Let's Discuss the Apple Vision Pro

FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF.

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It is unwise to narrow the cause down to just one thing, and probably unfair to limit it to Twitter-related psychic damage, but something is not right with the “innovators” and “disruptors” in Silicon Valley. It should be pretty easy to identify that having billions of dollars does not insulate a person from contracting a debilitating case of anti-social derangement in its ultra-degraded contemporary form. Product releases come and go, most of them featuring the amphetamized yammering of someone who watched or made too many sigma grindset videos or the tireless cocksure bullshit of a LinkedIn influencer. The dull grandiosity of Silicon Valley is not the worst thing about America’s economic inequality—that would be the broader hollowing out of the common good and the gnawed-down feeling of graft and hazard that permeates so much of everyday life—but their riches and impunity seemingly haven’t bolstered their capacity to bring about meaningful human progress. These deeply mediocre lords of this stagnant decline mostly tweak and tinker and pass it off as some revelatory technology. I am perversely fascinated by these freaks.

Whenever these pale creatures periodically belch up out of Silicon Valley’s ketamine/anti-woke bogs to hock their latest iteration of gizmos, it is not very interesting to me whether they actually believe the Apple Vision Pro will revolutionize productivity, or if this is their flubby attempt at salesmanship. One reason it is not very interesting is that everything they have touted as the future of some essential human thing or another—NFTs or crypto or Threads or the Metaverse—has mostly burned out in ways that left behind very few useful remnants. The greed and shortsightedness of contemporary capital have eroded social capacity everywhere, and it is clear that their present applications of technology represent a future that must be avoided.

All of this is a rambling preamble to say that the Apple Vision Pro is horrifying and inhuman. Having your iPhone home screen superimposed onto the world while you walk around sounds like a Disneyfied Dante’s Inferno. And the first thing the Apple Vision Pro does is obstruct your peripheral vision. The brand value of this product is: Here is that browser you have open with 100 tabs you have never looked at, but what if this was your life all the time? This is just ADHD, and you can buy it for $3,500.

It has taken me too long to realize that the urge to dunk on these tech dorks is a noble and vital instinct, and it should be encouraged and rewarded. What separates the fleece-vested fuming maestros of Silicon Valley from the rest of humanity is not their capacity to look at all this artless sweaty hucksterism and see not just the future, but nothing less than a vital solution to all our existential quandaries. I wonder whether they really believe any or all of this is the future or whether they just believe that everyone else can be made to believe it if they say it enough. Technology is supposed to solve a problem, but the only human need the Apple Vision Pro is addressing is finding a way to Venmo your friend for dinner and projecting that onto your ceiling. Who is asking for this?

The implications of this half-wondrous, half-finished $3,500 pair of eyewear have only become more startling when I encounter people interacting with it in what is reliably an even more degraded state. I came across a TikTok of a man who bragged about putting his iCal on his front door so he could check his schedule before he left his apartment. He could also pin a real calendar onto his door so he doesn’t have to dress up like a scuba diver to see that his dentist appointment is at 3 PM.

It may take time, and more online roasting than I am comfortable resigning myself to, for people to realize how ridiculous they look while they’re wearing these haphazardly fitting brain goggles. These people think they’re on that Iron Man steez in these supposedly cool and hip accessories, but they look like non-playable characters from a snowboarding video game.

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