RadixJournal - Soyjack Utopia

00:00:00.000 Hi everyone, this is Richard and welcome back to my journal.

00:00:04.300 I'm going to react a bit to the release of the Apple Vision Pro.

00:00:12.960 Don't worry, this sub-stack has not become a tech enthusiast sub-stack.

00:00:19.360 I'm not rebranding, nor will I be unboxing anything.

00:00:23.700 I'm only reacting to this for three reasons, I guess.

00:00:29.100 First off, I'm in middle age and I have been a bit of an Apple enthusiast for my entire life.

00:00:37.520 So there is a personal aspect to this.

00:00:41.420 Secondly, I do think this is culturally significant.

00:00:46.180 And so I will react to the product itself, but I want to talk about what it means for us as a society.

00:00:51.980 And thirdly, I guess, for philosophical reasons, I think we have been, as a civilization, questing for the metaverse since Book 10 of Plato's Republic.

00:01:07.760 So yes, I'll go that deep.

00:01:09.800 First off, let me just react to this on a surface level.

00:01:15.720 I first talked about the notion of an Apple headset around a month ago, I think.

00:01:24.900 And we talked about it on one of our members-only calls, and I actually posted my monologue on it publicly.

00:01:34.620 So you can go visit that, and I'll link it in the description, of course.

00:01:40.180 I was very down on this notion of an Apple headset.

00:01:49.720 I haven't re-listened to what I said, and maybe I was a little more balanced or fair.

00:01:56.940 But I was basically saying that this was going to be a complete disaster.

00:02:02.740 At the very least, you could say that they're diminishing returns, really, with these Apple products and in terms of changing the world and changing society.

00:02:15.800 So obviously, the Apple II did change society.

00:02:23.900 I mean, and Steve Jobs stealing, you know, it's what great artists do, stealing from the Xerox Corporation Research and Development Group,

00:02:34.020 and arriving at this notion of a user interface that's graphical, that is intuitive and fun, that's using a mouse and clicks and all those things.

00:02:47.100 Obviously, that was game-changing.

00:02:49.620 And everything that we take for granted now in terms of a computer and thus in terms of everything we do in our daily lives does derive from that on some level,

00:03:01.360 even if it was all stolen and not quite invented by Steve Jobs.

00:03:07.080 Steve Jobs is more of a showman than a technologist.

00:03:13.640 And I'm certainly not the only one to say that.

00:03:16.200 He probably has more in common with Barnum or something.

00:03:21.040 I actually think probably the best analog with Steve Jobs is Walt Disney.

00:03:25.500 And Steve Jobs, like Walt Disney, was a deeply American type, but also someone who was offering a kind of escape.

00:03:38.740 Someone who would use technology, but use it for humanist ends, you could say.

00:03:45.940 For better and for worse.

00:03:47.140 There's many things to criticize about Walt Disney, many things to criticize about Jobs.

00:03:51.320 Both, of course, became cult-like figures, particularly after Steve Jobs' death in 2011.

00:04:00.200 I mean, he was almost literally worshipped by various urban hipsters.

00:04:06.180 But what I mean by that is this.

00:04:08.140 It's not so much a fantasy of technology itself.

00:04:13.920 Even though Apple products will often, not always, but often be best in class and they'll brag about speed and hard drive size and Moore's Law and all that kind of stuff.

00:04:27.260 That's not really the point.

00:04:30.380 And it's very similar with Walt Disney.

00:04:32.280 He also was a technological innovator.

00:04:36.860 But it was always technology as a means.

00:04:39.600 You know, in the iPhone announcement presentation, Steve Jobs said that we're at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

00:04:49.080 And he actually showed an image of a street signs of liberal arts and technology.

00:04:54.020 So it was a kind of merging of the technology sphere, which can be scary and dehumanizing and frustrating and maybe even dystopian at its worst.

00:05:08.060 And humanism in the sense of it just works.

00:05:11.520 It's fun.

00:05:12.660 It's intuitive.

00:05:13.420 It's beautifully designed.

00:05:15.200 It kind of looks like something out of, I don't know, Star Wars or something like this.

