Apple's trillion dollar social experiment (and how to fix it)

What if someone invented a device that a billion people couldn’t live without, and spent 4x more time on than talking to their family, friends or neighbors? Apple XR (extended reality) goggles in 2027? Nope. It’s already here - the iPhone and its competitive sibling Android. We (on average) are glued to our phones over 4 hours a day. That’s far more than the 34 minutes we spend socializing and communicating, or the 19 minutes we spend participating in sports, recreation and exercise, according to the highly regarded American Time Use Survey.

Besides making Apple the most valuable company of all time, what is iPhone addiction doing to us? Someday PhDs will study Apple’s experiment on us. Until then, it is just a coincidence that as people talk less, loneliness has risen to a record 61% of young people, anxiety has doubled, sex decreased, and with it teen pregnancies? If idle hands do the devil’s work, hands glued to phones do not. Can we blame the massive decline in crime on Apple? Would anyone be surprised that as our time tapping devices goes up, our time engaging with people goes down? Are we doomed to isolation, anxiety and loneliness??

Fifty years ago we watched TV side by side with family, talked on our phones, shopped in person and didn’t wear headphones everywhere. We even played games side-by-side. Now our ears are plugged, our fingers glued to screens, and our eyes, thanks to light, cheap ‘mixed reality’ glasses might be next. At least that’s what Mark Zuckerberg and Apple are betting on, even if we’re still many years away from augmented glasses that are only as bad as living in ski goggles. But whether or not #ar / #vr gets comfortable and cheap, we don’t need goggles to plug into the virtual world. We’re already in deep.?

The good news is that the digital world need not be isolating. Games like Fortnite or League of Legends are as social as you want them to be. With the right software, connectivity can connect, not isolate. What’s missing is a place on the internet like our favorite sports bar, a safe spot to meet like minded folks, talk and experience our shared interests together. I want to cheer together when I’m watching sports or esports, whisper and applaud together when I’m watching movies, TV and videos, learn, shop or even pray together as if we’re side-by-side. (#zoom is not side-by-side. Zoomers seem to either stare at you or stare off to something behind you, in either case it’s a disconcerting mosaic of badly lit, restless heads.)? When I’m driving my Tesla, why can’t my friends see what I’m seeing, through my car’s cameras, so they can help me drive while we talk, like a good co-pilot?

With the right ‘meet and talk’ platform, like #Fortnite, #Discord or #hearolive , the digital world can be social. Maybe not as intensely, but only a click away. In 1977 the Apple 2 launched, and Atari 2600 with 4 controllers! Since the start of the digital revolution games have been social. It’s time for Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and everyone else to learn from multiplayer games how to make our digital world friends first.

That’s our mission. Hearo was founded by multiplayer game pioneers to reverse the trend of social isolation, to let friends and family spend the many hours we watch, together.