Maybe you’ve seen some of the crazy videos of first-adopter techies wearing the new Apple Vision Pro. They’re … nuts.
Stuff like this:
And this, which I understand to be a put-on:
Weird! But the one that worries me the most is this, which shows the world from the perspective of a Vision Pro user:
It’s an extreme example, obviously, but I had a couple of thoughts when I watched this video and others like it:
First: We talk all the time about “immersive” technology. This is it in nearly the most literal sense (we’re not in “Matrix”-style gel tanks yet): a device that wraps around our heads and puts the digital world at the forefront of our real world experience. We’re now capable of overloading ourselves with movies and social media and direct messages all the time, even when we’re in public or talking to family or maybe even having dinner.
My second thought: Uh… I kind of do that all the time right now.
And I don’t even have a Vision Pro. My iPhone and laptop provide me with hits of dopamine during my every waking hour. Sometimes at dinner. Sometimes when I should be spending time with the people I love. Some of this is justifiable: I do work and receive lots of useful information on those devices.
But too much of it — let’s be honest here — is just a lot of dicking around.
I was well into adulthood when the iPhone and iPad and Twitter came into being. And I was, no lie, excited about those things. The Vision Pro, on the other hand, fills me with a sort of dread.
It’s a device that literally comes between us and everything we might tangibly experience. It doesn’t replace the real world, exactly: You can still chat with your spouse. But it does — again, very literally — become the filter through which users experience that world. And it does all that before you even use the avatars the device uses to all “face to face” conversations with with other users:
That doesn’t seem like a great development. More than artificial intelligence, this is what makes me feel like we’re replacing ourselves with digital tech.
Maybe you can’t fight progress. Maybe I’ll decide in the next year or two I can’t possibly do the work I do without owning a Vision Pro of my own. God, I hope not.
But watching these videos made me realize that I already spend too much of my life immersed in a digital environment. Today, I left the house with a book and notebook in my bag, but no phone or laptop. I tried to slow down and be in the real world for an hour or two. No screens, no social media. (I ended up chatting with a friend who told me she had been off TikTok a month, afraid of what it was doing to her attention span. I swear I didn’t try to have that particular conversation.) I always feel better when I do so.
But I’m not intentional about it as often as I should be. We already have enough trouble being present with our friends and loved ones, spending time with them in the real physical world. It’s only going to get more challenging.