Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

Jaron Lanier's account of the invention of virtual reality, told as autobiography, technical history and philosophy at once.

The book follows Lanier from a childhood in New Mexico to the founding of his first company, and runs that life alongside a continuing argument about what virtual reality is for. Library cataloguers file it under three headings at once: computer-science biography, the philosophy of virtual reality, and its social effects. Henry Holt published it in November 2017 in 368 pages, with bibliographical references and an index. The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and Vox each named it one of the best books of the year.

Lanier is a computer scientist and musician who worked on virtual reality from the 1980s onward, and his publisher calls him the father of the field. His earlier books, among them You Are Not a Gadget, are arguments against what networked computing has done to people. Dawn of the New Everything turns the other way and makes the case that virtual reality can enlarge experience rather than flatten it.