Personalized Reality – Good, Bad, or Neutral?
When I go on social media, I mostly want to see what’s trending. The default page often when you open an app is the “For You” page, which shows content the algorithm thinks you’d like based on your behavior. The thing is, what I really want is to see what the world is interested in outside of myself—so I immediately switch to a general “Trending” page.
On YouTube, even when I’m not logged in, the homepage still gives me “recommended” videos based on general interest data. While it’s pretty accurate in suggesting what I typically enjoy, sometimes I just want to discover something new. Personalized content can be great—but it can also be limiting.
Social media execs discovered long ago that the secret to engagement is to get people into echo chambers where everyone agrees with them—and then have those echo chambers fight each other. The result? Everyone thinks they’re right because their opinions get likes from like-minded people, and anyone who disagrees gets dismissed or attacked. It becomes a war of extremes, with little room for nuance or compromise.
Take the vaccine debate during the pandemic. Social media shot the discourse into overdrive. You had anti-vaxxers calling vaccinated people government guinea pigs, and pro-vaccine voices calling skeptics selfish idiots. But in the middle, there were vegans who opposed the vaccine due to animal testing, people who got vaccinated but believed in personal choice, or those who were hesitant simply because they wanted more time. That middle ground was largely invisible.
Which brings us to the next evolution of media—Extended Reality (XR). These personalized content strategies are moving off our phones and onto the worlds around us. Through AR, VR, and MR, we’re approaching a future where reality itself becomes algorithmically tailored to your preferences.
And that raises a new question: what happens when everyone sees a different world?
Public Metaverse & The Personalized Sandbox
Imagine a metaverse that feels like Tumblr meets Minecraft. In a public, user-edited XR model, anyone can shape their environment based on mood, interest, or ideology. Your apartment window could overlook a nebula instead of a city skyline. Your classroom could look like ancient Athens if that helps you learn.
It sounds creative and empowering—and in many ways, it is. Education, therapy, urban planning, and art could all benefit from hyper-personalization. Learning styles could finally be accommodated. Whole communities could exist based on shared aesthetics or values rather than physical proximity.
But even decentralized realities can suffer from tunnel vision. These overlapping sandbox worlds raise serious questions:
What happens when no one agrees on what “outside” looks like? How do we teach compromise when even your furniture bends to your will? Do we default to consensus filters in public spaces, or simply live in social splinters?
This connects with the broader cultural idea of the splinternet—originally a term for the internet’s ideological and national fragmenting, now evolving into something spatial and embodied. XR doesn’t just divide people by feeds—it separates them by worlds.
People follow who they agree with and block who they don’t. Naysayers get labeled trolls—whether or not they are. Expanding your worldview becomes less appealing than hearing someone say “same.” Just like Tumblr fandoms that formed regardless of geography, XR will likely spawn identity-based digital communities that feel like home—but rarely challenge the user.
Even in open, non-corporate environments, users will wall themselves into feedback loops. We’ve already seen this fragmentation play out in attempts at decentralization like Mastodon and the broader Fediverse, where instead of a unified alternative to centralized platforms, communities often fracture further into niche silos. Applied to XR, this means that even well-intentioned public metaverses could end up replicating the same fragmented social realities—just with spatial presence layered on top. A world that feels custom-fit—but leaves no room for discomfort, challenge, or growth. If social media made compromise difficult, XR could make it optional. That may sound liberating—but it also risks eroding basic social cohesion and even our ability to function in a shared physical reality.
Worse yet, we may begin to lose our ability to tolerate ambiguity, unpredictability, and boredom altogether. When reality can always be optimized, why bother with anything less? It raises concerns not only about ideological splintering, but about our psychological resilience. The coping tools we build in an imperfect world may atrophy in a frictionless one.
Privatized Reality & The Media Landscape
Now shift to the commercial model. Here, personalization isn’t about freedom—it’s about profit.
