In 1992, I finished a master’s thesis at the University of Washington (MS Engineering, Computer–Human Interaction) called “Coherent Light: The Cultural Politics of Virtual Reality.”

It’s tempting to treat early VR as quaint techno-optimism: polygons, head-mounted displays, and a promise that the future would arrive in goggles. But my argument wasn’t really about gadgets. It was about power—and the way a new technology becomes a contested object long before it becomes a stable product.

The core claim: VR’s “irresistibility” is political

My thesis opens with a pretty blunt claim: the phenomenal appeal of VR is rooted in a control/empowerment dialectic—VR can become either a subjugating social artifact or something that produces democratic social progress.

That tension is why VR is so magnetic to so many groups at once. Different communities look at the same technical possibility and see different futures they want to author—and they compete to define what “proper use” even means.

So the story of VR is never just “innovation.” It’s negotiation: who gets to name the technology, fund it, normalize it, and deploy it.

VR didn’t come from entertainment. It came from command-and-control.

A lot of public VR mythology starts in arcades, science fiction, and counterculture. But institutionally, VR’s roots are military: research aimed at superiority on an “electronic battlefield,” tied to command, control, and communications.

In the thesis I point to how the Persian Gulf War’s media imagery—“smart bombs,” telepresence, logistics, surveillance—became a kind of cultural demo reel for the promise of remote presence and omniscient vision.

That history matters because origins leave residue. A technology built to optimize visibility, targeting, coordination, and compliance doesn’t magically become neutral when it’s repackaged as “fun” or “empathy” or “the next platform.”

VR is also, fundamentally, a vision technology. The thesis lingers on what I called “virtual optics”—the illusion of seeing an image “out there” where no object exists.

One example I use is the HITLab’s Laser Retinal Scanner: a device that projects low-intensity laser light directly onto the retina in controlled patterns.

The point isn’t “wow, lasers.” The point is that this kind of apparatus rearranges the whole chain of representation—images no longer depend on objects or photographs so much as digitized stimulus, delivered straight to perception.

And once “seeing” becomes programmable, the question becomes: who programs it, and to what end?

Even in 1992, VR developers were selling more than graphics. They were selling a moral story: high bandwidth to the brain, natural interaction, intuitive interfaces, humane technology.

I framed this as a kind of New Humanism in science—a shift where technologists emphasize the body, gesture, speech, and the “oral-gestural” ways people make meaning.

But I was skeptical of the language—especially the feel-good terms like “natural” and “intuitive.” Those words smuggle in assumptions: what counts as “natural” interaction varies wildly by culture and habit, and encoding one group’s intuition into a system is never universal.

In other words: “user-friendly” can be a soft glove over a hard politics.

Method: stop treating technology as the main character

I didn’t want to write a simple “good tech vs bad tech” story. I also didn’t want a deterministic story where technology drags culture behind it.

Instead I leaned on an idea from Carolyn Marvin: focus on the “drama” that erupts when new media arrive—how existing groups negotiate power, authority, representation, and knowledge using the new platform.

That framing matters because it gives agency back to social actors. VR isn’t destiny; it’s a contested scene.

Structurally, I made a deliberate cut between VR as an apparatus (design, functionality, effects on vision) and VR as techné, as a kind of enframed social practice and a cultural tool.

This is one of the most useful moves I made, and it’s still useful now: if we only talk about hardware specs or adoption curves, we miss the more important question—how the tool gets culturally metabolized, and who gets empowered or subordinated when it does.

Why this still matters (maybe more now than then)

Today we’re surrounded by “XR,” spatial computing, mixed reality, and all the rest. And the sales pitch is familiar: immersion, empathy, productivity, presence. But the underlying struggle hasn’t changed.

VR (and adjacent systems) still carry an implicit dream of total representation: map everything, render everything, simulate everything.

They still promise empowerment while quietly expanding the reach of systems optimized for control.

They still attract coalitions with competing agendas—corporate, military, artistic, countercultural—each trying to claim authorship over “what this is for.”

VR isn’t just a medium. It’s a political instrument whose meaning is fought over in public and built into the system long before the product is “ready.”

And that’s why I’m resurfacing this work now: not as a nostalgia artifact, but as a reminder that the future doesn’t arrive—it gets negotiated into existence.

The copy I have currently at hand is missing all of the images. Someday I’ll dig out the original printed copy and scan it in to restore the visuals. This thesis was originally typed out on one of those Toshiba portable proto-laptops, which was pretty boss..it had a 3.5” floppy and a kind of DOS; an LCD display that was these kinda..blueish pixels/characters on a light blue/gray background with a dial you could turn to crudely adjust the brightness. I’d take it to Café Septieme just below Broadway in Capitol Hill which was a few block’s walk from the second apartment I had there in Seattle. Later, I rolled all of the text into my friend Random (Phillip) Reay’s Mac Quadra where he had Aldus Pagemaker on it and at some point I printed it out on a laser printer somewhere. That entire toolchain was super early days stuff and it felt necessary to me to get it clean — but it was also beyond what anyone expected to have to do to get a master’s thesis done.