00:05:20.880 And you can see that with this new product, the Vision Pro, the weaving and the little accents of orange and things like that.

00:05:31.420 It does look very Star Wars-y, in fact.

00:05:34.560 But it's this minimalist, sleek, futuristic, but also approachable design that is associated with Jonathan Ive, Johnny Ive, who I don't think works at Apple any longer, but was a major figure there in terms of design.

00:05:55.680 The idea that you design the computer as an aesthetic object, that you wouldn't just create this cheaper and cheaper plastic box that is purely utilitarian, but you design something that would be beautiful, that you'd want to be seen using.

00:06:11.440 That the iMac in your home would kind of have a special place, that you'd want to be seen working on a Apple Airbook or a MacBook Air at a coffee shop, that that says something about yourself.

00:06:28.400 It says that you're productive and you're creative.

00:06:31.080 It also says that you have taste.

00:06:33.380 And, of course, it says that you maybe have a little disposable income.

00:06:36.420 It says all those things, whereas the goofy utilitarian corporate shill is there slamming on his plastic ThinkPad doing Excel spreadsheets and, you know, eking out profit.

00:06:54.820 The person using a Mac is creative and changing the world or innovating or maybe crafting the perfect home movie, capturing those moments.

00:07:05.760 You saw a lot of that in the Vision Pro demonstration.

00:07:11.460 So what I reacted to with the very thought of the Vision Pro was that this is very much going against all that.

00:07:26.320 Yeah, you can make a set of goggles fairly aesthetic, but at the end of the day, you're closed off from the world. 0.97

00:07:35.180 And, in fact, you look like a huge dork using them. 0.93

00:07:38.820 There's kind of even as brilliantly as these goggles were designed, you still can't get away from the dork factor. 0.95

00:07:47.340 And, in fact, you're carrying along a battery pack in your pocket.

00:07:51.440 I mean, there's a lot of hurdles to overcome, not in terms of your experience of it, but in terms of people's experience of you.

00:08:01.100 So it seemed to really go against Apple's philosophy, which I think is something that's kind of unspoken on some level, but on another level, something they wear on their sleeve.

00:08:13.240 In other words, it's cool to use this thing.

00:08:16.020 Are you really going to produce a product that's just inherently dorky?

00:08:19.100 You know, ski goggles are cool. 0.97

00:08:23.580 VR goggles, massive dork fest.

00:08:27.700 I still cannot imagine wearing one, even if it has Apple's logo on it.

00:08:35.360 So there was this kind of like going against Apple's vibe. 0.98

00:08:40.320 It was you look like a dork wearing them. 0.90

00:08:45.160 You're in a kind of you're trapped in a virtual reality space and you're not living in the real world. 0.96

00:08:54.860 There was at least some reporting on people in Cupertino that were quite skeptical of all this.

00:09:02.740 And they were kind of they're saying things that I think, you know, us normal people are also saying, which is that, you know, isn't this isn't this going against what we're all about?

00:09:13.480 Isn't this almost quasi evil in a way?

00:09:17.980 We're trapping people in a digital space, whereas we should be doing things that help people live in the real world or even in an analog space.

00:09:29.160 That is something that helps them be more creative or helps them even bond with their children and or so on through, you know, home movies have long been a big fixture with Apple.

00:09:41.240 This is this is the reverse of that.

00:09:43.800 This is a device that at least in its contemporary incarnations is solely about hardcore gaming or hardcore pornography.

00:09:54.440 You know, I mean, needless to say, you could imagine the kind of porn that can be created with this thing.

00:10:02.980 You wouldn't need to have sex again. 0.68

00:10:05.420 In fact, it would be even better than the real thing.

00:10:07.540 You could just kind of live in this digital realm of a wraparound 3D vision of whatever you're into.

00:10:17.220 And it would not only would it trick your brain, but it would in fact be better than the real thing.

00:10:22.240 It would lead to the extinction of the human race.

00:10:24.640 In fact, we'd all be pleasuring ourselves on VR headsets and not engaging with members of the opposite sex in the real world. 1.00

00:10:33.280 Isn't there something just inherently dystopian about this?

00:10:37.600 Now, I think Apple did answer a lot of those critiques, actually.

