A couple of weekends ago, I flew to Michigan to visit my daughter at school. When I arrived, we went straight to the Crisler Arena to watch a basketball game, where I dazzled her with my explanation of the finer points of the pick and roll. I grumbled at the fact that none of the players seemed to know the proper way to roll after setting a pick – dropping the top leg so as to “seal off” the defender -- which creates a much better scoring opportunity. Kids today.
Air travel for something that isn’t work has a certain allure. Packing a bag with no dress shirts. Reading for pleasure. Paying attention to things, without the overhang of meetings or presentations.
While boarding my flight to Detroit, I noticed that Delta’s ads lining the jetway mostly featured photos of people sitting in airplane seats and gazing at screens. Eyes vacant, faces softly illuminated by their phone or the in-flight entertainment system or an iPad shared with a significant other.
It used to be that airlines would promote travel by showing attractive destinations (beaches, foreign cities, exotic dining). Now they promote travel by showing people looking at their phones. You could say that Delta is, in a dime-store-Buddha kind of way, highlighting the journey, not the destination. But of course it’s not really the journey: it’s the escape from the journey, enabled by screens and noise-cancelling headphones. “The ‘me time’ you deserve,” promises one ad.
What does this say about Delta’s customer experience? I suppose at one level you can commend them for their honesty. "We know that the experience of our product is so unpleasant," they imply, "we’re going to promote it by showing how you can remove yourself from that unpleasant experience thanks to technology. Which by the way we will gladly enable by providing in-flight wifi, USB outlets at your seat, and unignorable video screens approximately 6 inches from your face."
Meanwhile, Apple recently launched their Vision Pro headset, the latest salvo in Silicon Valley’s war against human experience that is unmediated or non-monetizable. Interestingly, their marketing for the Vision Pro also has a veneer of Zen. A video shows a man standing at his uncluttered workspace, app windows floating gently in space around him. “Be in the moment. All over again,” Apple promises.
In a perverse way, marketing the Vision Pro in terms of a philosophy that extols the virtue of “non-self” is spot on. When you use this product, you remove all direct connection with the outside world. What you perceive is completely captured, filtered, and presented by Apple, Inc. With the headset on, your eyes as perceived by others are not your eyes at all, but an avatar, created and projected by the device. Your visual connection with reality has been severed, and a representation of that reality, one that is completely administered and controlled by a commercial interest, has been grafted in place. You, vis à vis the “real world,” cease to exist.
Some of the reviews of the Vision Pro speak in similar terms of dislocation. “It's easy to lose track of where I am when I'm wearing the Vision Pro,” begins Scott Stein in CNet, who writes from “inside” the device, as if it were a whale that has swallowed him whole.
As I’ve mentioned before, the idea of self-annihilation shows up often in mystical traditions. The only way we can approach direct contact with the divine is to relinquish our egos. If we do this right, we simultaneously embrace/submit to an essence (call it God if you’d like) that is surpremely powerful and loving and good. Delta and Apple also invite us to lose our selves, but in the service of late capitalism and the glory of spatial computing.
People are not buying this, figuratively and (especially given the $3,499 price point) literally. Many of critiques of the Vision Pro have highlighted the horror of what this product is and represents. And yet: a lot of reviews suggest that, once the technological bugs are sorted out, the miracle of augmented reality will usher in a new era of awesomeness. All we need, they suggest, is Apple to get the hand-eye interface to work more smoothly, and we’ll finally be able to get lost.
