Augments Are Speech
Keep property rights out of AR
In the last AR post, Towards a Digital Animism, I made the argument that conceptions of AR with 'scarce mappings' — that is, artificial limitations on the number and kind of augments that are connected to the things, people and places of the real world — are land-grabs by prospective rent-seekers.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the potential downsides of allowing anyone to 'attach' any digital payload to any thing or person or place. Nonetheless, curtailing that freedom in order to prevent bad behavior would be like preserving the technology of writing for a trusted elite in order to avoid the promulgation of bad ideas.
In that last post, I gave the hypothetical example of an AR-enhanced Times Square, making the point that in a system where all augments are always visible, public spaces would immediately become too crowded with digital elements to see through or use in any way.
Your first instinct about how to address this issue might be to ‘ban’ or ‘outlaw’ people putting augments on real estate they don’t own, as Mark Pesce advocates in the book Augmented Reality.
Power lies not only in being able to prevent the writing of locative metadata, but conversely, to limit the ability to read it.
Who speaks for the world? Before AR cloud providers shrink that into a question of technological capability, we need to create organizations and institutions that maintain our existing systems of ownership – however flawed – because we can at least assert our agency within them, through legal means. Assigning the right to write to any commercial organization will only see them monetized, potentially weaponized, and reframed as technicalities, rather than consequential property rights, with the potential to shape human behavior.
If unchallenged by property owners – currently perhaps only dimly aware of this potential theft of a property right via a bit of technological sleight of hand – these trillion-dollar tech giants can act as though all of the real world belongs to them, to be inscribed with locative metadata serving their own ends.
Pesce, Mark. Augmented Reality. Wiley. Kindle Edition.
It’s hard to overstate how much I disagree this position.
I believe that augments are speech, and that augments that are ‘anchored’ to real-world things or people or places are simply speech about those things.
Augments aren’t really anywhere any more than web pages are somewhere. Just like web pages or statements or newspaper articles, augments can be about people, places, and things, but they’re not in those places or actually hovering around those people, despite that they might appear to be if someone chooses to view them that way.
By Pesce’s logic, we should ban web pages that are about private property, and prevent them from coming up in searches about those locations. Google Maps shouldn’t have the right to provide information about private property. I fail to see how a ‘Place’ on Google Maps, with its Street View images, satellite imagery, commentary from users, and links to the internet, is any less ‘there’ than an AR augment that bears the same geolocation in its metadata.
This idea could be expanded to further prevent anyone from 'attaching' or 'anchoring' augments to other people, or trademarked products, or famous images, etc. The whole line of thinking represents a kind of regressive techno-authoritarianism. Unless he's deliberately shitposting or playing a Kaufman-esque heel, it's bizarre that he's named this freedom he's arguing against 'the right to write.'
Pesce bolsters his case here by saying that despite that existing ownership systems have flaws, at least they're a system, implicitly claiming that rather than seize the opportunity presented by AR's novelty to fix what is broken, we should instead just bring along what we have because it's easier I guess?
This take sucks, and I'm not persuaded by his effort to frame it as a 'small landowner vs the tech giants' cause. Even if that were the whole of the issue, the reality is that none of the tech giants in question do much 'writing' of their own today, but rather allow their users to do the writing on their platforms (think eg. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc).
The type of property rights Pesce advocates for here would curtail the rights of absolutely anybody to 'write', or speak, about private property, likely with rules around intellectual property not far behind.
More Speech
Augment speech should be free (as in speech and also often as in beer1, but that’s a topic for another day), and there should be lots of it. The solution to too many augments vying for the same space - which is to say effectively too many people with something to say about a person, place, or thing - is not to reject all but one ‘official’ statement or to prevent most people from speaking about most things.
The solution is to create a system that is designed to accommodate unlimited speech and to allow viewers to make sense of it in a way that works for them.
Today we have search on the web and in the other web-like corners of the Internet (again eg Facebook, Twitter, et al). I’m not sure how we should best approach this problem for AR, but I have some ideas.
I know I keep teasing the big reveal but I’m trying to keep these short-ish and on a single topic. I promise - outline coming in the next post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre