Sifting through early testimonial videos on heavily-censored, state-affiliated media (aka YouTube) of Apple's newly announced Vision Pro "mixed reality" contraption proved a bit surprising. Amid almost sputtering, uniformly ecstatic reports—
—from the few invited to enter the Apple Park inner sanctum in Cupertino for actual time wearing an actual pre-production device to experience things not actually there, were subtle hints of fear of what a gadget like this may portend.
For example, in this video:
and this:
one can catch glimpses of worry, "Oh it was incredible but... will I ever leave the house again?" One actually jokes about saying farewell to boring old non-augmented, non-virtual reality, "Smell you later!" Kinda funny but also, perhaps a problem.
Feeding a high-technology habit is becoming more and more akin to something like grappling with habitual hard drug use. Increasingly large chunks of billions of lives are devoured daily by viscerally entrancing (and now completely overwhelming) experiences facilitated by ever larger and more dazzling screens, ever louder and more immersive sound systems, ever more dopamine drip-feeding mediated and almost entirely meaningless games, movies, faux-"social" spaces, empty interactions, corporate mindlessness sessions, and hyped-up, vacuous, pseudo-events.
Google is the corporate equivalent of an intelligent, reliable, helpful robot (or should I say android?) that is secretly a treacherous fink silently documenting everything it can about you and reporting back to its true masters your areas of psychological vulnerability, habits, location, daily routes, and level of obedience to policed consensus reality. Essentially, Google is quietly and methodically laying the groundwork for your eventual assassination—character or literal—should it ever be deemed necessary by the rulers of the world.
Apple's brand of evil is far more slippery. At one level it appears to be offering a straightforward bargain, "look, we're not going to invade your privacy, at least not until you become interesting to the government, but in return we need you to empty your wallet for us. That's it, dump it out, all of it. That's not enough, do you need a loan or credit card?"
There is another catch to Apple's stiff bargain, however, something not quite captured in any of the EULAs you impatiently sign after spending an irresponsible amount of money for your sleek new iDeathtrap gadget: you're being inexorably drawn deeper into a kind of soul-dead, bourgeoisie rationalist (not to mention neoliberal capitalist) ideology. This ideology is sold to you via skillfully lit golden hour imagery of generic, physically fit, confident and attractive, perpetually positive, casually stylish, doubtlessly competent, perfectly interchangeable, politically content, relentlessly busy, and suspiciously satisfied pod people representing what Apple, Inc. would prefer humans aspire to be; jogging and laughing and smiling their way through what outside of these ads and the imaginary lifestyle they portray is the nightmarish corporate hegemony, collapsing biosphere, and desperate precariat companies like Apple have helped trap billions of alienated, domesticated, and debt-ridden wage slaves within.
Beyond even that lurks what may be the final level of the game Apple is playing with you, along with everyone else being drawn into their carefully occluded Vision. And the boss of this game level you really do not want to meet. During his talk on June 3 in Dublin, Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth asked audience members with iPhones to hold them up. He asked what we saw on the front of the device (a black mirror reflecting ourselves) and on the flip side (the ubiquitous corporate logo which brings immediately to mind the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden). To drive the point home he asked if anyone knew the price of the very first Apple computer, the Apple I.
Many know this. Yes, it was $666. Far fewer know the cost to carriers of the original iPhone was also $666.
As Kingsnorth has asked aloud previously, was the realisation of prophecy a joke, or was the joke prophecy realised? And does it matter? Of course, not everyone is being taken in. Some are cutting straight to the chase about where this is all leading the world:
The Vision Pro by all accounts appears to be dreadfully, ominously spectacular. And that’s the destination: life and society as pure, endless, spectacle. While the device itself is a technically new, technically bleeding-edge consumer product, it represents just the latest advance of what may well be a very old agenda.
With this bulbous tech leech latched onto your face like a Hollywood alien, our awful capitalist realist dystopian anti-society decays and dissolves, replaced with something seemingly more calming and controlled and easily mastered, a place far more explicable, predictable, and safe. It's almost, in fact, how people might describe a narcotic high. You may look like a douchebag, but at least you're a blissed-out one.
Apple is almost asking, “How much would you pay to no longer feel the pain of the reality we have helped impose upon you?” As with a lot of capitalist hustles these days, the same people selling you the cure helped give you the disease.
An eye-watering price will initially keep this latest and most sophisticated of soul-snares out of most hands, but you can be sure more "affordable" models are coming in years ahead. Vanishingly few humans older than about age 11 aspire to be cyborgs, yet somehow we're all being seduced into becoming precisely that in more and more literal and difficult-to-decline ways. The fierce and rapidly growing gravitational pull of the fusing phenomena of AI, VR, social media, mass surveillance, and extreme tech of every sort is drawing most of the world into a kind of black hole of technophilic nihilism, total alienation, and narcotic delusion.
Call it a singularity if you like. As a civilisation, we are nearing the event horizon of that black hole. What lies beyond the event horizon of a singularity cannot, by definition, be known.
What is known is that any human falling into one is destroyed utterly.