Virtual reality dystopianism and backlash have been in the cards for as long as the public has known about VR, and if anything, our extreme predictions have gotten a little less cool. Today, we have revenge porn and internet addiction. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, virtual reality fans had cyberpunk and the legacy of ’60s psychedelia. Counterculture icon Timothy Leary was an early proponent of the technology, and Jerry Garcia made one of the most omnipresent comparisons. "They outlawed LSD," he’s quoted as saying after a VR demonstration. "It’ll be interesting to see what they do with this." In his landmark 1991 book Virtual Reality, journalist Howard Rheingold says he was asked, verbatim, if VR was "going to be electronic LSD" at every event he attended for two straight years. The Wall Street Journal got in on the action in 1990 with a piece on VR pioneer Jaron Lanier titled "Computer simulations one day may provide surreal experiences." The predictable tagline, set a couple of paragraphs above a picture of a heavily dreadlocked Lanier: "A kind of electronic LSD?"

At the time, Lanier expressed frustration with the drug comparisons. "The only reason that that idea is around is because Tim Leary is now making something of a living talking about VR," he told the LA Times in 1991. "To me, all of this is just poisoning the ideological well." He dismissed virtual sex in the same piece and complained of the "huge amount of misinformation" about what VR was, including exaggerated media stories that gave the impression it was a photorealistic simulation of everyday life. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t have big ideas about its future. In an interview with Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, he speculated that if the first humans had virtual reality, they might never have developed language.

What meaning should we ascribe to virtual sex and violence?

The LSD comparison wasn’t the only thing VR had to contend with. ’90s "cyberspace" intellectuals were grappling with the same problems we have now: what do terms like "presence" really mean? Would people become the VR equivalent of couch potatoes, sedated by a potent new medium? What meaning should we ascribe to virtual sex and violence? Building on the work of philosophers from Plato to Marshall McLuhan, these weren’t just debates about hyper-realistic glove-and-goggles worlds. They could be about something as lo-fi as the text-only virtual community LambdaMOO, which gave us one of the most famous essays ever written about online cruelty.

And then there were the simply bizarre predictions. One sociology book mused about a kind of high-tech Hands of Orlac, in which the brainwaves of a psychotic could become encoded in a VR system’s artificial reality. "If a ‘normal’ person stumbled onto a path which triggers these psychotic routes, the ‘normal’ user may become trapped in an irrational, even dangerous, web. Remember, this is neither an everyday computer nor a television-style visual experience. It is highly intense, highly charged, and almost totally inclusive." The same book speculated that the Mafia could get casino visitors hooked on virtual-reality gambling. After Scientific American published a piece on VPL’s DataGlove — a more sophisticated predecessor to the Nintendo Power Glove — the National Enquirer apparently ran its own version with one bewildering tweak: it said that the glove had military funding and could be remote-controlled to creep behind enemy lines under its own power.

Fear of a VR backlash — or simply a failure to live up to the hype — was already very much on people’s minds. In ’90s media, the budding but limited technology became an all-encompassing tool that was both sensual and sinister. The Lawnmower Man gave viewers mind-bending VR sex, and Wild Palms presented it as a delivery mechanism for hallucinations and mind control. For some fans, these were pleasant diversions or interesting allegories. For others, they were a red flag. A 1993 Usenet thread on Wild Palms was ambivalent, especially about the news segments that followed it. "Wouldn’t you know it, the press has struck again," said one commenter of a post-Palms report that featured "addicted" teens and VR arcade games. "If the general public gets this kind of double-dose intro to VR (Wild Palms and violent video games) what kind of future does VR have in the home or workplace? … Maybe it was just bad research on their parts, but even so, what chance will VR stand if we keep letting people who really don’t know that much about VR introduce it to the public?"