly progressed quite a bit and largely in the direction expected, but he admits some surprise at the explosive growth of pornography since the dawn of the internet.

The numbers for the growth of pornography are a pain to find, especially if you try to avoid the seedier alleys of cyberspace. However, here’s a few things: Pornhub had more visitors per minute in 2019 (80,000) than the total number of copies of the first issue of Playboy (54,000); OnlyFans revenue has been growing strongly⁷; people claim that 12% of the internet is pornography; etc.

Meanwhile, AI companions are in the early stages, but at the moment it seems like having a person with no rights or ability to leave that you control in order to extract romantic/sexual validation from might be bad actually? Meanwhile, marriage rated continue to drop, but this has been going on for most of a century (though people marrying their AI lovers is new).

Chart from USA Facts

So the overall story is that sex is more and more a performance, the “inauthentic authenticity” of pop stars and parasocial relationships with OnlyFans creators and the simulation of AI romance, and turning away from the actual messy human long-term relationships that have functioned as “people-growing machines”. This area in particular seems like it might radically reshape what it means to be human.

Space

Last (is anyone still reading?) Dator talks about how the idea of settling space has been part of our dreams for many decades, and generations have been disappointed with the slow progress we’ve made. Dator talks about his decades as a lecturer at the International Space University, and his surprise that, although we’ve used space exploration as an anchor for future hope/direction for a long time, almost no work has gone into deciding what kinds of transformations both to governance structures and to humans themselves would make us fit for space⁸. Despite the advent of space tourism, this driver is still in the very early stages, serving as something that’s always just over the horizon.

1. The rise in gambling suggests that those boundaries are failing.

2. The same thing happened to children in the US: mortality fell by 98% over the last 200 years and a child dying now means something went “wrong”.

3. Typing those three words in order makes me feel so old, like my finger bones are becoming more brittle with every tap on the keyboard.

4. Hey it seems I already wrote a fever-dream paragraph adjacent to this very idea.

5. I’m guessing, though, that Oregon’s failed experiment at decriminalization has tempered public opinion at least a little.

6. Apparently not by him though? This is a piece of history with very little digital footprint.

7. This seems connected to the ideas I mentioned in chapter 6: the internet mechanized distribution of pornography (or impersonal sex more broadly), then OnlyFans professionalized it (we’re probably around the peak of this), and we’re starting to see the beginnings of AI automating it.

8. Not that it’s never happening; almost two years ago, I covered a book that talks about the serious questions we need to figure out if we’re going to successfully settle in space, and Karl Schroeder was writing about single-family homes in space about the same time.