On Jun 5, 2023, while I watched the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, something inside my brain said “RUN”, not a “run to buy this thing because it is amazing”, but a not a ‘run to buy this thing because it is amazing,’ but a ‘run for the mountains, and take everyone you can with you’. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was so afraid of that product. It wasn’t because it was heavy, tacky, or weird, nor was it the absurd price. Instead, it was something deeper, more complex, and subtle. Well, it was because I got infuriated with the idea of having a product with an amazing screen, and so immersive, but that only one person could experience it, everyone else had to sit and watch a tiny and fuzzy screen replicating the person’s eyes. In other words, and something I only realized recently, is that this product represented a trend in tech companies: the best path forward for them to profit, is for you to be alone, only you and their devices. Their, not so new, but more aggressive, product is iSolation.
The evolution of technology, specifically electronic devices, has allowed for a rapid improvement in the quality of products, a reduction in the size of components, and an increase in performance, while still making them more accessible, money-wise. For example, TVs that were once black-and-white, super small, and owned by only a few families in a city, compared to today’s TVs, which can be up to 80 inches (or more) and display videos in 8K resolution (or more—really, who knows?), and are accessible to most people, illustrate how evolution has enhanced the product. But there is one thing that holds the same: in the past, you could share that TV with the whole family, and today you can still gather everyone around it to see the same content at the same time.
Of course when compared to other media, we can always find a way in which the evolution pushes for reduction in the audience. If we compare a TV that can show a movie for a small group of people, to a cinema that fits a bigger group, or even to a theater that could receive a huge amount of viewers, we can always find an example of reduction, even more, when we think that today there is a lot of people that use a smartphone as the content consumption device. The screen size on it has increased a lot, from a ridiculously small size of around 3.5” to a ridiculously huge size of around 6.5”. But even at 6.5”, it is nothing compared to a medium-sized TV of 42″.
Even with smartphones, which are primarily designed for individual use, we can still find the ability to share it with others. If wanted, the owner of the smartphone can easily show its screen to another person, to share a video, a photo, a meme, or anything at all.
Smartphones, and the personalization of apps and content, have intensified the trend of isolation in the tech space. It was common for households to share a computer with all the family members in the 2000s, so the human relation to it was completely different than today, in which the smartphone has become an extension of yourself. It is common for an app today to allow only a single account to be logged in, so sharing a phone with others would mean logging off an account and logging in into another, a ‘time-consuming’ task that was the norm with shared computers in the 2000s. You can only get notified about things in an app if you are logged into it, a useful tool that at the same time makes it more difficult to share it with others. And you see the same behavior with other (even newer) gadgets: imagine sharing a smartwatch, or having one pair of AirPods for the whole family, it doesn’t even make sense to our brains today.
The book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka, talks a lot about algorithm feeds and their impacts on society, and in a way, we can see how this also contributes to the topic of human isolation. When the things you consume on your phone are different from the person next to you and are extremely designed to fit your taste in particular, there is no reason to share with others. Except, of course, sharing to others through the apps themselves, to people that are not physically close, but that may share a similar taste.
This exception is becoming a rule in tech, while at the beginning of a lot of social media apps, the idea was to bring you close to those that are far away, today those apps encourage you to connect to anyone as if they are distant. The apps needs to grow, to profit more every year, and for that, it needs to create problems it can solve. Instead of only serving as a bridge for physically distant people to become closer, if you are alone, everyone is far, and if everyone is far, you can use the apps to bring everyone closer (a marketing term, that most of the time means nothing).
There is one line in an Apple Vision Pro introduction video that always stands out to me: “FaceTime looks and sounds amazing in Apple Vision Pro. You see people life-size. And with Spatial Audio, you hear them as if they’re right in front of you”. Do you know another form of seeing people life-sized and hearing them as if they were in front of you? By them being in front of you. And I know you must be saying “But I can’t be in front of everyone, in all situations, I have family that lives far away, I have friends from another country…”. And I agree with you, but what I am trying to show here, is that the goal of this company is to profit, and so for that to happen, they have to sell you a $3500 device, and that would be way easier if you felt like everyone was far, as if this was the rule, not the exception, even those who are a couple of blocks away from your house.
I am not saying that Apple or any other company started to want you to be alone now, what I am saying is that for them to profit, they understood, quite a while back, that if you are alone, it makes things easier. And the Apple Vision Pro is just an easy and explicit product that shows that. You have amazing hardware that only you can use. You can see a movie in an immersive way, but you can’t share that with others (at least not physically). You can capture life moments in perfect 3D so that you can rewatch them later and feel like you are there again, but only if you are using their device. And if anyone else wants to participate in that, they also need to have a device of their own. What is better than selling one device that will be used by 5 people? Selling 5 devices that will be used by 5 people.
Apart from the money being made on everyone needing to own a device, companies also profit when you make decisions on your own. Research shows that isolation may skew decision-making towards more intuitive, automatic processes, moving away from slower and more analytical ones. One thing companies love is a buyer who is ready to buy something without questioning too much, who can be targeted with multiple advertisements until it automatically decides that it needs that product. In other words, it is easier for a friend to tell you that it is a terrible idea to get into a pyramid scheme than it is for yourself to get off of it if you are alone.
The future is not written yet, but from what it seems, it looks like the use of AI (or LLMs, as I explained in God’s AI post) will enforce this trend even further. In an extremely personalized future, in which even the videos, images, and text you consume through social media were created specifically for you, and to attend to only your desires, there is even less of a need for group culture, there is only your culture. And unfortunately, culture cannot exist in only one person. The culture would be gone when you are gone. For it to thrive and last, it needs to be shared.
So, lock your phone, and your computer, or remove your Apple Vision Pro and go talk to a life-sized, right in front of you human being. (Myself, 2024)