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Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

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Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#161

Post by entontoent »

gavinray wrote: post #98
Affric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real. It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.

> a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real This already describes our base experience of "reality". It's a predictive sensory hallucination.

Yeah, this is how I feel. "Reality" is already heavily mediated. Why are people so enraged that a person might want to mediate or enhance it further?

Often lately the same people who claim they value "creativity" and "art" seem to believe the the only valid forms of creative and artistic expression are the ones that existed when they were born. Everything else is degenerate art. I guess we've been here historically, though :/

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#162

Post by entontoent »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #142
entontoent wrote: post #54

This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation. I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in…

People already walk around with skins created for themselves. Clothing choices, hair styling, tanning, tattoos, piercings, colored contacts, fur suits, teeth sharpening, surgery for changing the shape of various parts of their body, and probably more that I'm not thinking of at the moment. I don't think the people who would make AR avatars would exceed the groups of people who do the more uncommon forms of the above.…

I doubt this will remain niche.

Clothing was niche at one point.

So was plastic surgery.

Image filters are now ubiquitous.

Also, I lived through the Second Life and Warcraft eras. Many people hunger for a form that wasn't just given to them by random chance by the universe.

The internet did eventually become homogenous, but it wasn't always this way, and tens of thousands of people spent a majority of their social life in these kinds of spaces.

I think in the future, there will be costume parties and entire communities where it'll be considered vulgar to insist on looking at someone's unfiltered body, in the same way it would be strange to see them without clothing.

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#163

Post by entontoent »

sdevonoes wrote: post #67
entontoent wrote: post #54

This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation. I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in…

Technically speaking, yeah, those things are cool. What’s not cool (anymore?) is that people like Zuck and other similar billionaires are behind such tech. I didn’t give a shit of the millionaires of the 80s/90s… but these billionaires of today, simply suck big time. So fuck them

Yeah this is the part that really sucks

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#164

Post by entontoent »

apsurd wrote: post #78
entontoent wrote: post #54

This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation. I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in…

I wouldn’t say that “what if the world was digital!” is some kind of apex creative insight. More practically the people in power need to own real estate. The metaverse, VR, AR, you’re giving these builders way too much credit by connecting it to creative expression. They want to own the land.

I don't think the intentions of those men matter, though, when it comes to whether or not they are creating new mediums for self expression. It won't be those men who make the art.

Most of Michaelangelo's working artistic life was spent touring and locking down stone quarries, pigments, etc and collaborating with brutal leaders to do so. Those men only cared about land and power, but the artists of the Renaissance manipulated those leaders to accomplish their own ends. This is what artists have always had to do.

And also... why is AR itself not automatically considered a form of creative expression? Art installations and cathedrals and any constructed space are doing the same thing.

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#165

Post by entontoent »

Gud wrote: post #151
entontoent wrote: post #54

This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation. I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in…

If you want to wear these things in your own garden, go ahead. But please don’t bring the panopticon to the forests.

I absolutely will. I am.

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#166

Post by entontoent »

Affric wrote: post #74
entontoent wrote: post #54

This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation. I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in…

That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real. It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.

I feel like you would love the book "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard. It agrees with you, and there's a sense in which you're right.

I wonder what you think our eyes are doing, though, and what you think magic is.

What makes it not elf-like?

We are creatures of the field and forest. The things that we invent are of the field and forest.

Are you saying that for you, the symbol translation needs to occur within cells and neurons instead of within a machine? Okay, well imagine we find a way to do that instead. Are we then more elf-like to you, because the senses would become part of our body?

Or are you saying that regardless of the path that we take to read wind and water with our eyes, we will never be like elves? That this could never be magic? Do you believe we need an External Being With Authority to grant us magic? Or a random, chaotic External Force like evolution?

It seems to me that regardless of when you "install" a sensory apparatus, before or after birth, your experience of the world will be similar (unless one or the other is more inconvenient for technical/social reasons).

If we can live in better harmony with nature due to enhanced senses that allow us to see the invisible motions of Earth, if we can identify birds and plants by sound and sight, if we can emit and process sonar, scan resources beneath the surface, better utilize and eliminate invasive species, spot predators from thousands of yards away (so they can remain in our ecosystem without being killed)... I mean that's magic to me?

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#167

Post by Affric »

entontoent wrote: post #166
Affric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real. It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.

I feel like you would love the book "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard. It agrees with you, and there's a sense in which you're right. I wonder what you think our eyes are doing, though, and what you think magic is. What makes it not elf-like? We are creatures of the field and forest. The things that we invent are of the field and forest. Are you saying that for you, the symbol translation needs to occur…

Our eyes, sight: close enough to magic. It creates an experience, that in people without synesthesia, cannot be encapsulated within another experience.

Elves know and sense, they have names for things, they don’t get told the names of things by something else. There have been people in on earth who read their environment well, who can reliably predict rain from wind and feel.

We perhaps, someday, will be able to create new experiences, senses, that cannot be encapsulated within our current senses, we might be able to expand our current senses (vision in all directions, new colours, new audible frequencies, quieter sounds, et cetera). What that isn’t is looking at a display or listening to a speaker.

I use computers every day. My phone, pedestrian crossing signals, guitar pedals, food, books, the web. Art, work, recreation.

I just don’t think these glasses amount to augmented reality but a distraction from reality.

We can learn to, and I have to an extent, identify our environment and surroundings. The Pokédex is a fun novelty but knowing how to name a creature or a rock or a person based on what we perceive rather than someone or something else telling us what it perceives is simply a higher state of existence and a richer internal world.

And yeah, internalising another language is inherently better than using Google translate.

These glasses ain’t it.

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#168

Post by Biganon »

entontoent wrote: post #165
Gud wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to wear these things in your own garden, go ahead. But please don’t bring the panopticon to the forests.

I absolutely will. I am.

If I ever see someone in the forest filming me against my will, I will happily snatch and destroy their device.

At some point, if you've willingly morphed into a living, breathing extension of the FAANG panopticon, you deserve it.

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#169

Post by Affric »

entontoent wrote: post #161
gavinray wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real This already describes our base experience of "reality". It's a predictive sensory hallucination.

Yeah, this is how I feel. "Reality" is already heavily mediated. Why are people so enraged that a person might want to mediate or enhance it further? Often lately the same people who claim they value "creativity" and "art" seem to believe the the only valid forms of creative and artistic expression are the ones that existed when they were born. Everything else is degenerate art. I guess we've been here historically,…

I skilfully use computers to make art every day.

I also can identify a bird by myself, have my own sense of timing and rhythm, and can figure out things about a person myself.

It doesn’t augment reality, it simply puts a display on your face, like the article says.

Re: Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

#170

Post by thefz »

entontoent wrote: post #160
thefz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation For as much as I love video games, it's really really what happened, though.

I don't think so. We had genocide and thousand-year periods of enslavement and colonialism and existential despair (and existentialism) and mechanization and atomization that led to the "elevation" and isolation of "nuclear" families from their social and historical contexts. We had racism and murder and sexual assault and lonely unemployed men who had nothing better to do than scapegoat entire populations and subjug…

To be honest not the arcade era, but what came after (home personal computers et al.) did really usher in one more reason to isolate in the comfort of one's own room.
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