I was an eighteen-year-old college student in 1999 when Keanu Reeves appeared in The Matrix and made questioning the nature of your reality seem cool and not just stuff for stoned Philosophy 101 students. Hard as it is to imagine, Facebook wouldn’t be launched for another five years; it would be eleven before Instagram appeared on the scene. We were still living mostly in the “real” world, with occasional visits to AOL chatrooms for novelty and what felt, at the time, like another opportunity to connect. The idea of a technologically-manufactured reality indistinguishable from Real Life seemed pretty far-out: a fun idea to play with during late-night dorm room conversations, but way more unlikely than the threat of all the world’s computers shutting down at midnight on December 31st.
In the twenty-six years since, it has slowly, and then much more rapidly, become more difficult to distinguish between “real” and “virtua…
