“When
I listened to developers talk about their eagerness to “immerse”
audiences in multisensory experiences, I thought I detected a less
savory desire
to imprison them in programming — to leave them with no sensory exit.”
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN – Virtual Reality Fails Its Way to Success – New York Times Magazine, Nov. 14, 2014
PASSIVE, TENSE
A vacuous reality star has managed to sucker the American media and a bit less than half of voters into making him the most powerful man in the world. Twice. Vacuous "reality" shows continue to garner
astounding ratings.
Our kids and grandkids, exposed to
advertising on every surface from those ubiquitous glowing screens,
to supermarket floors, to people’s bodies, can identify hundreds of
corporate logos, but not the trees and animals living on their own
block.
In the last three decades, artificial intelligence has snowballed from an icon-toppling chess bot to an omnipresent menace whose potential for evil refuses to knuckle under to its merits.
We're being lulled, surely but not so slowly, into a kind of consumer
torpor. We're allowing corporations—some would say machines—to not only
decide what we see and how and when we see it, but dictate whether or not what we see is real.
Donald Trump—I like to call him the Fool's Gold President—has exploited artificiality so well that he's convinced his followers that their beliefs are truer than facts.
This soulless "Big Brother" specter is already, with our acquiescence, compelling our comings and goings, controlling not just our notion of truth, but the very tempo of our lives.
They lure us ever closer to the end-game…
making us think it's all our idea.
One social scientist recently asserted that the sci-fi plot line of
computers taking over the world isn't really so far beyond the realm of
possibility. They lure us ever closer to the end-game, all the while
making us think it's our idea.
A CLASSIC FAUSTIAN BARGAIN
Okay, so maybe that outcome’s a bit over the top, but the steps we’ve
already taken in that direction are troublesome. In too many cases,
something more or less tangible we once knew and loved has been stolen
and stripped of at least one aspect of its reality, replaced, in a kind
of Faustian bargain, with another quality the trend-makers would like us
to think we asked for.
Among their cynical promises: convenience and other creature comforts;
saving time and money; a competitive edge; safety; control;
“connectedness.” And what are we left with? More time glued to screens
and buying stuff we don’t need—a surrender we’re promised will make us
happy, but which ends up doing just the opposite.
It’s not reality; it’s entertainment. And we’re
raising a generation of kids who will no longer
be able to tell the difference.
Whether it’s information, entertainment, connection or inspiration,
they’ve taken reality, with all its color, depth and imperfection, all
its challenges to reflect and ponder, and repackaged it under a
different definition of “reality.” Thing is, the new version was never
meant to serve human needs, but those of the corporations and czars who
control all that “content.”
Sped up, dumbed own, flattened, sterilized,
lowest-common-denominator-ized, what remains is simply an illusion. From
vapid sitcoms to grown women under contract to "fall in love" with a man chosen by TV producers, children’s programming that promotes consumption. It’s not reality;
it’s entertainment.
Not even the news is immune from the alternative-reality infection, with Fox News having paid $787,000,000 for lying, and admitting that what they do is more entertainment than journalism.
And I’m afraid we’re raising a generation of kids
who will no longer be able to tell the difference.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, like pushers of other addictions,
the trend-setting, faux-reality machine is no dummy. Start ‘em on a few
seemingly harmless free samples; get ‘em hooked; they’ll come back.
DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS
It’s not until you step back and look at the big picture that you see
the scope of the deception. Everywhere you turn there are examples of
things and experiences folks are passively choosing no longer to
actually experience or control first-hand:
- Fantasy football
- Virtual reality headsets and games
- AI summaries now headlining Google search results
- Political memes realistically putting words in people's mouths
- Automatic bill-paying
- “Crowd-sourced” information and opinion
- The cloud
- Twitter-speak (communication reduced from something that once had
tone and color—a heart and soul if you will—to the equivalent of
primitive grunts.)
- Apps (For watching TV; ordering dinner—even when your waitperson is
within eye- and earshot; for dealing with your plumber…I could go on.)
- On-line dating
- Virtual medicine
- Telecommuting
- “Friending”
- Twenty-four-seven “connectedness”
- Seven-and-a-half hours a day on-screen*
- Self-driving cars (and a bourgeoning field of other robotics)
For these activities and many more, we are now completely at the mercy
of our computers and their ability—or willingness—to continue operating
at our beck and call. It would take only one thing for any of these
pursuits to simply quit and leave us helpless: the corruption of the
vehicle.
We’ve already seen, albeit on an as yet less-than-apocalyptic scale, the
signs of such betrayal. Power outages, air traffic control breakdowns,
stock market crashes, data security breaches, service denials and an
untold number of other hacks & whacks happen all the time, yet
somehow we fail to put two and two together. Are these just tests, one
might ask, of how much we’re willing to give up for our end of that
Faustian bargain?
The more technology-driven our lives
become, the more vitamin N we need to
balance the virtual with the real.
A DOSE OF VITAMIN N
Who
are we? Where are the patience, the reflection, the
curiosity, the nuance, the character, the heart and soul that have
defined honest, self-aware, hard-working cultures for so many great
generations? Where is the healthy tension between risk and reward?
In this age of
Belviq and
Botox, of
Simbalta and
Cialis,
of more cures than there are maladies, there must be something we can
take for this atrophy of mind, body and spirit that threatens to
brainwash us. Right?
Turns out the remedy already exists. Always has, right under our noses.
It is Nature. Or as Richard Louv so famously calls it in his
best-selling book,
The Nature Principle, vitamin N.
Louv never says—nor do I—that we should simply quit technology like a
bad habit. What he does say is that the more technology-driven our lives
become, the more vitamin N we need to balance the virtual with the
real.
Nature is hard-wired into us from birth. So we can never turn off the
fundamental connections between us, the earth and other living things,
our need for our senses take it all in and be nurtured, taught and
inspired by it. But we can and do forget how vital those influences are
to our physical, mental and spiritual well-being.
By learning how little control we have,
we learn about letting go.
REAL, LIVE…LIFE
For each excuse one might have for not turning off the incessant
virtual-reality deceit and actually getting out there in Nature, the
potential benefit outweighs manyfold our tendency—or should I say our
conditioned response—not to. Because Nature does not exploit; Nature
cares for and teaches human beings—especially little ones—in the most
amazing ways:
- By facing risk, we learn caution, creativity, patience…
- By learning about our environment, we learn about ourselves.
- By facing new experiences, we get in touch with the timeless.
- By surrounding ourselves with the vast, the complex, we learn of our
true place in it all, at the same time insignificant and
scary-powerful.
- By tackling challenges we didn’t think we could overcome, we learn about our capacity.
- By learning how little control we have, we learn about letting go.
- By escaping our culture’s complex, hurried, embattled, often
alienating influences, we discover the timeless, boundless,
totally-authentic original community to which every living organism on
earth shares an equal claim.
Before we willingly concede yet more of our own reality to this
media-mad, “connected,” “content” culture, let’s stop, take a deep
breath and think deeply about what remains in our lives that still is
real, and decide—before it’s decided for us—where we draw the line.
“The
sensory cacophony (of virtual reality experiences like the Oculus Rift
headset) is so uncanny and extraterrestrial to suggest to the organism a
deadly threat.”
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
* Sources FamilyEducation.com / BBC
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