//Publication Date: 02/24/2026_

Ready Player One - Rage against the nihilism

Recently, I reread Ready Player One, and I was quite surprised to find that public opinion of the book had soured a good deal in the time between its first publication and now. I could not disagree more, and I think that it is one of the most relevant and compelling cyberpunk books that I have read. In this article, I’ll attempt to explain why.

The world in RPO is dying due to inaction. Humanity has been overtaken by a profound culture of nihilism and apathy, essentially giving up on even trying to solve its problems. It’s not that these problems can’t be solved; there has been no knowledge loss or regression in intelligence, and though we might have depleted our supply of fossil fuels, we haven’t even started building nuclear plants. Large parts of the country have just been abandoned.

The root cause of this is the core contradiction that drives the book’s plot: The OASIS is at once the greatest thing that humanity has ever produced and our doom. For the first time in human history, there is a drug that can be consumed for free, with no danger, and without social stigma. As Huxley’s Brave New World has SOMA, the world of RPO has the OASIS, and given this opportunity, humanity has chosen the drug itself to death while the world falls apart.

The OASIS also produces a profound cultural malaise. The culture of the OASIS is not nostalgia that inspires new work, but rather the re-consumption of existing media over and over again in ever-easier-to-digest formats. Even from a technical perspective, the OASIS is a cancer. The beautiful, decentralized web of the 90s and early 2000s is gone. Every technology, experience, and public network has been rolled into the OASIS, and the only technology developed is that which allows for further intoxication. In the world of RPO, the future of humanity is to die, starving and freezing in a hole, while pretending they are Luke Skywalker in a simulation.

Despite all of this, the OASIS is perhaps one of the pinnacles of the enlightenment in SciFi. Time, distance, and scarcity all bend to the awesome, near-magical power of software; thought-stuff made real at last. The production of the OASIS is the result of millions, perhaps billions, of scientists, engineers, workers, and artists working for thousands of years, each bringing us a little closer, one life at a time. It is the work of James Halliday, but it is also the work of the humans who laid the fiber connecting the world, the men who died on the beaches at Normandy, and every child from antiquity to the present who asked why. It contains the sum total of human knowledge and art, some things previously lost throughout human history, recreated almost perfectly, all immune to the ravages of time and the forces of nature. It is the ultimate museum, communications tool, and yes, entertainment medium.

Pressing the big red button to destroy the OASIS would bring humanity into a new dark age. Its destruction would be equal to the burning of the library of Alexandria a million times over, while shattering the Tower of Babel. In addition to the immense cultural loss, the destruction of communications, economic damage, and other immediate harms that it would cause, it would also be the extinguishing of the great flame of the Enlightenment. Halliday created the button because he knew that his creation had eaten him, but hitting it would be an admission by the self-selecting priesthood of the network that humanity was unworthy or incapable of handling the freedom and knowledge that they had bestowed upon it. It would be giving up on humanity as a technological species.

It is important to note that the state of the world was not inflicted on its population. At no point were people forced onto the OASIS. In a subversion of the cyberpunk genre, the company that produced the system was built by benevolent leaders, providing service as cheaply as possible, and with the express purpose of ensuring that even the poorest have an opportunity to partake. The corporation goes out of its way to educate children and invests heavily in preserving and modernizing the art and culture of mankind. Competitors aren’t met with violence and repression; they are simply never formed. This is an essential detail. If the drug was imposed, if this was some grand conspiracy, the average person could claim that they were not responsible for what happened to them. That they were victimized in a way. GSS’s benevolence forces the audience to confront the fact that the world did this to itself.

The contrast between IOI and GSS is another essential part of the story. GSS, for all the faults or boons of its products, is perhaps the last bastion of duty and responsibility remaining in the world. Even as the planet crumbles around them, they manage, day after day, to keep the servers and platform running. The OASIS isn’t hacked, it doesn’t go down, and it isn’t a bug-riddled monstrosity. They receive no plaudits or recognition for this. GSS is the ideal corporate structure built by every great inventor in history, from Bell Telephone to Google. A dynamic force of progress (or at least maintenance) in the face of overwhelming odds, all made possible by capitalism and the American Dream.