00:10:44.720 And all of this showed quite a bit of thought.

00:10:49.540 And that's what Apple is good at.

00:10:52.800 It's offering a thoughtful product.

00:10:55.820 They've put out some duds in the past, of course.

00:10:59.540 But generally speaking, they offer products that they've thought about.

00:11:04.860 They've kind of they've taken in some criticism.

00:11:08.200 They've addressed things.

00:11:09.300 They've revised things.

00:11:10.660 They don't do something when they could because it's just not right.

00:11:16.820 And they don't want to overwhelm you with features.

00:11:20.540 So this does show some thought.

00:11:23.260 And so there's some interesting things about these goggles where, for instance, if someone enters the room, you know, these goggles are covered in cameras.

00:11:32.600 So if someone enters the room and you look at them, or at least you're pointed in their direction, you're not actually looking at them, the face or the face mask, if that's the right word, of the goggles are a screen.

00:11:50.160 And they will actually show a representation of your eyes.

00:11:53.140 And it looks as if you're seeing through the goggles and seeing their face.

00:11:57.300 And, you know, of course, the way that we communicate is 90% nonverbal.

00:12:05.480 So much of communication is eye contact, a smile in your eye, a raised eyebrow, a hand gesture.

00:12:14.280 That's how we communicate.

00:12:15.500 And so Apple has thought through this.

00:12:18.660 They don't want to trap you in the digital space, but you can actually interact in the world.

00:12:24.940 There's actually an image in this presentation of a man working while wearing the goggles.

00:12:30.180 So he's walking around his workspace and, you know, getting a paper handed to him or something like that.

00:12:38.480 And when he's looking at that person, a representation of his eyes.

00:12:42.220 So we have, it's funny, I guess, in the sense that you're offering a digital representation of a transparent goggle, as opposed to just having a transparent goggle.

00:12:57.360 But whatever, they have at least addressed this.

00:13:01.960 The other thing that I could say about it that is two things.

00:13:05.760 One of the first is that I can say about it that's actually good is that, I mean, to compare the introduction of Apple Vision Pro to the Facebook metaverse is to compare apples and oranges or it's to compare the New York Yankees to a semi-pro beer league.

00:13:32.400 There's no comparison in a way.

00:13:36.480 I'm sure there are a lot of critics of this product, and I'm sure there are people making fun of it, including myself.

00:13:42.500 I'm not going to buy one.

00:13:44.920 But at the very least, I could say that it was compelling as opposed to being dystopian and dorky, the two Ds of Facebook.

00:13:57.380 So Facebook offers the metaverse.

00:14:02.040 So it is a purely digital realm in which you interact with people as avatars, and you can create weird avatars like being a robot or whatever.

00:14:12.480 And as many people noted, a lot of these avatars looked something out of 1998 or something.

00:14:23.080 It was very, very cartoonish.

00:14:26.100 I don't even have the words to describe it.

00:14:28.240 It wasn't really the uncanny valley.

00:14:32.260 It was like you as a cartoon.

00:14:33.860 Now, there is a real trend towards that.

00:14:35.960 There are memojis on Apple messages, Snapchat, horrible social networking app, should be banned with TikTok.

00:14:44.600 But anyway, it has your profile as basically a memoji, a kind of idealized, cutesy cartoon version of yourself that is becoming your identity.

00:14:55.540 Apple is doing something different.

00:15:01.360 So they're imagining augmented reality.

00:15:03.820 So with these goggles, they have an illusion of being transparent.

00:15:10.860 You are viewing a digital representation of the world that you're in in the goggles.

00:15:16.180 So it's kind of redundant, you could say.

00:15:18.760 And then within that, there is a lot about it that's, in fact, familiar.

00:15:26.340 So you could answer messages, check Twitter.

00:15:29.960 You can have an app open.

00:15:31.260 You could read a website, read the newspaper.

00:15:34.640 You could work on Adobe Photoshop in one end.

00:15:40.240 So it's a kind of what they call this 3D spatial computing.

00:15:43.180 Now, yeah, there are some kind of like 3D models that you could look at in 3D.

00:15:49.120 But this spatial computing is, at the end of the day, still 2D computing.

