The Vision Pro and other AR gear risks letting social media bubbles escape into another reality.
Mis- and disinformation is one of the defining issues of the digital age. With personalised feeds designed to maximise “engagement” and other measures which translate into time spent social media atomises the news so that there is no common frame of reference. That creates grave issues in a democracy as informed choice is difficult when social media actively tries to appeal to individual tastes and thus create bubbles instead of pursuing broad appeal. I have made the case that advertising is a poor foundation for the internet, but those concerns are freshly relevant now that Apple has released its vision pro Augmented Reality (AR) headset. I remain sceptical that Virtual Reality (VR) will take off for many applications because the internet as we have it now seems simply more convenient. However, AR has real potential if the headset was smaller, and had dramatically better battery life. That presents a potential problem for society.
What happens when the digital algorithms which rule Instagram and TikTok with an iron fist are allowed to haunt us in the real world too? Imagine a future where AR really takes off. There are some really compelling use cases, for example overlaying arrows on reality when you have entered a destination you want to navigate to. I imagine one of the first things which will be developed for the AR future is billboards and bus station ads which overlay different ads depending on who sees them. For me it is an ad for insurance, for you it’s for a restaurant, and for someone else it is for diapers. At your newsstand the headline is climate disaster and tensions in the South China Sea, for someone else it is about wokeness in schools and immigration. How can a democratic society work when we live in almost literally parallel dimensions?
Social media has led to an atomisation of society where the big news this week is wildly different depending on who you ask. A future where AR or VR is widely adopted the risk of giving advertisers and unscrupulous tech firms control over reality is one where the atomising model is exported to more realms in life. That would be a worrying development.
Of course, we don’t know whether this tech will actually be popular, and we don’t actually know that it would be developed in such a way as to be anti-social; tough taken in the context of Silicon Valley’s track record I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption. But it does give these companies a lot of power they were not entrusted by the citizenry. Strapping a Facebook headset on daily where Meta has control over what I see and where Meta can literally see what my eyes dwell on sounds unappealing to say the least. But then again so scrolling Instagram reels despite not enjoying it, and I do that several times a week already. These products are designed to be addictive and the companies making them don’t care about externalities for society. Bad enough to have that bubble in our phones, a lot worse to have that bubble out in reality too.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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