the Apple Vision Pro (???) announcement video is vibeswise identical to every other Big Tech Announcement Video you ever get now – not only totally rancid, but so overwhelmingly rancid that it’s hard to talk about. there’s so much awful so tightly compacted into such a dense ball of awful that pointing out any individual awful aspect of it feels like you’re missing the point. a wonderful defense mechanism
one of the parts that always stands out to me the most, though, is the way these things are always depicting an idyllic but harried life where you’re walking in a park, or spending time with your children, or patting your dog, and thank god that’s not all you’re doing right now thanks to the thing on your face that lets you also do what’s important, which is an email or a spreadsheet. you’re working, but the kid still thinks you’re mentally and emotionally present, so that’s 100% of both of those needs met. nice one.
another layer on the hard-to-pull-apart techbro brainworm onion that we see again and again is “looking like something is the same as being the thing”. in the apple announcement it’s “we will generate an ultra realistic facsimile of a person’s face for you to have a video call with”, which can be as technically impressive as it wants, but i don’t want it, i want to see the person’s face.
it’s also what the bot stuff people are calling “AI” is: it sometimes looks smart for a second, and these guys literally don’t know why it would matter if there’s a difference between that and intelligence. you judge a book by its cover because to you, someone uninterested in reading, that’s what a book is. i have to lump the “make a mesh of your face” people in with the “ai is un-gatekeeping art” people and the “nfts let you own things” people and the “whatevercoin will change the world” people: those to whom the surface level read of any given thing is the only one worth having
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