TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Plato’s Goon Cave feat. Paris Marx

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

This week, Riley, Milo, and Alice join special guest (and beloved friend of the show) Paris Marx of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast for a discussion about Apple Vision Pro. Yes, the ridiculous snowboarding goggles that let you see pop up ads everywhere, the next iteration of Google Glass (but worse, and weirder). Our message to you is: bully anyone wearing these things. Check out Tech Won’t Save Us here: https://www.techwontsave.us Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/platos-goon-cave-98073718 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

I feel like most of these people using it in these videos are like performing as well. Like I don't think they're actually using it properly. They're doing it for TikTok or Instagram Reels or whatever to get the views, right? Yeah, it's fully a meme as it will be the first time somebody gets it like yanked off their head. Or as it will be that the first person like, you know, gooning on their Vision Pro while having their Tesla Cybertruck on autopilot obliterates some toddlers that were about to get into a school bus that was otherwise going to obliterate them in a battery fire. I've been wondering, like, as these videos have been spreading around, though, like,

you might remember in, like, the Google Glass time, like, one of the key photos was Robert Scopol kind of wearing the glasses in a shower and, like, just looking like a lunatic, basically. And as these, like, videos have started to emerge, I was like, who is going to be the Robert Scopol of the Apple Vision Pro era and like be the image that makes this thing like unacceptable. Immediately pushing his way to the front, Casey Neistat. Yeah, maybe I hope so.

Like I hate that guy. Yeah, he's annoying. Although I feel like Casey Neistat is like, there's a level of irony to him or of like not, he sort of knows that he's not taken seriously. The fucking guy getting out of the Cybertruck, if it's like anonymous man, like the tomb of the unknown fucking Apple Vision Pro user,

like no one will ever know that man's name, but him voting while getting out of a cyber truck has gone down in history. Mason We see that Mark Zuckerberg, lifetime bitch, one year too early to the VR party that at least some people seem to be excited about who aren't being paid to be excited about it. But Riley, you can't call the Apple Vision Pro VR because it's actually spatial computing. I don't know if you got the memo. What a crazy concept. Paris, how is spatial computing different from VR? It's not.

Yeah. Fucking Marx, like a Berg heard about the Apple Vision Pro, and he immediately had Nick Legg zipped up into the punch bag from Die Another Day and it's just been absolutely taking the shit out on him. Hitting him with a fucking crowbar, just been kicking it constantly. He's like, Oh, please Mark, let me out. I've had enough. He's like, I'll tell you when you've had enough. So, Paris, you've written some, you and others, but you especially have written some really good stuff about the Apple Vision Pro. Can you just break it down for us?

What does this thing actually purport to do? What are the use cases? Other than just looking, like making people look like morons or being actively dangerous to themselves and others on the road, take me through it. Sure. It's supposedly the future of computing because Apple needs something so it can show that it can still make new products and that it can still quote unquote innovate, right?

Oh, if you don't mind me jumping in right away, it's a comfort product. It's an emotional support system, basically. To a certain degree, for Apple executives and investors. You could probably control a drone with that. Yeah. Exactly. So, sorry, carry on, please. Yeah, but kind of the goal of the product or how Apple is presenting it to the world

is quite distinct from, say, what Facebook was saying a year or two ago, where they were like, this is the metaverse. You're going to be in there playing your games and like living in this virtual world and whatever. And Apple is saying, you can't really play games on this thing. We don't really have a controller. We're not pushing this as like the main use case for it.

And in there like messages to journalists are saying, like, don't call it VR, don't call it the metaverse, you know, call it spatial computing and blah, blah, blah. But basically like the demos that they're showing is that you're going to use this thing for work. You're going to watch movies on it. You're going to like weirdly record your children while you're wearing this thing on your face.

And then when your wife divorces you and takes the kids, you can sit in your dark living room and watch these on your Apple vision pro, um, all alone. Yeah. That was one of the weirdest things was it saying, but people love that, oh, you don't have to remember anything anymore, because you can just record first-person memories all the time, as though, but that's like such a classic sort of tech person mindset,

because that assumes that only one person is involved in the making of a memory, and that the person you're making memories with, like I don't know, your kid or whatever, isn't going to be off put by the fact that they can't see your fucking eyes. No, no, because everyone's going to be wearing the Apple Vision Pro. You can see it from everyone's perspective. Everyone's life is going to be like being the pre-cogs in Minority Report.

