Looking away

The first reviews are in on Apple’s Vision Pro. Does it earn a thumb’s up? Is it an 8.7? Will it be a hit? How many units have sold? Is it trending? It would be pointless for me to pretend to neutrality on this. I’m rooting for it to fail, just as much as tech reviewers are generally hoping new tech will be “transformative” or “disruptive” and testify to the world-determining relevance of their chosen beat.

Paris Marx has a set of reasons to reject the Vision Pro here; my operative assumption is similarly that stuff branded as “tech” (as opposed to some more specifically designated field, like “medicine” or “transportation” or “physics” or even “management” etc.) all shares the same purpose of sustaining the “tech industry,” if not advancing “techno-authoritarianism” (the correct way to pronounce “techno-optimism,” as even the Atlantic has recognized). At the very least, each new product line allows tech people to continue to be tech people, much as most of what is published or broadcast mainly serves the purpose of allowing media people to remain media people.

The tautological nature of most “tech” is especially obvious when products are introduced with no particular market or purpose in mind. Their flagrant non-necessity is flaunted like the quintessence of opportunity. They are presented as a kind of abstract potentiality for consumers to harvest, as if it were the greatest honor for us to be able to become users and invest our otherwise formless enthusiasm into the various buzzwords churned out by Silicon Valley marketing departments and endow them with some concrete meaning. What is “defi”? What is the “metaverse”? What is “artificial general intelligence”? What is “spatial computing”? Earnest attempts to define these terms don’t obviate the bad faith with which they were devised.

Of course the Apple goggles are a preposterously priced novelty looking for a customer base to validate their existence. That is basically true of all “tech”; that is what defines it as “tech” and not something else. In a relatively exhaustive review for the Verge, Nilay Patel concedes that “there’s a part of me that says the Vision Pro only exists because Apple is so incredibly capable, stocked with talent, and loaded with resources that the company simply went out and engineered the hell out of the hardest problems it could think of in order to find a challenge.” In other words, the company is out of ideas other than the idea of its own innovativeness, and it is required to spend lavishly to sustain that fundamental myth. Technical challenges are entirely subordinated to the overriding capitalist challenge of making new markets where human flourishing doesn’t call for them.

Patel laboriously details the user experience of the Vision Pro only to conclude that Apple’s approach to augmented reality — not full immersion in a virtual world, but a see-through screen that tries to pre-synthesize the manifold of sensory stimuli for you in ways that external parties can exploit — is “a road to nowhere.” Using the device “is such a lonely experience,” he notes, and screens strapped to your face are “inherently isolating.” Even the New York Times’s Kevin Roose — who ludicrously asserts that he was “primed for skepticism” about the device — expresses some doubts, admitting, “I still have no idea whom or what this thing is supposed to be for.” (He’s quick to assert that it is still “compelling” despite having no apparent purpose or audience, as though Apple were an avant-garde artist collective exhibiting a particularly obscure objet d’art.)

These sort of observations have been made about these kinds of devices for as long as tech companies have been trying to foist them on us. But no amount of criticism or public indifference will stop tech companies from trying to get us opt into their isolating technology, into their enclosure, where they can not only capture more of our biometric gestures (where our eyes move and what our hands are doing at every instant, as the Vision Pro must do to operate) but can fully mediate reality to us, to the degree where we only can see and feel what they are willing to permit us to see and feel. Wouldn’t it be great if you had to pay Apple or Meta a licensing fee to use your eyeballs?

Roose would like to reassure us that when looking into the interior of the Vision Pro’s lenses, “you feel like you’re peering out of your eyes, not into a screen.” But Patel reports that “you’re still constantly being reminded that you’re looking at video on screens, and reality is just a lot more interesting than that.” Both of these observations speak to Apple’s ambition to eliminate the gap between screen and reality and have them co-exist on our eye, making the eye less an organ of sense perception than a clunky interface beholden to its hardware, software, and engineering competency. But in practice, the Vision Pro simply replaces your eyes with cameras.

