the Apple Vision Pro (???) announcement video is vibeswise identical to every other Big Tech Announcement Video you ever get now – not only rancid, but so overwhelmingly rancid that it’s literally hard to talk about. it’s such a dense ball of interwoven awfulness that pointing out any individual strand 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 at work, 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 that 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
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
lots of peoples’ brains have been irrevocably damaged by Moore’s Law and they think that V2 of the thing will have double the battery life and double the power, and because their brains have also been irrevocably damaged by techie herd mentality they believe that those things are all that’s keeping it from being something every human on the planet wants.
i just hope the honeymoon lasts as little time as possible and we can put the last few nails in this broader narrative’s coffin. but it’s apple so who knows, maybe there’ll still be people hanging on a decade from now insisting that the baggie of dogshit is gold coins.
definitely heard what you said correctly voice so put all my money into dogecoin, got it
It might catch on if people had $3500. Which we do not.
i can tell you what, Steve Jobs never would have allowed something that looked so dork-ass
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