The Apple Vision Pro and its consequences will be a disaster for the human race
Image credit: Apple
Note: This is a work of satire.
By now we’ve all seen and salivated over Apple’s croissant-shaped mixed-reality goggles. The technology has been praised by dozens of early users, who gush that the seamless eye tracking is “magical” and feels as close as one can get to controlling reality with their minds. It’s immersive. It not only feels real, it feels better than real. And, dear God, there’s nothing—and I mean nothing—worse than real life.
I confess I was one of those naive few who believed that social media was but a simple social experiment; a passe fad. Surely, I figured, people still want to feel the breeze in their hair and the sun on their faces. Surely people don’t want to stare, slack-jawed and listless, at a glass brick for six hours a day. Surely people still value anonymity on the internet. Surely people see certain types of websites for what they are, highly addictive, potent digital dumpster water that induces an anxious psychosis, a desire to imitate dangerous or stupid behavior, a desperate need for attention, validation, and praise from strangers, an impulse to prostrate oneself on an altar of shamelessness for the temporary high engendered by likes, shares, follows, invites, retweets, reblogs, saves, comments, replies, messages, inMails, kiks, yaks, snaps, and DMs. Surely, I surmised, people understand that something so addictive, so permanent, and so utterly ruinous to mental health, attention span, and productivity should be kept far, far away from vulnerable members of society. Surely kids should be banned from this stuff. Surely we’ve all learned from the catastrophe of the iPad generation, you know, the kids who aren’t hitting developmental milestones, the kids whose motor skills are so delayed they can’t even hold a pencil—surely we won’t strap children into AR/VR/MR/whatever-R headsets and turn them loose into the waiting jaws lurking in the depths. Just kidding, of course we will!
The Apple Vision Pro was impressive to me not only because of how incredible the capabilities seem but because of how ridiculously dangerous and sinister this thing is going to be when—not if—it gets down to an affordable price point. When everyone is wearing these things in real life, not in the comfort of the living rooms, which, I remind you, is the ultimate goal. You’re going to get in the headset and you are going to like it or, so help me God, I will turn this car around and take you right back to the dry, cracked fallout of reality. Loneliness has become so ubiquitous that the Surgeon General had to classify it as an epidemic. No one has friends anymore. Six in ten young men report perpetual singlehood. More people aren’t even entering relationships or bothering with intimacy anymore. Social media has made body image worse than ever. Is augmented reality really going to make any of this better?
Perhaps the next generations will look back on cosmetic surgery as medieval butchery. After all, they will say, why bother with a painful, pricey butt lift or jaw shave when you can enhance your avatar for just a few extra AppleCoin? And dating, too, may become a thing of the past. After all, who needs a girlfriend when you can flood your orbitals with a million miles of virtual vice? When you can make a baby in a vat?
Needless to say, I was wrong about social media being a cute trend. But I will not be wrong about the Apple Vision Pro. Now I also have no choice but to embrace the chaos and absurdity of the new real. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag or the toothpaste back in the tube, so to speak. I normally pride myself on being a bit of a Luddite but even I want one of these things. Not for any particular reason—I mean, maybe it’ll be fun to spin my next mixtape on the vast floating GarageBand app hovering over my modular boucle furniture set. I also want to see just how dangerous this thing is. How addictive; how compulsive, how degenerate! If TikTok is digital crack cocaine, and if people are capable of gaming to death, and if people can’t quit internet porn without getting literal withdrawals, then I want to see just what these croissant goggles are capable of. I welcome the dystopian hellscape. Bring it on.