I watched a wild video[1] the other day which really gave me a new perspective on the Apple Vision Pro. Casey Neistat walks around NYC with an apple vision strapped on his head and chats with people in the street. I was arrested by it - part of the reason is how he "effortlessly" interacts with a bunch of strangers in the video. He exists in the city, even with the headset on. Despite how nobody can actually see his face. I'd find that pretty scary to do!

I suspect part of the problem might be that devices give as an emotional excuse to avoid real human to human interactions. They enable us to turtle away. Talking to people online feels like the real thing, but better because its less scary. We don't have to be quite as vulnerable when we do it. And maybe thats the problem with this stuff - the more we enable "social junk food" we use it as a substitute for real, scary, intimate human interactions. The technology isn't the problem per se. The problem is how we choose to hide behind it.

[1] https://youtu.be/UvkgmyfMPks . Definitely worth a watch.

It's also a bit that compulsatory education ends at 18, and we switch to entercation. The top priority of the news is to captivate attention and entertain.

The black mirror about muting people and not seeing them anymore is the future. Living in one physical space occupied by multiple tribes, who merely see otherselves as apparitions.

Any time it is applicable, i have to post my favorite article on the internt https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... Ironic that im stuck on it.

Having nothing to do is a great driver to force people out of their holes and interacting with other humans. We've made it too easy to stay home

Counterpoint: when genuine human interaction does start to happen online, there's often an incentive to monetize it. It's the monetization that turns it into junk food. Spam, clickbait, infinite algorithmic feeds - they're all symptoms of the need to make money. I wonder if a true public space will ever emerge online.

See also this post that makes roughly the same point: https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

Wikipedia and Archive.org provide clues to other ways this could be addressed, through nonprofit donations, but then you have a somewhat opaque and unelected priesthood moderating things.

HN gets around it by basically being niche enough to rely on one overworked person to moderate. Scaling up the HN model would mean many individual small sites acting independently as a patchwork of public commons.

And all the other workarounds to this problem - and I agree it's a huge social problem and a drain on society - turn out to involve some technical hack to tie patchworks together, like Mastodon.

One thing that hasn't really been tried (by a democracy), at least that I know of, is a social network for citizens run by elected committees. And this may be the worst idea of all, since it would become a natural competitor for power with all other branches of government, and would run the risk of directly corrupting national politics in any number of ways...

Basically all this is to say that running any kind of mediation at scale between random members of society is dangerous, and not just because of the profit motive, but more basically because power corrupts.

This ^.

I'm hesitant to embrace a tech that so clearly and obviously keeps people separated. At least with a phone, you can position it so 2 people can view it simultaneously.

Every other week, someone needs to call said parents and walk them through connecting to Zoom. Again.

Introduce a VR headset? Absolutely not.

I'm not going to introduce VR either but not because she would not understand the technology. It just does not add anything real over what video calling already offers. Maybe AR if and when retinal projection ever get to be a thing, when the headset is no heavier than a normal pair of glasses, when it is not encumbered by an overly bossy company like Apple, maybe then. Not as long as you need to don a $4K pair of ski goggles which lock you out of the real world to suck you into some corporate mimicry.

> I'm not going to introduce VR either...it just does not add anything real over what video calling already offers.

^ this is the key point.

For example, being in Australia conferences in the EU and US require a 14 hour flight time and days of adjusting to a new time zone. Likewise there are people working two jobs, have children or are a carer who may want to experience the benefits of studying in person but can't.

I suspect as the fidelity gets better that human need of being around other people is going to be fulfilled. Which could make a massive difference in terms of reducing loneliness and the feeling of isolation.

So ... in many ways my life has been this "over the coming decades" first the internet in general, then social media, then smart phones. And at each of those steps I said what you just said about this.

But I dunno man! I have to say that I feel like the "this will lead to deterioration in valuable human bonds" crowd has been more thoroughly vindicated than my "we have to wait and see whether the good dominates the bad!" crowd.

When used as an excuse this is disingenuous - the problem is tech - without it, humans were better off in whichever way it caused harm. We're just dumb hairless monkeys without our tools, barely harmful at all.

Tech can have some benefits, but it also usually has some serious issues. If it didn't, we'd never need to update our tech to be safer, or pass legislation surrounding it. These issues exist regardless if there are humans driving or not - the only solution for some hypothetically superior race of beings is to not use it, at least in that iteration/form.

I have much more hope for someone like Starline, though it seems they've gone the AI route to cut down on the number of cameras and hardware for blending them together. https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline-pro...

It is a lot easier to use those headset where they naturally fit: ultra-personalised experience. Like social media v2, lot of potential to connect human, but devolving into jailing human in echo chambers: you can keep in touch with your family and friends across the world, or you can get hooked into a forever stream of news/post/video/product customised to make you engage.

VR headset used for games. I can see the social aspect winning. Spacial computing, I'm scared.

Worth a re-watch in this day and age given your comments on the zeitgeist.

"you will eat the b^H^H wear the headset"

This isn’t a new observation. I recall reading back in the 90s about how the problem with TV is what’s on the TV.

The tech is fine. The incentives for media are all perverse and destructive.

Which isn’t wrong necessarily. But definitely is working hard.

I don’t know if I agree with that just that you’re characterization is off. I think the medium is the message.

But to stretch the analogy, drinks are still an issue "because its the people hawking them have the wrong incentives". It could be sugary drinks, alcoholic ones, etc, they are all bad (even water). However this doesn't say much about why these drinks are all bad, which has nothing to do with incentives.

Its a similar argument for TV/social media. Sure bad people exist, uninteresting argument. That ignrores the real question of why they are bad.

A common saying for Movie and TV adaptations for books is 'we needed to change it to adapt it to the big screen'. Which is true.

It would be really silly to directly transcribe a reading of LOTR to a movie - despite the week long running time.

The media is the message, and the message is the media - if we want it to work/be effective.

The marketing and type of drinks for alcohol are not the same as for sodas - for a reason.

So saying some fundamental properties of the media won't impact the type of message or impact of the message seems a bit unlikely.

Exactly. Some properties of the medium are inherent. No amount of "bad actor" excuses change that, and possibly even affect the usage.