The Augmented Realist Manifesto, Part 1
Augmented reality is coming, and a shitstorm is coming with it. We still have time to avoid the worst.
Augmented reality is going to change your life.
For better and for worse, it’s going to precipitate the most significant change to human experience in the history of our species, and nobody can stop it from happening.
The way things are going, we are going to roll up every digital thing we do into an increasingly natural-feeling reality-digital hybrid experience.
Don’t get fixated on glasses. The hardware will change with time, but computers and the digital world they contain will cease to be things in places and will instead sublimate to share the real world with us.
That transition will open the door to unprecedented tracking. It could lead to profiling, advertising, and loss of opportunity in our digital, economic, social, and creative lives.
At the same time, we could use the disruption to reinvent our relationship to technology in its entirety, in the process positively expanding our conception of what it means to be human in ways we can’t yet imagine.
Both could well happen at once.
Having accepted that, I believe we should aim for an outcome we like. If we don’t, a combination of market and regulatory forces will give us a shitty dystopian mess bundled with an irresistible upside. We could make ourselves a terrible offer we can’t refuse.
Right now, the way things are going, we’re going over the falls of posthumanism with capitalism driving the boat. We can do better.
The stakes: An unprecedented change in the human experience
Not that long ago, cell phones could barely see the web. Few people could use their phones to do anything but calling or maybe SMS.
And then, in the span of two decades, smartphones, with their ubiquitous 24/7 access to the internet, changed untold aspects of our society, our economy, our culture, and even our brains. We all became just a bit post-human from the explosive effects of billions of people having networked computers in our pockets.
With augmented reality (or AR, wearable computing, spatial computing, XR, etc — let’s call it AR), we are now at the cusp of yet another disruption — one whose effects will definitively change what it is to be human.
As a form factor, AR is the next logical step in the integration of ubiquitous networked computing with the natural experience of being an embodied human.
We’ve begun down this road with smartphones, but, with AR, computing will no longer be something we do on slabs of glass or at desks. It will be part of the fabric of our experience, commingled with the physical world around us.
As such, a segment of the population will soon begin an exponentially-accelerating, headlong rush into a kind of cyborg transhumanism.
The lived experience and capabilities of those who ‘wear’1 will be increasingly unfathomable to those who don’t, or to those who came before — far more so than the difference before and after electricity, or computers, or the internet, or smartphones.2
Today’s discussions of AR center on massively multiplayer gaming, on ownership of digital objects, on remote work, and generally on bringing concepts from our current lives along into this new world. That thinking signals a limited capability to imagine the kind of change we’re in for.
I am envisioning a kind of near-omniscience. Not a godlike awakening where the mysteries of the universe are revealed to us, but rather an ability to know almost anything that any other human knows without knowing what questions to ask.3
Wearing will bring a kind of networked awareness directly to our senses, in many cases bypassing the use of language or even conscious thought or observation.
Those who wear will live in a world with very different secrets from the kind we take for granted today, a world where the sorts of knowledge and abilities we now regard as the domain of experts will be as accessible as the time of day.
Those who wear will operate a kind of unconscious throttle, modulating at all times the amount of their attention and mental bandwidth they dedicate to either the real or to the augments their gear gives them.
As such, wearers will dream a liminal awareness, constantly floating between the true world and a full immersion in the digital aether that occupies the same spaces. The choice of how ‘dry’ they keep their consciousness will be something we regard as a transient personality trait, or life choice, akin to how ‘addicted’ a person is to their phone, or how ‘online’ they are today.
Don’t be fooled: the frivolity and silliness of today’s dreams of AR belie the power of the understanding possible from sharing your senses with a spatial internet. Today we sip information; tomorrow we will swim in it.
That’s just the likely bit
These are neutral terms for a likely outcome of the way things are going. As a single vision of a mature form of this computing, that has the less-likely and more extreme elements stripped out.
You may feel the situation described above represents one or another extreme as it is, whether a utopia or a hell, but there’s plenty of room for further extremes in either direction around that baseline, and much that could go right or wrong.
And one way or another, several companies will ensure that an AR-enabled future comes to pass.
As you probably noticed, Facebook changed their name to Meta, signaling how seriously they’re taking this endeavor. They have a reported 17,000 people working on it, and their latest headset is outselling the Xbox.
Tim Cook has said he’s AR’s ‘number one’ fan. Magic Leap has raised about $3b to date. Snap claims to have 250k creators making software for their glasses, with 300 of them having made ‘lenses’ that have been viewed one billion times each. Microsoft won a $22b contract from the army for a military-spec Hololens 2. Google never gave up on Glass. Pokémon Go was just a trojan horse for Niantic’s real-world AR plans.
