I've never read Lanier's writing, and this was an interesting article, but the pastoral reverence in the article just felt... weird. Some thoughts.
On this line contrasting Apple's approach from Magic Leap's approach:
> Camera-based mixed reality is vastly easier to accomplish than the optical version, but it is concerning. Early research by a Stanford-led team has found evidence of cognitive challenges. Your hands are never quite in the right relationship with your eyes, for instance. Given what is going on with deepfakes out on the 2-D Internet, we also need to start worrying about deception and abuse, because reality can be so easily altered as it’s virtualized.
The two thoughts, cognitive challenges and deception, are unrelated. And Lanier spends no time saying why the optical version will be free of deepfakes. Instead he uses this piece of emotionally charged language to justify why the camera approach is inferior:
> Today, in much of the online world, algorithms calculate “feeds”—a term suggesting that people are cattle, and not free-range ones.
Again seemingly uninterested with engaging substantively with why the camera approach is worse than the optical one other than by making us feel, well, moral.
Then there's:
> Today, the V.R. community seems to want to make headsets smaller and smaller, until they disappear. But in the old days I’d build one-of-a-kind V.R. headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too.
It's unclear how much this is some shift in values vs simply a shift in aesthetic culture. The culture of the '80s and early-'90s was loud bikes, loud cars, big heavy computing, lots of cables. This isn't the aesthetic culture of today.
What confuses me the most is:
> There are fresh, urgent reasons to reaffirm the value of experience. It is impossible to judge technology without a sense of its purpose—and its only plausible purpose is to benefit people, or perhaps animals, or the over-all ecosystem of the planet. In any case, if we pursue technologies that make it hard to delineate the beneficiaries—for instance, by blending brains into robotics not to cure a disease but just because it seems cool—then we make the very idea of technology absurd.
Even though near the beginning Lanier says:
> V.R. can be a way of exploring the nature of consciousness, relationships, bodies, and, perception. In other words, it can be art. V.R. is most fun when approached that way.
So which is it? Must technology be anchored to a purpose or can it simply be art? The idea that technologies are purely utilitarian is surely not something people still believe right? Not after synthesizers, modded cars, modded motorcycles, personalized beatboxes, and the like?
Then there's:
> But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it.
The average person in the developed world lives in a meticulously designed world. They ride some form of manmade transit or hop into some form of human constructed personal vehicle and go along infrastructure meticulously planned and designed to go to a destination whose very form has been prescribed by pages of municipal code and undergirded by large sums of public monies. They have access to sanitation systems, emergency services, and more. The average person does not spend time on some open frontier pondering their "real reality".
In general the article seems... like a weird, romantic, pastoral polemic steeped in the sort of romanticism common to older folks waxing about how the physical world is "real" while the virtual world is "fake."