One could take a Kantian line here and question the degree to which the eye can ever really access reality, whether it is augmented by “pass-through” screen technology or not. And one could question the integrity of the brain’s internal operating system, the a priori schema that format sense data so that the understanding can use them for cognition. The heavy-handedness of Apple’s attempt to further mediate reality to the goggle-wearer shouldn’t make us think that taking the goggles off allow them to see reality in some direct and unmediated way. The elusive point of VR and AR tech could simply be to re-enchant our senses, to make us appreciate how “interesting” plain old “reality” can be once more and how “natural” our access to it really is, how it doesn’t really require social relationality at all. Who wouldn’t prefer the most basic shape of consciousness to climbing Hegel’s ladder to absolute spirit? Sense certainty is a wonderful thing—thank you, Oculus Rift; thank you, Apple!

Part of the point of AR/VR devices is to conflate reality with resolution. Roose gushes over the Vision Pro’s purported ability to record “memories” with a greater amount of detail.

I’ve long awaited the day when 3-D images are good enough to make me feel that I’m actually reliving a family memory, rather than looking at a grainy snapshot.

Looking at spatial photos and videos on the Vision Pro, I realized that moment had arrived. The photos and videos in Apple’s demo — which included a scene from a kid’s birthday party, a video of a mom making bubbles for her daughter and a family gathered around a kitchen table — were gorgeous, and the depth added by the 3-D camera made them uncannily realistic.

There is a naïve faith here that what makes memories affecting is how detailed they are, that somehow memories might not be “realistic” enough. If you record some event with enough fidelity, the recording will do the work of remembering for you, and you won’t have to worry about it again. Memories are conceived as a quantum of information, a signal muffled by the noise of time. This seems like a tragic misapprehension of what memory consists of, like reading Proust and wishing he could have just watched some home movies instead of writing all those boring words.

The inadequacy of our documents prompts our memory more than their thoroughness; we work to remember what is not recorded, not reified into an image and that missing material is ultimately what make a moment feel significant. It matters because we sense what has been lost along with what has been preserved. And no matter how thoroughly the Vision Pro records a particular event, it will still be the case that it will call more attention to what is beyond the frame than what is replayable. No amount of detail will fully capture or replicate what it was like to experience a moment. No amount of mediation yields pure presence.

Reality goggles, regardless of whether they are perceived to work or not, support the fantasy that the individual has an autonomous, personal grasp of the real. Either they are helping you see the real in an augmented or electively virtual way, or they are reawakening an awareness of how connected to reality you are automatically, through the passive faculties of your senses. They deny that society is always already mediating reality to us in ways we can never fully fathom, let alone control.

Apple wants consumers to imagine the Vision Pro is more like Google Glass than a VR helmet, but even reporters as professionally committed to giving Apple the benefit of the doubt as these two reviewers can’t accept that or even pay much lip service to it. “Most of what’s impressive about the Vision Pro happens in fully immersed V.R. environments,” Roose writes, “not the kinds of ‘augmented reality’ situations that Apple is envisioning.” Patel frankly states several times that the Vision Pro “is a VR headset masquerading as an AR headset.”

The fact that the cameras “pass through” your actual surroundings to the screens in front of your eyes doesn’t make the product less of an immersive VR helmet; instead it is bizarrely immersing you in the environment where you already are and setting up a parallel sense of reality rather than an augmented one. It offers a real-time demonstration of how reality reduces to the size of screens, breaking the world down into information chunks where it would otherwise be a continuous experience of infinite, inexhaustible richness. Some may perhaps take comfort in seeing that infinity negated and made seemingly tractable (it all can be captured and datafied; the “memories” will now be more complete); some will be invigorated when they take the goggles off, with a stronger sense of immanence in the only world there is.

But there are better ways than indulging in “immersive experiences” to remind us of the plenitude of reality. The most definitive thing about face computers is that you can’t look away from them. The screen is designed to envelop you. But people invariably come away from them with an enriched appreciation of how much they take looking away for granted.

Looking away is the basic unit of subjectivity, the ability to modulate one’s relation to the sensorium. I can fully engage with my surroundings, or I can withdraw myself, turn inward, see myself as on the margins of whatever activity is taking place. I can adjust my inner sense of how much I am subject and how much I am object in relation to everything around me. The world carries on without my input or output. Devices like the Vision Pro depend upon and foreground the idea that you are at the center of the reality you take in, which is not reality at all but the starkest form of delusion. The mind ultimately rebels against it.

The fact that wearing reality-distorting goggles is isolating could in theory be addressed; Facebook has made some clumsy attempts at it with initiatives like Horizon Worlds, where people can experience a shared digital construct. But the need to look away can’t be accommodated by a device that is designed to control what you see.