MF02: V1 Riffs on Reality
What’s Reality Privilege? Where does it come from? Why does it matter?
If this is your first time hearing about it, Reality Privilege [RP] is a concept paraphrased by Marc Andreessen in a recent interview in reference to this not-so-recent piece by Beau Cronin.
[If you prefer video, you can get the abridged/live version in the first two mins here]
It then made the rounds in the tech-adjacent blogsphere (at least) here, there and then. And since this is a (loosely defined) tech-adjacent newsletter, we need to offer our own (hot) take on it!
⚠ Excessive Heat Warning: Proceed With Caution ⚠
If you skipped all the links, here’s the TL;DR version:
“A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date”.
Let’s take that from the top 🎬
RP is abundance, access and autonomy. It’s the Elysian Fields and Garden of Eden. It’s having main character energy and living life as a movie. It’s, for lack of a better term, being one of God’s favourites - the story of The Chosen.
Even before your environment is “a thing”, RP starts at the subject level: your identity/biology. All the immutable characteristics and traits you inherit at birth. This is the first hand of cards you’re dealt in life - the great divine lottery and magical sorting hat we all go through.
You begin your journey here, unaware of its existence but under its effect nonetheless. If you’re lucky, the algorithm of life might give you an OP player character from the start. Who knows, you might even get a royal flush in the first round:
"The genetic lottery. You only get one shot at it. Some people hit the jackpot. Others...Don't."
But then the World comes in: where/when are you born? Two key variables (space and time) which could make/break your initial playthrough. Less deterministic sure but still, caveat emptor - random luck involved.
And with the World, of course, comes other people. At first, you’ll be surrounded by just a few of them. You’ll learn to call them family. They’ll be your reality hosts for Act 1 of your story.
They’re, after all, the reason why reality is even a thing for you.
Naturally, they’ll have the biggest influence in your life. Whoever you eventually become, it’ll inevitably trace back to this point. This is your origin story - where it all starts.
By the time you factor in all the variables above (genetics, birth date/location, family), you can already start calculating your starting RP score. This isn’t an exact science, but you get the point.
Reality - whatever that really means - is the opposite of a level playing field. Reality privilege is, after all, a privilege - the exception to the rule. A relative competitive advantage, only available to a select few.
RP cuts deeper and wider than just “privilege”, however. It’s an umbrella term for all the ways in which your environment can give you an edge in the game of life - broadly defined - not just socio-economically as is often understood by “privilege”.
When we talk about “privilege”, we also assume that it’s a problem we can fix somehow. If we think of it as a socio-economic problem, then it implies there must be a solution somewhere, right?
RP breaks that illusion. It points the way, but it doesn’t give us any directions. We can trace where it comes from - “the fabric of reality” - but can’t do anything about it. Reality is the ultimate checkmate - there’s no escaping it.
RP’s a basic fact about the human story we’ll never be able to change. Inequality and unfairness forever baked into nature’s design. A broken design sure, but even more so, an immutable system.
All the policy in the world only band-aids and sticky tape. Remedies, never solutions. Only partial mitigation, indefinite maintenance and ongoing repair available as options.
There’s no winning strategy that can solve for the root-cause of reality privilege. It’s an unsolvable game by definition.
The only logical conclusion?
“Hate the Game, Not the Player”
But what if we could change the game altogether?
Even if we can’t (yet) debug the source code of reality, we can definitely fork it.
We can use it to create new realities. New possibilities. New Worlds.
This is both an invitation and an opening:
What if we could re-create reality anew?
Was reality always a L0 for us to build on top of?
A base infrastructure layer.
A platform.
Only one out of many possible alternatives?
This is the pandora box that opens up when you start thinking about reality privilege. It’s perceptual surgery at its finest - the residue lingers on. Once you see it, there’s no unseeing.
You start noticing the walls. The design constraints and technical limits of the world around you. The “default settings” you once thought were fixed, rigid, static.
Now merely optional. Suboptimal equilibria. Happy little accidents.
You wonder what it would mean to break away from them. To start from scratch. To jailbreak the whole thing.
What happens once you start seeing reality as 1/n?
Is it just an escapist illusion? Hubris? Naivete?
Is that what we’re building with technology? A gateway drug? A rabbit hole?
As we build new worlds and bring ourselves online to new realities, will we remember why we did it in the first place? Did we ever really know?
Will we ever come back?