Apple’s vision of our miserable lives
“Daddy, where are your eyes?” the young girl says to her absent father.
I have to say, I found Apple’s “vision” of our future hugely depressing. Whilst there can be no doubt about the amazing technology the company has created, it feels that the positioning is nothing short of dystopian.
Now, I get why Apple decided to go down the ‘augmented reality’ route rather than the pure Metaverse — they have a lot more form in building functional interfaces. By avoiding the pure VR route, they were also able to avoid showing off potentially clunky and awkward 3D graphics akin to what Meta has shown. Apple’s implementation is slick and seamless, and to an end-consumer, should feel like less of a leap from screen to headset. They even bragged about the joy of staring at a spreadsheet even bigger than your own house. With a few twists of the crown you can envelope yourself in a cocoon of cells — what dreams are made of.
That being said, all the ways they showed this application was essentially people ignoring life as it is happening around them. You’re encouraged in a sense to never take it off — certainly not to play with your children. It reminds me of the 1991 movie Wedlock, where all the prisoners have necklaces that explode if they try to escape. Whilst Apple isn’t as ghastly as to use semtex in its devices, it has promised a dance along TikTok app: a punishment possibly worse than being swiftly beheaded.
At the end of Apple’s #WWDC23 we see a man laughing as he kicks a ball to his daughter after she has distracted him from his important work at the coffee table. He is in fact only laughing at a video of what he is told is his daughter. The reality is that he lives alone and never had a family because he was too busy climbing Everest from his sofa. The vision around him is just another layer Apple has created to keep him happy and productive. Outside his ten bedroom house, behind the panoramic lakes, the world continues to burn as it enters the next age of extinction. After morning meetings, the “Dad” will relax with a movie about steam trains and reminisce about how things used to be better in a time before he even lived. It reminds him that he needs to vote for the Reframe party who are the only ones standing up for “traditional values” and the “anti-awake” policies. With a few blinks and a pinch in the air he votes directly from the toilet, before heading back to his desk where he fingers the knife drawer between earnings calls.