XR ads are evolving from “targeted” to “total.” Platforms like Admix are working on seamless XR advertising: billboards inside virtual cities, product placements in games, and storefronts tailored to your Amazon cart. Facial tracking and emotion detection can make ads respond to how you’re feeling in real-time. These biometric metrics—once just theoretical—are becoming part of the new data economy.
And with 3D printing integration, a product you try in XR can be downloaded, printed, and posted to social media as proof of experience. The gap between browsing and owning disappears.
But with that comes manipulation. The world feels magical, because it’s designed to please. But it’s also designed to convert. A soda on a table isn’t just decor—it’s a sponsored item from your purchase history. NPCs may wear clothes you’ve window-shopped online. Even your environment’s lighting might adjust to fit your emotional patterns.
And like with the Fyre Festival, illusion becomes indistinguishable from reality. You believe what you see. So what happens when ads simulate trust? Influence your worldview without you realizing it? Control your environment while claiming to empower you?
The stakes are higher because XR is embodied. You don’t just see an ad—you walk through it. You don’t scroll past propaganda—you live inside it.
This gives way to something more insidious: reality as a product.
Smartphones already centralize so much of modern life—banking, communication, fitness, entertainment. Now imagine that level of dependency but spatial and sensory. XR will centralize your senses. Your environment will be mediated by private servers. Downtime won’t just mean a broken app. It means a broken world.
And when that world is privatized, paywalls and manipulation aren’t bugs—they’re features.
The same algorithms that served fake news in feeds will shape your spatial experiences. Misinformation may no longer look like text. It may look like a building. A statue. A piece of architecture. You might believe it because it’s the world you’re standing in. This is fake news at the environmental level.
XR marketers may also reinforce social biases rather than challenge them. Gender stereotypes, class aspirations, even racial targeting can all be coded into a so-called “personalized” world. Advertising, rather than being culture-breaking, often becomes culture-reinforcing.
When hyper-personalization relies on predictive AI, there’s another danger: belief via immersion. If an AI tailors everything to your behavior—your facial microexpressions, posture, even blink rate—you’re no longer engaging in conscious choice. You’re being nudged, immersed, and persuaded.
Transparency, Trust & Terms of Service
Even the most immersive tech will need ground rules. But who writes them?
In the race to gain advertisers, platforms often alienate their users. Think Tumblr’s adult content ban, YouTube Rewind’s tone-deafness, or Zuckerberg’s smiling VR avatar “touring” Puerto Rico’s hurricane damage. These moments show what happens when branding trumps humanity.
Zuckerberg later said: “When you’re in VR yourself, the surroundings feel quite real. But that sense of empathy doesn’t extend well to people watching you as a virtual character on a 2D screen.” A revealing look at how even top tech CEOs misunderstand the optics and power of immersive experience.
AI-generated marketing is still prone to failure. One infamous case involved the New England Patriots’ auto-reply bot generating a jersey with a racist Twitter handle—because the filtering system wasn’t built to recognize context. As AI scales into XR, these risks grow. Emotionally intelligent systems must also be ethically sound.
And just like browser cookies and social metrics created hidden hierarchies of engagement, the XR version will be more invisible and more powerful. Your access, popularity, and influence could depend on how easily your feed can be monetized. That’s a slippery slope.
We are entering a world where environments themselves may be curated for economic optimization. Not just what you see—but what you feel. These emotional landscapes become commercial property. If your sadness sells better than your joy, which version will the algorithm favor?
The challenge, then, is to ensure that immersive personalization doesn’t become immersive exploitation.
Final Layer: Who Edits Reality?
Whether it’s user-customized or brand-engineered, hyper-personalized reality is coming. And it will impact everything—how we learn, how we argue, how we cope, how we dream.
So the question isn’t “is this good or bad?” It’s: How do we build this responsibly?
Because the power to alter perception at will is immense. It could unify or isolate. Heal or manipulate. Democratize or centralize. Make us more human—or less grounded.
We can’t afford to ask these questions later. Because by the time reality is negotiable, everything else is too.
OverwriteXR 