Watch the fire. Note on Apple Vision Pro
Last week, I had dinner with a friend who is not only smarter than me but who has also built things I barely know to use (iPhone camera!) AVP almost got us fighting over some of our core beliefs
I can only wish this overview of the short history of hyperreality was published before we entered the restaurant. Perhaps it would’ve helped me put my thoughts in the right order. But as von Trier’s fox said: ‘Chaos Reigns!’, so let’s embrace the chaos and carry on.
‘When I’m bored, I pick up a good novel, sit by the fireplace, and watch the fire.’ — Oscar Wilde
I do believe that how technology is designed and built reflects a vision of reality. It's someone's vision that became convincing enough to share it with others and make others perceive it as their own. It’s not original to say but it’s worth remembering every now and then that what ‘reality’ means signifies a whole set of different things for different people.
For some, reality will be a political chessboard, a space of struggle between the oppressed and exploited and the guilty. For others, it will be nature’s eternal parade, with its sophisticated ways we try to lock into clunky metaphors and funny human rituals, a little less whimsical when we consider the loss and destruction we cause daily (as per Bruno Latour’s writings on our guilt towards nature – all links below). For someone else, it will be about mechanics and principles that animate the matter through invisible patterns and highways which determine who lives and who dies (Oppenheimer).
In our personal definition of reality (because there is no one universal definition we could agree on, and the market will sooner or later make a use of it), we reflect what we currently believe is important. For many people, it will be themselves, and there is no human lifetime long enough to make them understand how impoverishing that is.
For Van Gogh, according to Berger, reality was an act of labour:
“His whole life story is one of an endless yearning for reality. Colours, the Mediterranean climate, the sun, were for him vehicles going towards this reality; they were never objects of longing in themselves. This yearning was intensified by the crises he suffered when he felt that he was failing to salvage any reality at all. One also knows from his letters that nothing appeared more sacred to Van Gogh than work. He saw the physical reality of labour as being, simultaneously, a necessity, an injustice, and the essence of humanity throughout history. The artist’s creative act was for him only one among many such acts. He believed that reality could best be approached through work, precisely because reality itself was a form of production.”
One of the reasons I mention Van Gogh is because when great artists depict reality through painting, they rarely recreate what they see. Instead, they communicate what they contemplate being confronted with a particular problem, scene, or object. But this act has little to do with our shared reality. Painters, much like filmmakers, know best that reality is inimitable. It’s inimitable because it’s a concept, an intellectual construct that we could read much better through quantum mechanics rather than by using the Newtonian toolbox for beginners, if only we were capable of grasping the scope of quantum principles to begin with (some curators are).
Ancient thinkers used reality as a vehicle for a universal model of perfection that we were to study in order to build new, more humble models, like temples, cities and necropolises. But that was a while ago when we still believed in an elusive phenomenon called civilization, which is another form of collectively negotiated reality.
I suspect that the truth about our relationship with reality is in most cases about power, unless it is a desperate cry for solace (the two faces of hubris). That’s why great technologists target reality as their ultimate goal — the ultimate playground. A Fortnite for their obsessions, and their desire for eternity. Jaron Lanier wrote about it just recently, and as usual, he wrote it exceptionally well.
Beyond Reality
The moments when reality feels at its weirdest is when we suffer. We say (whisper), 'I feel disconnected.' We suddenly see reality in a different light, as if we were hit by fever violently invading our body and mind. That feeling of disconnection, unless it’s a clinical symptom, is usually a sign that your relationship to the world is about to change. It indicates that you are under a revolutionary amount of pressure that will galvanize a new worldview you never anticipated.
Standing in a hospital hallway, waiting for the information, you feel how reality flies away. It becomes first sharp and then blurry, isolating you from your surroundings allowing the world and its cruel, heartless particles to speed right through you, and yet you know very well that this impression is merely an illusion created by the suffering mind overwhelmed with pain.
What is our approach to reality when we realize there is not much of it left? How does it modify our outlook on how we overuse it in everyday life, like water that pours down into the sink and pipes when you brush your teeth, flowing without purpose, left to cool for no reason? We shouldn’t confuse reality with time, although there are moments when they seem almost undistinguishable.
I think of these moments when I try to understand what it is that we are building. What you, me, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, or maybe someone else, imagine every morning as the first or only thing that matters to them when they are given a chance to redefine reality, to set the stage for a new type of world we want to live in or that we want to offer to others. Let’s imagine it on a small scale, one headset at a time.
What do you see when you close your eyes and imagine your own personal reality? Do you see another screen? I don’t.
Death of The Story
How do you tell this story, how do you even begin? The story of an unknown world which you visited for me (“He who travels has a story to tell”). Isn’t that what we build our devices for? You know very well, my friend, just as much as I do, that the devices we use today substantially shape the stories we tell. Much more than its authors can imagine.
Today, we are all experts in stories, which is maybe why it is so damn hard to hear a good one, because our inner storytelling strings got broken with so many poor stories we’ve heard, so many disappointing, lecturing stories (‘you should this, you should that’), primitive in structure, and hollow in meaning. Noisy stories, pretentious stories, not-enough-given-to discover stories. Enemies of their own subjects. Walter Benjamin famously stated in “The Storyteller” on how the art of storytelling has died. He wrote it shortly before committing suicide in Spain trying to escape the Nazis; this short essay is probably one of the most relevant (I know he would’ve hated this word), the most truthful observation made at the forefront of a century of mass storytelling eruption that evolved into the experience economy as we know it today.
Benjamin starts with how a story differs from information:
“Every morning news reaches us from around the globe. And yet we lack remarkable stories. Why is this the case? It is because no incidents reach us any longer, not already permeated with explanations. In other words: almost nothing occurs to the story’s benefit anymore, but instead it all serves information. In fact, at least half of the art of storytelling consists in keeping one’s tale free of explanation. (...) Information is only valuable for the moment in which it is new. It lives only in that moment. It must be completely subject to it and declare itself immediately without losing any time. A story is different: it does not use itself up. It preserves its inherent power, which it can then deploy even after a long period of time has passed. (...) The story can be interpreted. Yet there is room for other explanations. (...) It resembles the seeds that retain their germinative power even after being shut up in the airtight chambers of the pyramids for millennia.”
What reality do you see when you close your eyes?
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: https://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Storyteller-Walter-Benjamin.pdf
Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: https://www.google.fr/books/edition/After_Lockdown/aWlCEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT7&printsec=frontcover
John Berger, Portraits, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/151-portraits
Jaron Lanier, Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/where-will-virtual-reality-take-us
Noam Segal, Notes on the Index in the accelerated Digital Times, https://pompeiicommitment.org/commitment/noam-segal/
Matthew Ball, On Spatial Computing, Metaverse, the Terms Left Behind and Ideas Renewed, https://www.matthewball.vc/all/metaversespatialandmore