Crisis of Worldless Individualism (Apple Vision Pro)

2024-02-02

Here are some initial thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro, which launched on February 2nd, 2024. I have not tried it yet — I’m just speculating.

  • It’s incredible the amount of effort we put into technology that does seemingly nothing for the betterment of humanity. Technology historically contains within it some emanicpatory potential (i.e. in my view Technology should be liberatory). The latest technological developments are not emancipatory, unless it’s framed only from the cruel perspective of liberating us from the ugliness of our own consciousness. There’s some libidinal psychology here going on; the Apple Vision Pro allows us to further repress the mysteries of our unconscious.
  • Marc Andreessen has spoken about ‘reality privelege’ when he talks about the virtues of the metaverse. No matter how hard we try, we just can’t seem to materially lift people out of poverty. We swear — there’s just no solution, be pragmatic. The most practical thing is instead to give people reality distorting goggles that transport your sense of self and space/time and consciousness. Not quite another world — but rather an eerie sense of worldlessness.
  • Reality Distortion: When you strap on the AVP, Apple wants you to not enter a VR world like the Oculus, but to be able to spatially compute through your existing surroundings. But the early reviews point out the video passthrough on the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) is not perfect — it often has trouble with light. (Hm.) What you’re seeing is a simulacrum — a projection of your world captured on camera and sped through to your eye senses at a high-speed refresh rate. This is a fascinating and philosophical technical decision (or limitation); like the shadows in Plato’s cave.
  • You’ll notice that Apple, in their presentation, never uses the terms Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), or the Metaverse. Instead, they seek to push the term Spatial Computing. Spatial computing feels very much in line with tools for thought land.
  • No longer is computing confined to rectangular screens, our eyes all day struggling as they stare at two dimensions trying to unlock a third or even fourth. There are certainly compelling ideas here.
  • Interestingly, Dynamicland and Folk Computer are also exploring a kind of Spatial Computing. But they do it through real physical objects: paper, blocks. Grounded in the real world. Bret Victor famously ranted against the limitations of glass screens. While there is exploratory potential to augmenting your surroundings with computing, doing so on a closed-off, individual headset — as opposed to being with others in space — and waving your hands, manipulating air… seems suspect.
  • I haven’t tried it yet, but how satisfying is it to type on an imaginary keyboard, your fingers wiggling through some limbic space-time continuum? Does it feel good to pick up the edge of a window, with no tactile feedback, and resize it?
  • Apple Vision Pro is too expensive to worry much about its immediate impact, but I have worries that AVP will be like the Walkman for consciousness. It will lead us into a cold individualism that removes us from the world and from our community. The Walkman turned music inwards, away from the communal, into the individualized (The Walkman marked the movement of music from external to internal 20220201220251). With music, this can certainly be a nice thing. But what about with your whole vision? Projects like Dynamicland and Folk Computer are built around collective computing experiences. People doing stuff together in space. With Apple Vision Pro, you’re merely looking at strange glass, fingers pointing at moons.
  • It seems awfully lonely in there.