To hear the latest on the transatlantic effort to regulate the tech world, sign up for POLITICO’s Global Tech Day on June 15 that will track the most important issues facing the U.K., EU, U.S., and elsewhere. “Don’t wear the goggles.” So implored New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a newsletter last week, making the case to his readers that a reality lived through the mediating influence of augmented reality was not really one well-lived at all. “This is not a rejection of technological progress,” Douthat writes. “It’s a rejection of the social regress and dehumanization that comes when we let technology master us instead of the other way around.” Fair enough — there’s an entire field dedicated to making sure that technology serves humanity’s existing needs instead of amorphously shaping them. But VR devices affect us differently, in that they’re the exact opposite of new technologies like AI that operate mostly behind the scenes. They actually create the scenes. There’s a reason that Douthat is so agitated, just as there’s a reason that in introducing Apple’s Reality Pro headset, Tim Cook positioned it as the next step in an evolution of computing that started with the personal computer, evolved to the smartphone, and now will enclose your eyes in a digital bubble. The vision of a VR-augmented world proposed by Apple and the broader community of metaverse boosters would transform society as much as the smartphone did, if not more. Now Apple has developed a headset that people might actually want to use on a daily basis, assuming they can afford it. That’s why critics like Douthat (and many others) are now painting a bleak vision of what a VR-saturated society might look like, and the tech companies themselves are ardently fighting back. Whoever gains more cultural influence and wins America’s hearts and minds in that debate could help define for a generation how we interact with our devices, and how those devices in turn shape our experience of the “real world.” One of the tech world’s representatives in this fight, as one might expect, is metaverse evangelist numero uno Mark Zuckerberg — but his rhetorical mode in doing so might be surprising. “Our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social… Our device is also about being active and doing things,” Zuckerberg told Meta employees last week. “By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.” VR critics’ worst fear is that if the headsets become ubiquitous, they’ll push a tech-dependent society over the cliff of digital enslavement. Zuckerberg, here, is echoing them by positioning Apple’s device as enslaving future generations of couch potatoes, and his own as a tool — like Facebook, in theory — for social connection and cohesion. That’s a philosophical (and market) debate between two businesses that might not be resolved for decades. But Zuckerberg’s line of critique is a preview of how the cultural discourse is threatening to take shape around this technology before most people have even had the chance to take it for a test drive. Augmenting reality with virtual overlays and screens is, on one hand, a much more natural way of interacting with the digital world screens than craning your neck to stare into a phone all day. But it’s also an effective surrender to that world — an acknowledgment that if our lives are unlivable without the web of apps, QR codes, and RFID tags that live in our phones, we might as well have a more comfortable way of accessing them. “The rival firms clearly want people to integrate their headsets into everyday existence, the way we’ve already integrated our laptops, tablets and phones. Unfortunately, that rational commercial goal is in deep tension with the flourishing of the human race,” Douthat wrote in his column, arguing they will push humanity toward “toward deepened isolation, depressive solipsism, masturbatory anomie.” It’s easy to imagine that line of argument catching on among cultural observers and influencers, which is probably part of the reason why companies like Meta, or the enterprise-oriented Magic Leap, have been aggressive in pitching their devices as tools with specific uses in the workplace. Earlier this year Meta’s Nick Clegg made a lengthy pitch that “The Metaverse Can Transform Education,” citing significant evidence that VR tools can engage students and improve educational outcomes, both academic and professional. Like Zuckerberg, he emphasizes the human touch: “Above all, it is skilled teachers who know best how to inspire their students… Getting this kit into their hands is the necessary starting point.” That might be the case in the classroom setting, but as an ubiquitous consumer device it’s unlikely the average headset user will have a minder reminding them of best practices and to give their eyes a rest once in a while. Whether our virtual future ends up as Douthat’s anomic dystopia or a technicolor, cooperative virtual playground might ultimately depend on pesky old human nature.
| 