00:15:54.780 So you're looking at, in an augmented virtual reality realm that looks like the real world, you're looking at a two-dimensional space.

00:16:05.840 So, you know, I don't know whether you find that like a compelling kind of like response or a compelling happy compromise or whether you look at that as almost redundant.

00:16:20.860 I mean, on some level, you can almost imagine like putting on these goggles and then looking at a three-dimensional representation of your own laptop that you're typing on.

00:16:33.780 I mean, at some point, it is both more familiar and thus something that I think is more attractive.

00:16:41.740 But then there is a kind of redundancy and why quality to it all.

00:16:47.960 Now, one place where it succeeds is in the realm of movies.

00:16:56.140 But even here, I think there are some criticism that should be leveled.

00:17:00.660 So, yeah, I could definitely imagine being on a plane for eight hours and just wanting to escape the humdrum of it all and the annoying person sitting next to me and just put on these goggles and, you know, watch my favorite movie and just be totally absorbed in it.

00:17:21.160 It would just be right in front of your face, amazing stuff.

00:17:25.980 I can see that.

00:17:26.960 Now, the goggles in that way could be a rich man's play thing, a $3,500 airplane movie viewing device.

00:17:39.680 There are plenty of people who would, without even any hesitation, spend $3,500 on this.

00:17:46.900 But that is the 1%.

00:17:49.880 Let's say most people are not going to be willing to do that.

00:17:53.780 They already have an iPad or their iPhone or they can watch a movie on the tablet in front of you in most airplanes these days.

00:18:02.080 So, that is, granted, cool, but then even that can be criticized.

00:18:08.320 I think there's a real 2020 quality to that.

00:18:11.880 That is the shut-in, you know, COVID-era quality to all of this in the sense that, yeah, of course, we all watch something alone.

00:18:22.800 I watched a movie alone last night, enjoyed some dinner, watched one of my favorites.

00:18:29.760 It's all fine, but it is totally reducing the theatrical or communal quality of the movie experience.

00:18:42.340 You're immersed in it alone.

00:18:44.700 There's no way that these things can really interact together.

00:18:51.100 So, you know, there's a big difference between, say, you know, sitting down on the couch with your girlfriend and watching Succession or something, Game of Thrones, and you're there communally, you're talking about it, you're both kind of reacting to it at the same time, or watching a, you know, Indiana Jones with your kids or something.

00:19:15.500 There's a communal aspect to it.

00:19:18.200 You might be at home, it might be digital, but it still resembles on some level the attic theater of 2,500 years ago.

00:19:29.780 It's communal in some way.

00:19:31.340 This is, granted, immersive, maybe it's cool, maybe it's extremely convenient on an airplane, but it's just so solipsistic that I think there is a dystopian quality to it.

00:19:42.960 And as I mentioned, this is just, you know, it was on everyone's mind, even though it wasn't mentioned.

00:19:48.740 This is just begging to be used for extreme hardcore pornography, which will end up ending the human race through lack of reproduction.

00:19:58.340 So thanks, Apple.

00:20:00.200 But yeah, those are some fairly good things.

00:20:03.140 So I guess I would ultimately applaud them for doing the augmented reality thing as opposed to a virtual reality.

00:20:15.140 They're trying to split the difference, but I don't, and I could, yeah, I mean, you could argue that 3D computing is the future and so on.

00:20:26.460 Is it really a better future or a future where we want to be?

00:20:31.600 Those are worthwhile questions.

00:20:34.020 But I do think it was a lot better than I thought, interestingly.

00:20:40.080 But yeah, to go more philosophically, because I was thinking about this the other night,

00:20:46.600 and I was thinking about the famous Book 10 of Plato's Republic.

00:20:54.580 Plato's Republic is, of course, a book about politics, as the name implies.

00:20:58.920 The name of the book is polis or city-state or whatever.

00:21:04.060 It's usually translated as republic.

00:21:06.180 But it's really Plato's masterwork, and it contains almost all of his philosophy in this one political manifesto, you could say,

00:21:20.680 about the best possible form of government and society.

00:21:25.240 And there's a tremendous amount there.

