A Liminal Moment for Humanity, AR as Artificial Reality

Most of the time I think of the Apple Vision Pro as an irrelevance.

A toy for rich folk, too niche to get developers interested enough, to make the quality of apps needed, to make it useful enough,? for enough people buy it to get developers interested.

Too slow to improve to become what it needs to be, to have mass take up.

But occasionally I think of it as a totally pivotal moment for humankind.

Wireheading was a typically dystopian idea embraced by filmmakers, futurologists, and alike where people would have wires inserted into their brains to allow direct electrical stimulation.

It was a bypass, why get the pleasure of eating ice-cream by eating ice cream, when you could just feel like you had with a few well placed electrons.? With this, one could 'short-circuit' the brain's normal reward process & artificially induce pleasure, with no need for eyes or touch or limbs and stuff.

Quite often the internet today feels a bit like this. Our algorithmically driven feeds have optimized time spent by feeding our brains with stuff to make us somewhat excited or agitated.

We’re slowly trained to gorge on outrage, anger, fear, desire, you get the idea. For a lot of people today the real world feels a little lacking, a little slow, a bit unremarkable, the M5 is way less exciting than GT7.

It turns out large sectors of the population have got sucked into the gravitational pull of screens, like moths to a flame, and now for many more time awake is spent online than off.

The real world has gone from how and where we live, to the background while we check our phones. We used to go online, now we tell people if we’re going off it. The internet used to be a place we went to, we surfed there, now it’s just how we live.? You get the point.

I’m pretty sure anyone waking from a 30 year coma would be utterly astonished by how not here we are. How directly our presence, our gaze, our thoughts are in the digital realm, a world of broadcasting not living, of keeping score, not keeping well.

It is absolutely possible to imagine a society that bifurcates slightly along a new digital divide. One where people who actually own their homes, who have friends they enjoy the presence of, who can afford decent flights, who exercise, who own cars, step away slightly and slowly from the crack cocaine of the internet and decide to live intentionally and with growing discipline to extract themselves from screens.

Maybe the Apple Vision Pro isn’t an expensive TV, maybe its a very cheap room, a bargain of a house, or a vacation, or life.? Why fight the urge when you can embrace it. Why look good in reality? Why have real life social skills? Why put up with travel time when you can transpose yourself into an immersive video?

Maybe this is the opposite of a toy for rich people, maybe it’s the best chance of the life they hoped for but feel locked or lucked out of.

This isn’t a new idea, plenty of folk are playing computer games seemingly 24/7 in basements. Plenty of people have personas that flourish almost entirely online, plenty of people care more about tokens or scores than dollars. Just as some choose to "wirehead" today with drugs or devices, we’ll probably see a future where many choose to almost permanently escape into a new realm. This isn’t really spatial computing, this is a new artificial reality. The cheap high of living as a virtual billionaire or superhero could become rampant addiction.

Why be with your family in a dilapidated apartment, when you can be in gorgeous mansion partying with supermodels. Why work a minimum wage job, when you can live virtually as a billionaire? And so the virtual "red pill" vs "blue pill" dilemma emerges.

Such ideas can seem rather disturbing. Commentary like this can easily carry judgement. I try hard not to feel like “a good life’ is linked to sunshine, the air, human touch, but is this a lack of imagination or massive privilege bias. Is it not good for the planet to consume more digitally, is human connection the same if it’s digital, who is anyone to say thats what’s not real, isn’t real, if its almost identical.

It’s quite likely to me the Apple Vision Pro becomes the start of a plausible movement towards digital entrenchment, a key factor in even more people withdrawing from traditional life, and with this comes existential questions we’d be wise to ponder without judgement.

I'm not saying this will happen fast, the tech is too expensive and not good enough to be a sweeping wave.

I'm not saying it's new, there are huge demographic tranches of society that are close to this state now, from avid gamers to the incel movement, to porn addicts, to Black Pill subredditors to 4chan lurkers *, there are perhaps hundreds of millions of people living life like this. A day spent on Public Transport in China, looking at groups of young people hanging out anywhere, would convince you that their phones have taken over their lives.

What I am saying is we may see a bifurcation, a vast segment of the world, perhaps without the means, mechanics, desire or skills to live a traditionally good life, seek to exist primarily in the digital realm.

And as a reaction against this, more traditional privileged people seeking to unbind themselves from screens, stimulus, scoring and algorithms, to flourish in a more traditional, real way.

Maybe the long term success of the next array of devices is less about how much money people have and more about how good their actual reality is.

And whatever the case is I refuse to believe that these headsets will replace the phone, they were just entrench and not insignificant tribe of people into a primarily non-Real life.

* there is a lot of stuff on the Internet about these groups and experts on them, and I'm not one of them, I will have made many mistakes describing these tribes and there is a lot to read for those who care. It is worth mentioning they'll be almost never talk about these people in marketing. even the billions of people who game frequently are ignored by every single brief I've ever seen and unless you're selling an energy drink or Pizza.