Two recently read articles have inspired me to try to verbalise my long, half gut-feeling, half vaguely-rationalised attitude towards the technological changes we are facing. The first, “Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?” comes from Jaron Lanier, the pioneer of V.R. and a leading figure in the technology for over four decades.1 The second is Rebecca Solnit’s reflection on how Sillicon Valley has transformed the lifestyle in San Francisco.2
You would expect Lanier, “the father” of virtual reality, to advocate for the technology to become ubiquitous. In the essence of his article, he does not. Conversely, he names Apple’s and Meta’s plans to make V.R. an indispensable part of our everyday life, a mistake. No matter how helpful virtual, or rather augmented reality can be in medicine, architecture, aviation, it gives a thrill only when used fleetingly, as a tool, not as a permanent substitute for the real world. For Janier, the best moment of a session in V.R. headset is when he takes the headset off, and confronts himself with the unrivalled, tangible beauty of the real world again.
Living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is a life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not loose it. - Jaron Lanier
Compare the hubris of Mark Zuckerberg, who wants to enforce everybody to become dependent on the networks and devices he envisages, with the modesty of Jaron Lanier who puts the manufactured fruit of his lifelong efforts in the shade of a human: “We must now put people on pedestals, or they will drown.”
Compare, then think, then choose.
Rebecca Solnit recalls San Francisco of her youth, teeming with social life among the variety of small, local shops; and attributes the contemporary demise of social fabric to the arrogance of obscenely rich, irresponsible and unaccountable technocrats, whom I’d rather call plutocrats.
By producing such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to none. - R. Solnit
What Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and the like have in common, is hubris, arrogance, and “abuse of other’s privacy while ferociously protecting their own.” (R. Solinit) I am not much interested in the lives of these gentlemen, hm… of these guys, and only from the article I’ve learned that Peter Thiel “stands against the ideology (sic!) of the inevitability of death of every individual.” What?!
Sapienti sat! Who calls the inevitability of death an ideology (I still cannot shake off), stands himself beyond the nature of life; every life, which intrinsically features exactly the same number of deaths than of births. Such an arrogant has nothing to offer to me, no matter how tech savvy he or she is.
Think for a while, what could be the real incentive for designing a social media platform and delivering it to millions of people worldwide, if the inventor builds a luxury bunker for himself, to survive a possible apocalyptic event (Zuckerberg and his secret Hawai compound). To improve your and my life? Really?
The World Wide Web (I stick to this name to denote all the content, leaving the term “internet” to the infrastructure), computer software and smartphone applications, communicators, geolocation, weather prediction, you name it, are not inherently wrong. The difference starts with people behind it and their intentions: is a piece of technology offered with an intention to help you, at work or in everyday life, or is it rather imposed on you to glean data from your web searches, your writing, your mail and messages? Does the information you get inspire you to think, or is it only a bait to make you click?
Here is the demarcation line which should guide us in what to accept, and what to reject.
We have the right to choose, and our choices, multiplied by millions of people, have the power to make a change.
I strongly believe, that trying to move away from the algorithmic leviathans of information, trade, and entertainment, towards individual, well informed choices is, these times, an everybody’s duty, comparable with the obligation to live in a more sustainable way in the face of the climate change.
The more arrogant and hubristic the owner of an enterprise is, the more intensely we should shun the “benefits” they try to impose on us.
A smartphone, a V.R. set, a streaming service, an e-reader; these are all tools, of which we can and should make a good use. Not forgetting for a single moment, that the real world, all its beauty and its horrors, its richness to sustain us, and the power of the elements which can kill us, all pleasures we can enjoy and all duties we must fulfill to survive; this sensory world, for which there is no substitue, is the bedrock of our life.
If you have any thoughts on the above, please leave a comment. Your remarks may improve my future writing.
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“Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us” by Jaron Lanier.
The New Yorker, 2024-02-02
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/where-will-virtual-reality-take-us
“In the Shadow of Silicon Valley (Loosing San Francisco)” by Rebecca Solnit
London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 3, 2024-02-08
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/rebecca-solnit/in-the-shadow-of-silicon-valley