For despite feeling his false sheep with grass and tending to it as if it were alive, Deckard suspects that his neighbour knows his secret. He does not earn enough to buy into reality, and the electric surrogate stigmatises him, technology recognised as an inferior alternative to reality. The negative abuse of technology by the government is illustrated in another narrative strand, whereby 'empathy' TVs feed religious revelations to the populace, the VR set enabling the user to 'experience' the eternal suffering of their fictional God, Mercer, who is viewed forever climbing a hill bombarded by rocks. Again, the concern is with technology dividing social classes, with the anti-hero paying for a false memory of a trip to Mars because it's cheaper than the real thing. Not only will he be able to tell his peers of his lavish trip, but he will remember it himself.
Memory is reality, and anything else is less than reality.
And technology enables us to define ourselves as we would like to be, for better or worse. What all these examples explore, is the nature of passive experience informing or coming to replace active reality. Cerebral experiences supplanting physical ones. The fear is that an alternative, electronic reality can become preferable to actual reality. There are two pieces of art which explore this idea in greater depth.