They need to like create the AI that like takes it off of your face when you're recording. Like when everyone around you is wearing the Apple Vision Pro, it like is able to- Digitally erases it. Just put your ghostly avatar there instead. So you just think that that is what everyone's seeing. Well, we've seen videos of people using it to set cooking timers.

Yeah, we've seen it. Cool. Cause previously that was like fucking impossible. So hard. It's not like it's built right into the oven, right? Just a man, just a man with four egg timers that are like, they're in each pot of boiling water. And when they go off, he's having to reach into the boiling water

to pull them out and screaming. And they turn to the camera and goes, there's got to be a better way. Has this happened to you? The recording first person memories bit really sort of got to me because it's just like, do you think there is anything to making a memory other than just detail and a better memory

is inherently a more detailed one? It's just so strange and alien. It is total data. It's not the best of memory, it's merely a more detailed one. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just what a phenomenally weird way to look at the world that's so fundamentally alienated from anything that makes you normal.

It's sort of like doing effective accelerationism on your own sort of like brain, right? To be like, I'm sort of, I'm min-maxing all the value that I'm getting out of these memories by wearing the big snowboard in goggles while I do them. I feel like most of the videos that were going around were like, you know, you could look at them and say like, this is ridiculous, like the person using it in the subway or using it in the Cybertruck or whatever. But there was one video that kind

of stuck with me that I think really shows like the divide between some of these tech people and like, you know, regular normal people where he was like wearing the vision pro goggles like as his young daughter like, you know, baby daughter was like sleeping on him and he was like finally I can like do something while my child is like sleeping on me. Yeah, he was like watching a movie or something. Yeah, yeah. He was. Yeah, he was like watching a movie or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a... Which, okay, sure, but like, I don't know. I'm playing like baby care simulator while my child is in my chair.

He's a German man. And also, you know, you can ask, well, so what's actually innovative about it? Doesn't really let people do more things other than just turn every flat surface in their field of vision. So long as that flat surface isn't moving in the room is lit just right and there's no nothing on the flat surface into another screen to bombard you with information like in your house.

It seems largely the innovation and get please Paris correct me if I'm wrong is about tracking and capturing things about tracking your eyes and knowing when you focus on something about tracking your gestures. So it knows like, oh, you're pinching on where you think the Apple music app icon is. For example, and miniaturizing is sort of very, very large. Some things that used to need to be very large into quite a small headset. These are impressive engineering problems to solve, but... Yeah, but you put them in the context of capitalism and you left once again with the you training your own replacement, but recreationally and you're paying for the privilege.

Yeah, I think based on what you're saying, I think one of the things that stands out and kind of Neelai Patel was talking about this in his review of it, who's at the verge. Usually, he's not someone I would bring up as someone I would cite favorably, but I thought his review was actually quite critical for one of these mainstream tech publications, where he was saying that it felt like Apple did all this innovation on this product, tried to move all these things forward, but it was kind of like innovation for the sake of innovation. Like what is really the purpose behind it? What is it that this product is actually delivering? And that seems very unclear. And one of the things that has stood out to me in reading some of these reviews,

the people who are actually using it and who aren't just like pure Apple fanboys, even when they acknowledge that it seems cool to use and stuff like that, they're like, but it feels incredibly isolating to be stuck behind this massive headset. And I think part of the goal that really comes through in Nila Patel's review is that there's a really clear desire by Apple to mediate how you're seeing the world, right? And the initial goal of this product, which I think is important to remember was not to create this headset, but to create like glasses that were going to have displays and things that would come up on it, but they weren't able to miniaturize the technology so much so that you could just have a regular pair of glasses with this kind of thing operating on it.

So they kind of compromised and made this headset instead. And so they still want to do this stuff where you can put your screens all over the place or like watch a movie on your headset and stuff like that. But now it's not on like a small glasses display, it's on a large headset. So to have the kind of pass through so that you can see what's not on like a small glasses display, it's on a large headset. So to have the kind of pass through so that you can see what's actually on the other side of the display, you need to have all of these cameras. And so you're actually having reality kind of,

these cameras are in the middle of the reality and Apple's products and Apple's services and whatever are mediating that reality to you. And they want you to feel that it is kind of seamless, right? That you're just seeing the world through these cameras and through this headset, but actually, it's quite noticeable that that's not happening, and that there is a clear divide and that you are looking at the world through these cameras. But that way of mediating reality is very beneficial and potentially very profitable

to these tech companies because we see that the more and more that they can get us looking at their screens and looking at their services, they basically make more money off of us.