The Quietus Moore: on fantasy, capitalism and VR

Excerpts from a really informative interview published on The Quietus few days ago.

The complete interview is available HERE. 

Alan Moore:[ ...] I have to admit, I was never a fan of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, I never watched Game of Thrones. I think a lot of fantasy is kind of – perhaps lazy is too strong a word but something in that region. It falls back on standard tropes. Whereas fantasy should always be unique and new. For me, a wonderful fantasy would be Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, which hasn’t got a dragon or a wizard or a dwarf. It’s just about this crumbling castle and its ritual-bound inhabitants. Or Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy. Which is a completely original idea: this neglected garden of Eden that has overgrown space and time. The problem with fantasy at the moment is that most of it is purely escapist. It isn’t fantasy that’s going to tell you about the real world. It’s not using its symbols to illuminate, but give you access to another world that doesn’t have the problems and responsibilities of this one. I mean, take the Metaverse, which is a massive data harvesting project, apparently. I think people are trying to bail out of this universe into – I dunno – the Marvel Cinematic Universe...

[...]

We need to move beyond capitalism. We need to move urgently beyond growth and our obsession with growth, because that is a fantasy and it always has been. We do not live in a world of infinite resources, so infinite growth is clearly not possible. It’s becoming very urgent. We don't have to be ruled by GDP. There are other ways that progress can be measured: the wellbeing of a country, for example.

A lot of this would entail the introduction of a universal basic income scheme. Which again is very possible. There are places where they’ve tried it out. It seems to be a very workable thing. And we know that the money’s there. The thing is that amongst conservative thinkers, it is unthinkable that people should get something for nothing, even though that is what their entire careers are often based upon.

We need something drastic very soon. A lot of this stuff, it’s not going to work unless there’s some top-down adjustments. Big initiatives like the Green New Deal, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pushing in America. I don’t think the Green New Deal actually dares to talk about the possibility of a life after capitalism. But at least it sounded like people started to address the issues. We need to show people what a world beyond growth might look like.

[...]

The idea of a VR future is, at the moment, quite a frightening and disturbing one. And we’re going to be in the hands of big tech companies who simply want all of your data so that they can sell it. But that is not to say that there won’t be possibilities in the idea of virtual reality. Technology is pretty much neutral, it depends on how we use it.

I experienced a little bit of VR and it is a very compelling experience where your body is not obeying your instructions. I have tried to step off a VR cliff, knowing that there was solid floor there, and I’ve been unable to do it. I’ve tried doing it with my eyes closed. Now, that didn’t work either, because my brain was telling me, ‘no, we don’t step off a cliff, even with eyes closed’. That's worrying, but it does indicate the depth of effect of this technology. And it occurred to me that you could recreate a transcendent experience which is very rarely visited upon people by making that available through something like virtual reality.

The first time I heard about virtual reality, I said somewhat cynically, ‘Oh, yeah, like there’s another kind…’ because we already have a virtual reality, it’s just that our headset is our head. We don’t experience reality directly, it’s compiled somewhere on the loom of our consciousness from the sensory expressions that we receive. And we do that moment by moment. So it’s not that big a leap between reality as we experience it and virtual reality. Would it be possible to recreate a mystical experience using VR? It would take a great deal of artistry. [...]

Complete interview HERE.