Falsehood

You hear the voice of the woman singing a song emitting from your radio, and despite what she says, she does not sing for you. You hear the voice say You are the reason for this song and I just want to hold you, but these are falsehoods. These words are not sung for you and there is no woman who is singing.

The sound you hear is in fact a speaker system embedded in your car, which is provided with an electronic signal transcoded by a radio system in your center console, which itself received an electronic signal carrying the bits of data which comprise the noise you hear. There is no mouth from which this noise originates, it is an artificial imitation, born of plastic and wires. It does not mean what it sings, it does not know what it says, it has no feelings. Something worse than a facsimile, a falsehood.

And you cannot help but fall for its perverse lies and let it inspire feelings within you. In your spiritless car, impotent steel and plastic, inverse of life, with you sitting utterly alone, driving in the dark of night, you feel the comfort of a woman’s voice. You construct, in your mind, the warmth of her body, the smell of her hair, her gentle hand in yours. A flash of lightning in the clouds above illuminates absolutely nothing at all. The blow of the A/C dries out your eyes.

You blink and look through your windshield, and you see a fabricated world, remote, abstracted, and viewed from a screen, a world that is not yours. Lights blur by, reflected off the wet asphalt, and beaming down on constructions made for no reason other than to be driven past. When will windshields be replaced by LCD screens, receiving and portraying an encoded data stream, and the farce of no farce finally be dropped.

You ache for the thing in and of itself, for a world for you, for a woman for you, for a song for you, but it is not so. Doomed to driving with VR goggles on. Walking with VR goggles on. Sitting with VR goggles on. Riding a train with VR goggles on.

Particularly bleak was a video I remember seeing years ago from a tech nerd youtube channel, where the creator fully believed that a beneficial use of VR technology would be to provide an image of a nicer home for those in an unfortunate living situation. A false home, with the same dimensions and furniture, but simply rendered to be nicer in appearance, with simulated windows, paintings, lights, and even a balcony. The presentation of falsehood as blessing.

I cannot find the exact video I saw but I did find this in a similar vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcyOVd6awZY