00:21:28.840 One of the themes is this notion of mimesis or imitation.

00:21:37.280 And Plato takes some interesting perspectives on this.

00:21:44.000 In Book 10, he lays it out pretty clearly.

00:21:49.180 He says that, you know, any carpenter can make a couch.

00:21:56.860 But when he makes this couch, and these can be couches of various different kinds and various different fabrics or sizes or dimensions, etc.

00:22:08.940 But they're based on this, as it were, metaphysical idea of a couch.

00:22:16.100 So they are, in their way, a kind of copy of a couch.

00:22:22.100 And Plato extends that, or Socrates, I guess, in this case, who's speaking, extends that line of reasoning and says that when an artist holds a mirror up to nature or depicts humanity or, say, paints on a set in a theatrical production, paints a couch,

00:22:47.120 that he's doing an imitation of an imitation of an imitation, so Plato, in this way, has a very cynical, or maybe cynical is not the right word, a low view of the artistic process.

00:23:05.600 Hamlet will say to hold a mirror up to nature is a great thing that can be done through art.

00:23:11.400 Plato sees this as a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy, and so it's becoming blurry, and you're getting away from the real truth of the matter.

00:23:22.640 Plato, of course, wants art to be didactic in this sense, that it should have a purpose of teaching, at the very least, good behavior, but maybe even teaching truth.

00:23:36.480 And in that sense, bad art should definitely be censored.

00:23:40.700 Plato is by no means a free speech advocate or libertarian.

00:23:46.300 He's quite the opposite.

00:23:48.360 And you can look at all this and say this is the blueprint for a totalitarian society, as many people have done, Karl Popper most famously.

00:23:57.200 But what I'm stressing on is that idea of art being a kind of diminished thing in the sense that it's a copy of a copy.

00:24:06.700 It's not even a representation of the real.

00:24:10.100 It's a representation of a representation.

00:24:13.840 And in a way, the carpenter who makes a couch, who's copying the ideal of a couch, is higher in Plato's mind.

00:24:22.740 And so I think there's been this tendency since Plato, I mean, all philosophy since Plato is merely footnotes, to try to access that real, that the real thing, the ideal realm.

00:24:40.780 Maybe we can imagine it's out there, we can imagine it's divine, but it is the realm of truth beyond the realm of mere representation.

00:24:55.680 And I think there's something, I sense something like that is going on in this quest for the metaverse that is a purely digital realm.

00:25:08.760 And I'm not saying that Mark Zuckerberg is a Platonist exactly, in the sense that he's read Plato or he's inspired by Plato.

00:25:19.880 Maybe he has, maybe he hasn't.

00:25:21.800 He dropped out of Harvard, but maybe before then he might have been assigned to the Republic.

00:25:26.800 Who knows? Who cares?

00:25:28.280 But Mark Zuckerberg is part of a general tendency.

00:25:33.040 Why would we want to go into the metaverse?

00:25:36.940 Why is that an ideal?

00:25:40.960 This life-denying quality of all of these products, even Apple Vision, even though it's better.

00:25:48.320 The life-denying qualities of technology where we want to enter the digital realm and this digital realm will somehow be more truthful.

00:25:58.360 That you'll be able to access a kind of idealized version of yourself and maybe even access a kind of utopian version.

00:26:07.260 You know, we're away in the metaverse.

00:26:09.560 We've dispensed with all of the humdrum and grossness of the real world.

00:26:15.720 You don't have to, you know, you don't sweat. 1.00

00:26:18.700 You don't have to take a shit. 0.99

00:26:20.380 You, there's no food to eat in that sense. 1.00

00:26:24.240 You, you know, you're, you're, you're accessing some kind of idealized realm.

00:26:30.880 And why are we questing for that endlessly since Plato?

00:26:35.980 And why do we think that that realm is going to be any more truthful?

00:26:42.360 Just some bigger questions to ask about technology.

00:26:47.600 Is maybe the metaverse the ultimate fulfillment of Platonism or even the ultimate fulfillment of Christianity?

00:26:58.160 Something to think about.

00:27:00.180 Talk to you later.

RadixJournal - June 05, 2023

Soyjack Utopia

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript