Selling Skins for the World Around Us
Butterflies, Impressionism, and the Interface
Some weeks ago the eleven year old asked me what it would be like if we, as a species, would be able to see ultraviolet light.
We discussed the concepts of random variations in physiologies, ecological niches, fitness advantages for passing on our genes and revisited the fact that not only we aren’t able to see uv, but also not able to ultimately imagine what it is like to be a butterfly.
She then suggested how great it would be to have ‘some sort of glasses’ which allow to see uv light and I told her about the concept of Augmented Reality and how big tech corps are currently competing for affordable lightweight AR glasses.
“Wow” she said, clearly impressed, looking out the window for some 20 seconds.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that Augmented Reality will be the next big media technology leap, and when my two daughters will be my age, they’re very likely to use it as, well, naturally as I use my smartphone today.
What is not yet as clear is how this will affect our interaction with our physical and social environment and the implications this will have on what the philosopher Thomas Metzinger calls our phenomenological self-model (my translation from German):
The phenomenological self-model biologically evolved as a system of representation and information processing, embedded into a social network of multiple self-models communicating with each other. Today though we find ourselves deeply enmeshed in a dense fabric of technical systems of representation and information processing: with radio, TV and the internet, our self-models have become increasingly embedded into a global data cloud, featuring accelerating growth and emergent complex dynamics […]
For those of us extensively working with the internet, it has become part of our self-model. We use it as an external memory device, as a cognitive prosthesis, and for regulating our emotional states.
Metzinger’s use of the concept of a cognitive prosthesis is interesting here. While the traditional use case of a prosthesis is to replace missing body parts which evolved over millions of years, Augmented Reality might help us to enjoy cognitive abilities we haven’t evolved biologically. These abilities could help us to render our representation of the world more useful, more simple, and/or more beautiful.
What does that mean?
Let’s start with usefulness. With the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman suggests that our perception didn’t evolve for seeing the world how it ‘really’ is (veracity) but to maximize what he calls “fitness payoffs” for passing on our genes.
When looking at a typical AR scenario though, it often seems that the attempted increase of usefulness doesn’t come from making accessible what’s been contained in the environment already, like ultraviolet light, but from adding new layers of transactions, which effectively render the user as a consumer and the environment as a market.
This effectively means that the way we currently think about AR’s usefulness is primarily directed at investors and brands, along with its content-industrial auxiliaries of advertising agencies, trade publications, and survey providers reporting “consumer interests”, while only marginally, if at all, at actual users, least so for maximising their fitness payoffs.
So what would it take to make AR more useful for the majority of people who don’t make money with, but rather consume, content? When it comes to a basic functional benefit, navigation assistance seems to be the most readily available example. The essence of navigation assistance is to make a non-familiar environment more accessible, ultimately more simple, by reducing it to a series of commands (“in 200 meters, turn left”) towards a destination, which thereby strips the path to the destination of its inherent structure and meaning. Effectively, navigation assistance destructures the real world scenery for rendering it as the mere context of something else more important, the destination.
There is an interesting relationship between using AR to make the world appear more simple and late 19th century impressionist art. Consider Paul Sérusier’s Le Talisman, finished in 1888, which today is traded as a “manifesto of pure painting”.
If you don’t know a priori what to see in the painting, it might take some considerable time and guessing to recognise the landscape near Pont-Aven/ Brittany it represents, containing a transversal path by a row of beech trees on a river bank, with a mill in the background.
As the art historians at Musée d’Orsay in Paris have documented, Sérusier’s mentor, Paul Gaugin had told him during the painting process: “How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion". Effectively, Sérusier reduced, simplified, destructured all the elements in the real world scenery to corresponding stains of colour.
So both navigation assist systems and impressionist art destructure, and restructure their real world environment for more simple representations. As computing power and algorithmic efficiency keep increasing, future AR applications might take this several steps further and restructure real world sceneries for more aesthetically appealing representations, in the technologically augmented eyes of the beholders.
In the words of the late German philosopher Gernot Böhme in his essay collection “Ästhetik” (again, my translation from German):
Reality is being aestheticised. When aesthetics is interpreted as a surface, the make-up, the image, the realm of simulacra, then we could make the assumption that the aesthetic has begun to displace the real […]
AR’s potential to selling skins for the world around us, ie. to aesthetically hyperindividualise and destructure consensus reality is strongly at odds with why and how our appreciation of beauty culturally evolved in the first place, ie. as a motivational vehicle of symbolism to “draw unity, community, shared values and beliefs, compassion and other emotions that bind us as cooperative societies.” (Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019).
Does this mean that Augmented Reality is a realistic threat to our civilisation’s continued existence, by collapsing the cultural foundations we collectively agree upon? In my opinion the answer is potentially yes but realistically no, as this would presuppose a large number of people actually adopting the technology, which at this point doesn’t seem very realistic for the nearer future, other than several more urgent threats to our continued existence, none of which AR currently provides any useful or simple solutions for.
Stay kurios,
and take care
Daniel
PS. The title phrase Selling Skins for the World Around Us (imho perfectly summarising how the advertising world approaches new technologies) originates in a Twitter interaction with Adam Knott:
