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June 5, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
26:59
Soyjack Utopia

Richard discusses Apple’s “Vision Pro,” the company’s foray into virtual reality. Has Western man been questing for the “metaverse” since Book X of Plato’s Republic? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Hi everyone, this is Richard and welcome back to my journal.
I'm going to react a bit to the release of the Apple Vision Pro.
Don't worry, this substack has not become a tech enthusiast substack.
I'm not rebranding, nor will I be unboxing anything.
I'm only reacting to this...
For three reasons, I guess.
First off, I'm in middle age, and I have been a bit of an Apple enthusiast for my entire life, so there is a personal aspect to this.
Secondly, I do think this is culturally significant, and so I will react to the product itself, but I want to talk about what it means for us as a society.
Thirdly, I guess, for philosophical reasons, I think we have been, as a civilization, questing for the metaverse since Book 10 of Plato's Republic.
So yes, I'll go that deep.
First off, let me just react to this on a surface level.
I first talked about the notion of an Apple headset.
Around a month ago, I think.
And we talked about it on one of our members-only calls, and I actually posted my monologue on it publicly.
So you can go visit that, and I'll link it in the description, of course.
I was very down on this notion of an Apple headset.
I haven't re-listened to what I said, and maybe I was a little more balanced or fair, but I was basically saying that this was going to be a complete disaster.
At the very least, you could say that they're diminishing returns, really, with these Apple products in terms of changing the world and changing society.
So, obviously, the Apple II did change society.
I mean, and Steve Jobs stealing, you know, it's what great artists do, stealing from the Xerox Corporation Research and Development Group and arriving at this notion of a, you know, user interface that's graphical, that is...
Intuitive and fun that's using a mouse and clicks and all those things.
Obviously, that was game-changing, and everything that we take for granted now in terms of a computer and thus in terms of everything we do in our daily lives does derive from that on some level, even if it was all stolen and not quite invented by Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is more of a showman than a technologist.
And I'm certainly not the only one to say that.
He probably has more in common with Barnum or something.
I actually think probably the best analog with Steve Jobs is Walt Disney.
And Steve Jobs, like Walt Disney, was a deeply American type, but also someone who was offering...
I'm certainly not the only one to say that.
A kind of escape.
Someone who would use technology, but use it for humanist ends, you could say.
For better and for worse.
There's many things to criticize about Walt Disney, many things to criticize about Jobs.
Both, of course, became cult-like figures.
Particularly after Steve Jobs' death in 2011.
I mean, he was almost literally worshipped by various urban hipsters.
But what I mean by that is this.
It's not so much a fantasy of technology itself.
Even though Apple products will often, not always, but often be best in class and they'll brag about speed and hard drive size and Moore's Law and all that kind of stuff.
That's not really the point.
And it's very similar with Walt Disney.
He also was a technological innovator.
But it was always technology as a means.
You know, in the iPhone announcement presentation, Steve Jobs said that we're at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
And he actually showed an image of a street signs of liberal arts and technology.
So it was a kind of merging of the technology sphere, which can be scary and dehumanizing.
And frustrating and maybe even dystopian at its worst.
And humanism in the sense of it just works.
It's fun.
It's intuitive.
It's beautifully designed.
It kind of looks like something out of, I don't know, Star Wars or something like this.
And you can see that with this new product, the Vision Pro, the weaving and the little...
It does look very Star Wars-y, in fact.
But it's this minimalist, sleek...
Futuristic but also approachable design that is associated with Jonathan Ive, Johnny Ive, who I don't think works at Apple any longer, but was a major figure there in terms of design.
The idea that you design the computer as an aesthetic object, that you wouldn't just create this cheaper and cheaper plastic box that is...
Purely utilitarian, but you'd design something that would be beautiful, that you'd want to be seen using, that the iMac in your home would kind of have a special place, that you want to be seen working on an Apple.
Airbook or a MacBook Air at a coffee shop, that that says something about yourself.
It says that you're productive and you're creative.
It also says that you have taste.
And, of course, it says that you maybe have a little disposable income.
It says all those things, whereas the goofy utilitarian corporate shill is there slamming on his plastic.
ThinkPad doing Excel spreadsheets and, you know, eking out profit.
The person using a Mac is creative and changing the world or innovating or maybe crafting the perfect whole movie capturing those moments.
You saw a lot of that in the Vision Pro demonstration.
So what I reacted to with the very thought of the...
Vision Pro was that this is very much going against all that.
Yeah, you can make a set of goggles fairly aesthetic, but at the end of the day, you're closed off from the world.
And in fact, you look like a huge dork using them.
There's kind of even as brilliantly as...
These goggles were designed.
You still can't get away from the dork factor.
And in fact, you're carrying along a battery pack in your pocket.
I mean, there's a lot of hurdles to overcome, not in terms of your experience of it, but in terms of people's experience of you.
So it seemed to really go against Apple's philosophy, which I think is a...
It's something that's kind of unspoken on some level, but on another level, something they wear on their sleeve.
In other words, it's cool to use this thing.
Are you really going to produce a product that's just inherently dorky?
You know, ski goggles are cool.
VR goggles, massive dork fest.
I still cannot imagine wearing one, even if it has Apple's logo on it.
So there was this kind of like...
Going against Apple's vibe.
It was, you look like a dork wearing them.
You're trapped in a virtual reality space.
And you're not living in the real world.
There was at least some reporting on people in Cupertino that were quite skeptical of all this.
And they were saying things that I think...
You know, us normal people are also saying, which is that, you know, isn't this going against what we're all about?
Isn't this almost quasi evil in a way?
We're trapping people in a digital space, whereas we should be doing things that help people live in the real world or even in an analog space.
That is something that...
Helps them be more creative or helps them even bond with their children or so on.
Home movies have long been a big fixture with Apple.
This is the reverse of that.
This is a device that, at least in its contemporary incarnations, is solely about hardcore gaming or hardcore pornography.
Needless to say, you could imagine...
The kind of porn that can be created with this thing.
You wouldn't need to have sex again, in fact.
It would be even better than the real thing.
You could just kind of live in this digital realm of a wraparound 3D vision of whatever you're into, and not only would it trick your brain, but it would in fact be better than the real thing.
It would lead to the extinction of the human race, in fact.
We'd all be...
Pleasuring ourselves on VR headsets and not engaging with members of the opposite sex in the real world.
Isn't there something just inherently dystopian about this?
Now, I think Apple did answer a lot of those critiques, actually.
And all of this showed quite a bit of thought.
And that's what Apple is good at.
It's offering a thoughtful product.
They've put out some duds in the past, of course, but generally speaking, they offer products that they've thought about.
They've taken in some criticism.
They've addressed things.
They've revised things.
They don't do something when they could because it's just not right, and they don't want to overwhelm you with features.
This does show some thought.
And so there's some interesting things about these goggles where, for instance, if someone enters the room, you know, these goggles are covered in cameras.
So if someone enters the room and you look at them, or at least you're pointed in their direction, you're not actually looking at them, the face mask, if that's the right word, of the goggles, Are a screen, and they will actually show a representation of your eyes, and it looks as if you're seeing through the goggles and seeing their face.
And, you know, of course, the way that we communicate is 90% nonverbal.
So much of communication is eye contact, a smile in your eye.
A raised eyebrow, a hand gesture.
That's how we communicate.
And so Apple has thought through this.
They don't want to trap you in the digital space, but you can actually interact in the world.
There's actually an image in this presentation of a man working while wearing the goggles.
So he's walking around his workspace and getting a paper handed to him or something like that.
And when he's looking at that person, a representation of his eyes.
It's funny, I guess, in the sense that you're offering a digital representation of a transparent goggle as opposed to just having a transparent goggle.
But whatever, they have at least addressed this.
The other thing that I could say about it that is...
Two things.
The first that I can say about it that's actually good is that, I mean, to compare the introduction of Apple Vision Pro to the Facebook metaverse is to compare apples and oranges or it's to compare the New York Yankees to a semi-pro beer league.
There's no comparison in a way.
I'm sure there are a lot of critics of this product, and I'm sure there are people making fun of it, including myself.
I'm not going to buy one.
But at the very least, I could say that it was compelling as opposed to being dystopian and dorky, the two Ds of Facebook.
Facebook offers the metaverse, so it is a purely digital realm in which you interact with people as avatars, and you can create weird avatars like being a robot or whatever.
And as many people noted, a lot of these avatars looked something out of 1998 or something.
It was very cartoonish.
I don't even have the words to describe it.
It wasn't really the uncanny valley.
It was like you as a cartoon.
Now, there is a real trend towards that.
There are memojis on Apple messages.
Snapchat, horrible social networking app, should be banned with TikTok.
But anyway, it has...
Your profile is basically a Memoji, a kind of idealized, cutesy cartoon version of yourself that is becoming your identity.
Apple is doing something different.
So they're imagining augmented reality.
So with these goggles, you are...
They have an illusion of being transparent.
You are viewing a digital representation of the world that you're in, in the goggles.
So it's kind of redundant, you could say.
And then within that, there is a lot about it that's in fact familiar.
So, you could answer messages, check Twitter, you can have an app open, you could read a website, read the newspaper, you could work on, you know, Adobe Photoshop in one end.
So, it's a kind of, what they call this 3D spatial computing.
Now, yeah, there are some kind of like 3D models that you could look at in 3D, but this spatial computing...
Is, at the end of the day, still 2D computing.
So you're looking at, in an augmented virtual reality realm that looks like the real world, you're looking at a two-dimensional space.
So, you know, I don't know.
Whether you find that like a compelling kind of like response or a compelling...
Happy compromise, or whether you look at that as almost redundant.
I mean, on some level, you can almost imagine putting on these goggles and then looking at a three-dimensional representation of your own laptop that you're typing on.
I mean, at some point...
It is both more familiar and thus something that I think is more attractive, but then there is a kind of redundancy and why quality to it all.
Now, one place where it succeeds is in the realm of movies.
But even here, I think there are some criticism that should be leveled.
So, yeah, I could definitely imagine being on a plane.
For eight hours.
And just wanting to escape the humdrum of it all and the annoying person sitting next to me and just put on these goggles and, you know, watch my favorite movie and just be totally absorbed in it.
It would just be right in front of your face.
Amazing stuff.
I can see that.
Now, the goggles in that way could be a rich man's plaything.
A $3,500 airplane movie viewing device.
There are plenty of people who would, without even any hesitation, spend $3,500 on this, but that is the 1%.
Let's say most people are not going to be willing to do that.
They already have an iPad or their iPhone, or they can watch a movie on the tablet in front of you in most...
So that is, granted, cool, but then even that can be criticized.
I think there's a real 2020 quality to that.
That is the shut-in, you know, COVID-era quality to all of this.
In the sense that, yeah, of course, we all watch something alone.
I watched a movie alone last night.
Enjoyed some dinner.
Watched one of my favorites.
It's all fine.
But it is totally reducing the theatrical or communal quality of the movie experience.
You're immersed in it alone.
There's no way that these things can really interact together.
So there's a big difference between, say, You know, sitting down on the couch with your girlfriend and watching Succession or Game of Thrones.
And you're there communally.
You're talking about it.
You're both kind of reacting to it at the same time or watching a...
You know, Indiana Jones with your kids or something.
There's a communal aspect to it.
You might be at home, it might be digital, but it still resembles on some level the attic theater of 2,500 years ago.
It's communal in some way.
This is, granted, immersive.
Maybe it's cool.
Maybe it's extremely convenient on an airplane.
But it's just so solipsistic that I think there is a dystopian quality to it.
And as I mentioned, this is just, you know, it was on everyone's mind, even though it wasn't mentioned.
This is just begging to be used for extreme hardcore pornography, which will end up ending the human race through lack of reproduction.
So thanks, Apple.
But yeah, those are some fairly good things.
So I guess I would ultimately applaud them for doing the augmented reality thing as opposed to a virtual reality.
They're trying to split the difference, but I don't...
And I could...
Yeah, I mean, you could argue that 3D computing is the future and so on.
Is it...
Really a better future, a future where we want to be?
Those are worthwhile questions.
But I do think it was a lot better than I thought, interestingly.
But yeah, to go more philosophically, because I was thinking about this the other night, and I was thinking about the famous Book 10 of Plato's Republic.
Plato's Republic is, of course, a book about politics, as the name implies.
The name of the book is polis, or city-state, or whatever.
It's usually translated as republic.
But it's really Plato's masterwork, and it contains almost all of his philosophy in this one political manifesto, you could say, about the best possible.
One of the themes is this notion of mimesis or imitation.
And Plato takes some interesting perspectives on this.
In Book 10, he lays it out pretty clearly.
He says that, you know, Any carpenter can make a couch.
But when he makes this couch, and these can be couches of various different kinds and various different fabrics or sizes or dimensions, etc.
But they're based on this, as it were, metaphysical idea of a couch.
So they are, in their way, a kind of copy.
Of a couch.
And Plato extends that, or Socrates, I guess, in this case, who's speaking, extends that line of reasoning and says that when an artist holds a mirror up to nature or depicts humanity or, say, paints on a set in a theatrical production, paints a couch.
That he's doing an imitation of an imitation.
So Plato, in this way, has a very cynical, or maybe cynical is not the right word, a low view of the artistic process.
Hamlet will say, to hold a mirror up to nature, is a...
Great thing that can be done through art.
Plato sees this as a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy, and so it's becoming blurry, and you're getting away from the real truth of the matter.
Plato, of course, wants art to be didactic in the sense that it should have a purpose of teaching, at the very least, good behavior, but...
And in that sense, bad art should definitely be censored.
Plato is by no means a free speech advocate or libertarian.
He's quite the opposite.
And you can look at all this and say this is the blueprint for a totalitarian society, as many people have done, Karl Popper most famously.
But what I'm stressing on is that idea of Art being a kind of diminished thing in the sense that it's a copy of a copy.
It's not even a representation of the real.
It's a representation of a representation.
And in a way, the carpenter who makes a couch, who's copying the ideal of a couch, is higher in Plato's mind.
And so I think there's been this tendency since Plato, I mean all philosophy since Plato is merely footnotes, To try to access that real, that the real thing, the ideal realm.
Maybe we can imagine it as out there, we can imagine it as divine, but it is the realm of truth beyond the realm of mere representation.
And I think there's something...
I sense something like that is going on in this quest for the metaverse that is a purely digital realm.
And I'm not saying that Mark Zuckerberg is a Platonist, exactly, in the sense that he's read Plato or he's inspired by Plato.
Maybe he has, maybe he hasn't.
He dropped out of Harvard, but maybe before then he...
Might have been assigned the Republic.
Who knows?
Who cares?
But Mark Zuckerberg is part of a general tendency.
Why would we want to go into the metaverse?
Why is that an ideal?
This life-denying quality.
Of all of these products, even Apple Vision, even though it's better, the life-denying qualities of technology where we want to enter the digital realm and this digital realm will somehow be more truthful, that you'll be able to access a kind of idealized version of yourself and maybe even access a kind of utopian version.
You know, we're away in the metaverse.
We've dispensed.
With all of the humdrum and grossness of the real world, you don't have to sweat, you don't have to take a shit, there's no food to eat in that sense.
You're accessing some kind of idealized realm.
And why are we questing for that endlessly since Plato?
Why do we think that that realm is going to be any more truthful?
Just some bigger questions to ask about technology.
Is maybe the metaverse the ultimate fulfillment of Platonism or even the ultimate fulfillment of Christianity?
Something to think about.
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