These companies are engaged in a race not only to create the most compelling offering to consumers, but to dictate the terms of the deal for creators.
This is your problem
I’m not writing this as something I hope happens. I simply think it’s clear it will happen.
I believe almost everyone capable will wear eventually, because to not wear will be to be something of a Luddite, a bit like it would be to abstain from using computers or the internet or smartphones in today’s world, but far more so.
Still, with all the inevitable compromises that come with wearing, especially early on, many will choose to abstain, but their numbers will dwindle rapidly with time, as has been the case with smartphone or internet adoption.
If you’re skeptical and you’re old enough to remember a world before smartphones, think back to your mindset at the launch of the iPhone in 2007.
At the time, you didn’t have great maps on your phone. When you went about in unfamiliar places, you might have printed out directions from MapQuest, or pulled over on roadsides to examine an atlas.
Missing an exit was a big deal. Knowing whether you missed the exit or not could be non-trivial to sort out. Foreign subways could be inscrutable mazes.
You probably got lost a lot, and even when you weren’t technically lost, you might have known relatively little about your surroundings. You might have been unaware of things of interest even in the immediate vicinity of your home, like a hidden park, or an Uzbek restaurant, or an e-waste dump.
You probably found things differently from the way you do today - through word of mouth, or serendipity, and only really formed an idea of a place by physically visiting there yourself. There were no Places on Google Maps with their pictures and reviews and website links and Q&A and ‘People Also Search For’ sections.
But now we all carry devices that allow us to see recent high-resolution satellite imagery of almost anywhere in the world. We can see the street-level view from about 10 million miles of 360-degree photography, a capability that, 20 years ago, would have felt absolutely outlandish.
We have in our pockets perfect maps of the interiors of train stations, coupled with navigation systems that show exactly which escalator to take, and what platform to stand on, and when — maps that take into account line closures and delays, accessibility concerns, and more.
Even if we know our way, we don’t need to blindly follow a memorized ‘best route’, ignorant of traffic conditions, road closures, delayed mass transit, parade routes, or even natural disasters — all of that real-time information is factored in to the directions our devices give us.
We can spend an hour or two on the couch meandering across the world, combing a neighborhood’s streets, absorbing the visual texture and a rich stream of information that sits on top of that place: context, culture, commerce, history, topology, news, even 4-D imagery with building geometry and time-scrubbing over decades.
It’s almost impossible to remember a before, but we now have an understanding of what and where and place that is so complete that basic human behaviors like way-finding, discovery, and navigation are fundamentally different experiences than in the before-times not that long ago.
Did any of that seem possible, obvious, or even necessary when you first saw a smartphone? If you thought you might have those tools, did you think they’d ever come with you almost anywhere you go?
To appreciate how completely we’ve incorporated this capability into our experience, try conducting an extreme experiment: leave your phone at home and head out into a strange place.
Imagine using no digital maps while spending a week abroad, or, one further, absolutely no internet at all. If you’re anything like me, contemplating that idea requires engaging the part of my brain reserved for imagination and speculation.
I really don’t have a good idea what that would be like any longer, but I can say with some surety that it’s a profoundly different way of traveling, and of being, than what I’m used to today. It sounds romantic but it also sounds like losing a sense — like being blindfolded, or like some kind of monastic retreat.
It’s been just 15 years since the launch of the iPhone.
Even after reminding ourselves of how profoundly different our lives are with smartphones, it remains impossible to understand the nature of the before and after coming our way with AR, but I can say with some confidence that it will be even harder in the after-times to imagine the before.
We will be substantively changed.
So what would be good? What’s bad?
So, AR is coming, for better or worse. What’s better? What’s worse? Remember, the above was the middle-of-the road projection.
Things could get very dark … or we could become better versions of ourselves, as individuals and as a society. Or both! Probably both.
For speculative but specific examples from the spectrum of outcomes ahead, read on to part 2 of the Augmented Realist Manifesto.
To get a feel for the kind of blended infrastructure / semiotics / philosophy terrain I’ll be exploring in future editions, consider revisiting my now-classic 2015 post The Map and the Territory: On the Balkanization and Semiotics of Augmented Reality.
A neologism borrowed from Rainbow’s End, which, I’m afraid, is the best the book has to offer
AR as a mode of computing is hardware-independent, and it may provide some conceptual mobility to envision a future where few use goggles or glasses and the norm is contacts or implants or something less material and substantial.
Forget the hardware, is what I’m saying.
Much more on this in a future post