I really want to gripe about "Ernest Cline's" Ready Player One. There was an element of dystopia to it, yes, but it was only the movie adaptation that came away with the takeaway that the virtual world was bad. In the movie they decide to add in the protagonist making the executive decision to shut down the virtual world on a couple weekdays or something. That pissed me off. That world was people's livelihoods. This kid lived in a poor junky slum and had a great social life and presumably some level of income in the virtual world when the movie starts. At the end of the movie he is super rich and has a hot girlfriend (who's character arc was largely that she perceived herself as ugly?). There's really not that much in the film or the book that says that forcing people to go unplugged made any sense.
The actual book was about a virtual world gone extremely right. The dystopian part was the corporations that sought private control of the platform.
Bonus complaint: The evil corporation in the film literally enslaves people and brazenly murders others in public, yet it's CEO is brought down by some unremarkable local cops? What?
The world in RPO is pretty nonsensical and the whole thing is a vehicle for nostalgia with a fairly formulaic plot. Nothing wrong with that it’s a fun beach read, particularly if you’re of a certain age. I was mildly terrified by the number of people I met a few years ago whilst working in VR who considered it aspirational. We’ll absolutely get a dystopia if the metaverse is based on teenage fantasy. Particularly with an AR vision that is rushing to put glorified ads for Disney and Marvel into the world.
You'd think the creator would have thought of something like that, but nah, he wanted to leave it to the coolest teen. Or, in the movie version, the teen most able to identify weirdly personal details from the author's private life.
The actual book was about a virtual world gone extremely right. The dystopian part was the corporations that sought private control of the platform.
Bonus complaint: The evil corporation in the film literally enslaves people and brazenly murders others in public, yet it's CEO is brought down by some unremarkable local cops? What?