IOI is purely an opportunistic vulture. It doesn’t make anything, but simply acquires and drains whatever it can get its hands on. Should it succeed in its mission to take over GSS and the OASIS, it would destroy it as surely as if it were hit by a nuclear bomb. This would not be out of malice, however nasty the people working there might be. To ascribe it to malice would imply that IOI is competent, which they most certainly are not. IOI would destroy the OASIS because IOI is a hideous amalgamation of managers incapable of anything but destruction. They are the ‘managed’ in managed decline. Given the state of the world, they could obtain much higher returns simply by building concrete block housing, settling the wastelands between cities, building atomic power plants, or engaging in off-planet colonization. This, however, would require skill, creativity, and risk-taking. IOI doesn’t have this. They are making money in the only way they know how: by grinding down whatever’s left like entropy made manifest. The CEO of IOI will be the last to die freezing in a hole, but he will die all the same.

The plot of RPO is that of an average boy rejecting this apathetic, nihilistic worldview. His journey is a transition from searching for the egg simply for his own entertainment to a desperate fight (at great personal risk and through great displeasure) to keep the fire of civilization burning for another day. At the start of his journey, his hunt for the egg is propelled by no great purpose, and it presents no risk to him. Later on, however, he rejects the IOI king’s ransom and instead chooses to embark on the hard journey to preserve the only thing that still matters to him in this world. As the story progresses, he gains a sense of purpose, develops discipline and courage, and finally finds meaning both inside and outside the OASIS. Wade’s journey is a rejection of the apathy and nihilism that pervades his world, and instead choosing the high path of duty, honor, and perseverance through privation. It’s also an acknowledgement of the book’s core conceit: escaping the real world with digital crack doesn’t make you feel good.

The most important moment in the book is when Wade infiltrates IOI. It is here that the true villain is revealed in the comprehensible micro rather than the impersonal macro. As IOI enslaves men and marches them off into a concentration camp, they do not fight, run, or even complain. Make no mistake, they know exactly what is happening to them. It’s no great secret that they will almost certainly die in that tower eventually, but it makes no difference because they’re already dead in every way that matters. The digital drug no longer makes them feel anything, and they’ve been on it so long that there is nothing else in their lives. They have so rotted their own minds that there is simply no humanity left. IOI is simply there to extract any remaining value and… retire whatever’s left. When Wade enters and returns with his soul intact, he shows that he has defeated the nihilism within himself. He has a cause, a purpose greater than himself now, and he is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for it.

This is the truly fascinating contrast between RPO and other great cyberpunk literature. In many other cyberpunk stories, we explore what it means to be human through the lens of creating new forms of conscious life. In Blade Runner, the replicants fought bravely against their enslavement and did everything they could to extend their limited lifespan. The corporation that created them had to invest significant effort to keep them repressed and productive. IOI doesn’t need to do this. It harvests the walking dead, who then work and die without so much as a single word of complaint, showing far less humanity than any one of the non-human replicants. Again, these people have done this to themselves; there is no Amon Goeth inside IOI reshaping humans into slavish machine-men. They’re already the perfect slave-automita.

This is the true horror of apathy and nihilism; it will destroy anything it touches, given time. There is no nihilistic vision for the future, not even a negative one. Any society where nihilism has reached a critical mass will simply die, either starving out when the machinery of the world stops functioning or being expended and retired by any group less far gone than they are. I use ‘expended’ and ‘retired’ very deliberately here. To be enslaved or exterminated, one must not go willingly and with full knowledge to the plantation or the block.

Moving from the realm of the fictional to the real world, I think that one would have to be blind not see the parallels between the OASIS, the internet, and AI. For everything the internet has done to catalog the collective knowledge of mankind, it has also enabled people to essentially escape reality with an eternal stream of nonproductive nonsense. One need only look at the rise of the NEET to see the terminus of this pipeline, but we can see it in everything now. The refusal to tackle or acknowledge large problems, the glut of sequels and remakes, and the attempt to solve all problems through a scapegoat. Symptoms of people who have escaped reality for so long that nothing matters anymore. AI has made this problem even worse. While a NEET might be pathetic, I would argue that someone who can’t even think because they’ve used ChatGPT so much is even worse. What if AI is able to pass the Turing test not because it has become indistinguishable from a human, but because it has become good enough that people simply ask AI every question and echo back its response? Is our future as a species to outsource our thinking to AI and drug ourselves on digital entertainment while the world collapses around us?

In your own life, consider the amount of time you spend doing nonproductive, non-contemplative, completely passive activities. The only fix for this is personal discipline and self-direction. Our society no longer enforces these things on us; we must take up the mantle and do them ourselves. This is not a popular statement. No one wants to read about how the collapse of the world is not due to some great enemy but rather due to the cumulative sum of their own and others’ personal failings. Telling people there will be no savior is not popular, and I think we have seen this in the public sentiment toward this book.

This is why, now more than ever, our hope rests in the Wades among us.