philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

“We could very quickly find ourselves in a world where reality is controlled by tech corporations”

... According to Lanier, the important question is what will happen when humans take off their headsets: "And so another urgent question is whether people can enjoy the storied reality of finitude after coming down from the high of fake infinity. Can being merely human suffice? Can the everyday miracle of the real world be appreciated enough? Or will the future of culture only be viral? Will all markets become Ponzi-like fantasies? Will people reject physics forever, the moment we have technology that’s good enough to allow us to pretend it’s gone?” ...

"Today we can still take solace in the fact that we are able to disconnect from the phone and the computer. You can decide to leave Twitter, because there is a reality beyond the phone screen that is full of bots, fake news and manipulations. But in the future reality may be controlled by corporations and political parties. Imagine a country that has a minority of people it doesn't like, a persecuted minority. It can promise some corporation that it will give them a tax break in exchange for designing a reality that suits it." ...

"So this is something I constantly think about: why do I build what I build realistically? Is it just because I have a technical attraction to it? Because it's not good, and we have to overcome it. I also think that artists, designers, technical people, should strive not to imitate reality in a distorted way, but to do fantastic things. This field was created so that we can see things that are a little beyond.

"Already today, people intuitively understand these problems, even people who do not understand anything in the field, both because of the aesthetics of augmented reality and because of the way it is placed in front of our faces. And this aesthetic is symbolic, it signals to us that we are losing a little grip on reality, because it is being hidden from us, because we are being locked in a bubble."

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