America Is Ready Player One
Cover of “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Image taken from Amazon.
I know. It’s a pretty crazy claim. Real life can’t be the same as a work of fiction, can it?
Yes. Yes, it can.
I’ll start with my own experience. I realize that this is anecdotal, but I’ll explain it anyway.
Growing up in a suburban Massachusetts community, I lived close enough to my elementary school that I could walk there easily. My mother would frequently take me and my siblings there on foot (or by car if the weather was less than ideal), and she’d get to hang out with the other parents who were doing the same thing. You could consider the schoolyard a “third place” of sorts.
Those were the good old days, and before you call me an old man, just know that I’m still more than a month shy of my 25th birthday. Got that? Good.
When school let out, it was very common for children to meet at one another’s homes. Again, we lived pretty close together in those days. There was also a nearby park not associated with any school, and I spent many spring evenings on the playground while my older brother played Little League baseball. That’s how my parents and I made friends back then - in person, the old-fashioned way.
I’m not going to deny that some people still have the social stamina and determination to form bonds in the real world. However, saying that “some people know their neighbors, therefore social atomization isn’t a problem” makes about as much sense as saying “some people run marathons, therefore obesity isn’t a problem.”
The issue at hand is the way things are trending.
You see, when I was a child, I had a Nintendo Wii, on which one of the games I played the most was Mario Kart. I remember it being such a massive deal when I could connect to the Internet and race against random people from all over the world. The limited chat functionality if you were playing against friends (an option I never availed myself of before the service shut down in 2014) seemed revolutionary.
Why did that seem special, though? Simply put, because it wasn’t the default.
These days, a large percentage of video games are played online - indeed, a great majority of them require an Internet connection to play. I remember when it was such a hassle to set my Wii up for a game of Nintendo WFC Mario Kart, but these days, people are always online unless they actively choose not to be.
I’ll admit that I am guilty of this myself. It’s a beautiful spring day out there right now, but I’m inside writing this essay. Even when I’m on my front porch, I very often have my computer open in front of me to talk to my friends on Discord. And that’s a problem.
Now, I present my thesis: We’re living in a dystopian novel. A very specific dystopian novel.
I’m not normally a defender of Ready Player One these days. In most respects, it’s a sorry excuse for literature. But I’m starting to think that author Ernest Cline was on to something about the modern world, even if that wasn’t his intention.
The year is 2025, and America has gone to shit. It’s just gone to shit two decades early. In the United States today, we have to deal with mass shootings - but events like Columbine or Sandy Hook are only a small fraction of the overall gun violence in this country. We’ve got road rage shootings every day because we’ve collectively lost our patience as a society. People kill each other over the smallest things, aided by the fact that we’ve literally got more firearms than people.
Main character Wade lives in the Stacks, a trailer park outside of Oklahoma City, while the late owner of the OASIS, James Halliday, had a net worth estimated at $240 billion USD. When the book came out in 2011 (and when I first read it in 2015), $240 billion seemed absolutely insane even by billionaire standards. Now, however, America’s shadow President Elon Musk is even richer than that. As for the Stacks, the homeless population keeps on rising. Maybe it’s not as visible and sensational as it is in Ready Player One, but it still exists. Housing keeps getting more expensive, as do other things people need to survive.
In Ready Player One, the plot revolves around an Easter Egg hidden within the OASIS and a competition to find it. Given that the winner is going to receive a sizable share of Halliday’s fortune (or maybe not even a share!), it’s highly coveted.
We see this in real life too. So many Americans vote for Republicans because they don’t see themselves as members of the working class who could benefit from progressive economic policy. Instead, they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who could benefit from owning the libs. The American Dream, after all, has historically been to get rich and famous.
At one point in the book (and no, I don’t hate myself enough to check what page it is), Wade mentions that people can broadcast themselves to the world whenever they want, doing whatever they want, whether or not anyone is watching. In 2011, Twitch streaming (and YouTube streaming for that matter) was in its infancy. The idea of playing video games for a live audience was, again, absolutely revolutionary.
That’s not the case anymore. To become a popular gaming YouTuber, you basically need to be a streamer; recording your let’s-plays and uploading them later isn’t going to make you popular. And don’t even get me started on SEO and the quest to beat the algorithm, which is what drives people to hire massive production crews. It’s often said that Mr. Beast ruined YouTube, and I’m starting to see why people think that.
It’s not just gamers who constantly want attention. We have people literally risking their lives to be famous, like one Trevor Jacob. Remember him? He’s the YouTuber who claimed engine failure and jumped out of a perfectly good plane just for views, leaving it to crash into the side of a mountain. (On a side note, the video title “I Crashed My Airplane” is just perfect - he did it on purpose).
Runaway climate change, like what happens in Ready Player One? Yeah, it’s happening here too. We’ve even got a climate denier as President yet again. Despite increasingly devastating wildfires every year, the only significant American response has been from the entertainment industry making some TV series about conventionally attractive firefighters.
And speaking of entertainment, it’s all giant corporations these days. Amazon might not run the world to the degree Ready Player One’s OASIS does, but it’s not far off either. Gone are the days when they merely sold books online. Now they own entire grocery store chains and even an aerospace company that recently gave Katy Perry et al a glorified carnival ride. But there’s also Amazon Instant Video, which lots of people use for streaming TV shows and whatnot.
As dominant as Amazon is, they don’t have a monopoly on peoples’ time and attention. Consider the Walt Disney Company as well. They don’t just make movies from the imagination of one imaginative man with some retrograde ideas about race - not anymore! They’ve got theme parks, cruise lines, streaming platforms, and even entire residential neighborhoods. I’m not kidding about that last one.
One of the most commonly criticized elements of Ready Player One by its detractors is its misogyny. Women, such as Wade’s obsessive love interest Art3mis, are often portrayed as one-dimensional, and plenty of reviewers have taken notice. And then Aech is (spoiler alert) only there so that Wade can say “I’m not racist, I have a black friend”.
We’ve got plenty of misogyny in real life too. It’s not just the United States Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion, either. The “manosphere” of content creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan influenced the latest election, and that TV series Adolescence has also drawn attention to it. (And yes: I know Adolescence is set in the UK, not the USA, but I’m sure American schools are, as usual, even worse than British).
I could go on and on about the parallels between the 2044 described in Ready Player One and the reality of life in 2025-era America. But I think I’ve covered my bases.
The point of dystopian science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) is that events depicted in the former are supposed to be at least conceivably plausible. Harry Potter, for instance, is no closer to coming true now than it was when the first book was published. That’s not the case for the work of Ernest Cline.
Ready Player One is not a literary masterpiece. Not even close. But in its own sick, twisted, and depressing ways, it predicted the future. And for that, we should appreciate it.
