The Great Escape from Escapism

VR Might Still Be Beyond the Edge of Cyberspace

“<magazine illustration> man climbing out of a tron - like computer grid,” Midjourney

In case you’ve been trapped underneath the Earth’s crust you missed it, Apple announced their latest Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality headset. I checked out the video above and it looks pretty good. And Digital Native does make a pretty convincing case that media has always trended towards more immersion not less. As he puts it:

We saw this offline, with books giving way to radio, which in turn gave way to film and television. And we’ve seen the pattern repeat online: Twitter was text-based; Instagram popularized photo-sharing; TikTok is built around video. Now, every platform is scrambling to be video-first. Each major platform gets progressively more immersive.

He is actually more right than he lets on. Even live experiences are not immune to this trend, with 3-D immersive experiences of Van Gogh paintings doing blockbuster business. The Marvel Cinematic Universe may release films in 3-D but that apparently isn’t immersive enough. Fans love that the story keeps going on through interconnected sequels without an apparent endpoint. For now, artwork without end seems to be the most common wish proffered to the AI genie. In these “no art, just vibes” times, endings are giving major death vibes. How popular is media immersion? There is a an app called Blush which is like Tinder but you can have AI chatbot matches for a premium subscription.

So if all this is true, why do I feel like VR is still not about to have its moment?

Looking back at Digital Native’s immersion argument outlined in the block quote above, one thing I noticed about the trend in offline media immersion is there was a push for 3-D movies in the ‘50s but by the ‘60s 3-D movies were already considered quaint and ridiculous. Even now, 3-D movies have lost their mojo, Avatar 2 notwithstanding.

(link to original tweet because Elon is still petty about embeds on Substack)

Film director Michael Bilandic’s tweet above is only the funniest of the horde of great Twitter and TikTok takedowns of the Apple Vision Pro. As one Wired magazine staffer said:

Every successful Apple product of the past two decades has disappeared into our lives in some way—the iPhone into our pockets, the iPad into our purses, the Apple Watch living on our wrists, and the AirPods resting in our ears. Wearing the Vision Pro for hours on end will call into question what it means to compute, but also, what it means to live in the real world. My forehead felt cool when I took the Vision Pro off after around 30 minutes, a testament to Apple’s considerate design. But my face also breathed with relief, the way it has after using other heads-up displays. The air feels more real out here.

Here is a takedown on TikTok that’s not meant to be caustically funny like the above tweet but is the most insightful:

@profgallowayI don't see Apple's VR headset going places 🤷 #scottgalloway #apple #tech #prediction #fyp

Tiktok failed to load.

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Why would Apple let go of the world’s pulse? Ego. As said in the above Tok, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been bitter rivals as of late. Perhaps Cook greenlit this idea as a kind of showdown with Zuckerberg’s Meta Oculus Metaverse designs. And, by the time he realized the Metaverse would hang itself, Cook was just the latest victim of sunken cost fallacy.

Not only might this not work, but it may have come at the worst time. More than any other time in recent memory, this decade has been one in which we were told not to go outside. Between the COVID era and the recent Smokepocalypse in New York, which was the worst wildfire smoke air pollution event in US history, Americans were cooped up inside. It may be true that the trend of media might be pointed towards deeper immersion, but this is does not mean that we want more media necessarily. For every lonely geek looking for love with AI chatbots, there is a person who resents being told not to go outside and swears this is the summer they return to the beach, regardless of how poorly their beach body is coming along.

Imagine the opposite: imagine a two-year blackout where nobody could go online. After two years, people would line up to have the Apple Vision Pro surgically attached to their heads. But our current situation is trending towards the exact opposite. Not only with people going to horny drunken indie sleaze concerts in NYC, but the resurgence of spirituality as well. Spiritual experiences, from Catholic epiphanies to ayahuasca trips, are the opposite of the immersive escape offered by media. They offer more reality not less. From Noah Kumin’s latest Substack:

A peak experience or religious experience simply contains more experience. It is something deeper and more holistic. As William James puts it in his conclusion to Varieties of Religious Experience, someone undergoing such an experience

becomes conscious that this higher part [of himself] is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

In light of such experiences, our mundane experience of the material world is only a view of the world “through a glass darkly.” It is real, it is there, but experimentally we know that it is not the whole of the thing, and we know that the whole, by being whole, is greater and more real.

Without any media, we already look at the world through goggles. Many of us look at the world through the goggles of our ego, ignoring pretty sunsets and happy animals, focusing instead on our petty rivalries. I am one of them. I am pretty sure Tim Cook is too.