A Vision (Pro) of Loneliness
Howdy,
Earlier this month, Apple unveiled their Vision Pro headset, ending years of wild speculation about Apple’s strategy for virtual/augmented reality. I haven’t had access to the headset, but I have read just about every review written by tech journalists who have.
Most of the reviews rave about the fact that Apple has gone to ridiculous lengths to perfect and simplify what it has termed “spatial computing.” Apparently, the headset can create a dinosaur in the middle of your living room that looks so real that your basal ganglia tells you that you should run away before the giant reptile eats you. It can project multiple enormous screens in your room, or throw you into three-dimensional photographs that make you feel like you’re wandering around in a memory. In fact, most of the reviews I’ve read have expressed frustration at the fact that they can’t fully express in words how holistically pleasing the experience of using the Vision Pro is.
When they’re finally available for sale next year, the Apple Vision Pro will be about $3500 each, and it will cost even more for glasses-wearers like myself to have special lenses crafted in order to use the device. In other words, I’m defnitely not getting one. But I’m sure that future versions of the device will be more affordable for mass-market use (probably the Apple Vision Air™, coming to engulf your head in 2027 or so) and so I’m certainly not going to vow that I’ll never buy one of their headsets.
I can’t help but notice how lonely most of Apple’s use cases for the Vision Pro are. Almost all of the examples in their press materials show people sitting or standing alone in stylish, airy living spaces: They’re doing work, video chatting, watching movies, and looking through photographs alone. All alone.
And even though the headset projects an image of your eyes onto the front of the headset when another person is around, and even though the first ad for the Vision Pro goes out of its way to show a dad wearing the headset while horsing around with his kids in the kitchen over breakfast, those lonely figures are what really stand out to me as the most likely use-case for the device in its current form.
I just can’t see myself sitting down to watch a movie in the same room with friends and family like this, with each of us wearing our own Vision headset. But when I said this to a friend of mine recently, she pointed out that teenagers absolutely will do that. She’s right, of course. Younger people will absolutely wear the Vision Pro (or, more likely, the more affordable next versions of the Vision Pro with better battery life) in public. Young tech workers who live in tiny but expensive studios will love the ability to watch IMAX-scale movies from the comfort of their own futons.
But unless there’s a massive societal shift—and never bet against Apple when it comes to creating massive societal shifts—I would feel too embarrassed to ever let strangers see me wearing this thing. This is the first time in my life that I can feel a technology passing me by, aimed over my head at the generation behind me. And I’m pretty okay with that. You kids go on ahead and strap a teevee to each eyeball. Maybe I’ll hop in later, after my nap.
An Update on AI and Writing
Here is a completely real interaction I had with the ChatGPT iOS app yesterday:
Man, it is scary how smart this thing is getting.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Ballast Book Co, the independent bookstore in downtown Bremerton. The charming little shop, which changed ownership a little while back, just went through a small renovation process and is back open with a huge slate of book clubs that meet all around Bremerton. I learned in the process of writing this piece that Bremerton has a huge and very committed nerd community, with lots of arcades and board-game bars sprinkled throughout the area.
And I also profiled Washington author Dave Neiwert, who is a leading expert on far-right and white nationalist organizations. His latest book, The Age of Insurrection, is a harrowing read explaining how regional clusters of militias and whitessupremacists have become a legitimate threat to American democracy. It’s an essential read for people who want to defend our country against neo-Nazis and other Trump-enabled creeps
For the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I discussed the economics and politics books we’re looking forward to reading this summer. I enjoy being mean to Goldy, and I’m glad that some of my bullying of him has been recorded and preserved for posterity.
I’ve Been Reading
The best new book I read this month, by far, was Yellowface, a novel by R.F. Kuang. It’s a satire of the publishing industry tucked into the framework of a literary thriller about a white woman stealing her Asian-American friend’s novel after a fatal accident and passing it off as her own. If you’re currently trying to sell a debut novel to a major publisher, I encourage you to read this book’s warts-and-all portrait of the publishing industry before you sign on the dotted line. It’s a clever story about someone trying to get away with a con, only to learn that she’s just a tiny part of a much bigger scam. I can’t guarantee you’ll feel great about the world when you finish this book, but I sure did tear through this one in an afternoon because I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
I re-read Jonathan Raban’s travel memoir Passage to Juneau this month. This was one of the first books I read when I moved to Seattle and got a job at the Elliott Bay Book Company 23 years ago, and revisiting it as an older man offered a different kind of experience. When I was younger, I loved the book for its dazzling tour of the history and geography of the region, but this time I deeply felt for Raban’s experience of loss and discovery. He was one of the finest writers ever to live in Seattle, and this one holds up beautifully.
I listened to the audiobook version of Tom Hanks’s novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and I had a great time with it. Hanks reads a large portion of the story, but he brings in guest readers to handle the monologues that are specifically from the perspective of important side-characters. This is not a ground-breaking or brilliant novel, but it is a charming and cheery overview of the process of making a movie. When I heard that the film featured in the novel is an adaptation of a Marvel-like comic book, I thought Hanks was going to publish more of a satire of the money-grubbing side of the film industry, but he happily treats the movie-making process as art, and every person involved in the process of making the art—from the writer/director on down to the lowliest production assistant—is treated as an artist, with dignity and compassion. Is it cheesy? Sure, a little. But that means it’s also a perfectly pleasant diversion for film-lovers who enjoy meandering solo summer walks on the beach.
I was a teenager when the Branch Davidian compound at Waco went up in flames, and I was fascinated by the story, devouring every morning’s newspaper for new developments. (My parents didn’t have cable, thank God, or else I would have been glued to CNN.) I was surprised when I read Koresh, by Stephan Talty, to learn how little I actually knew about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. I didn’t realize exactly how much abuse and criminality Koresh had been allowed to get away with before the raid, for instance, and I wasn’t aware of the rush to make a TV movie of the Waco seige before it reached its conclusion. It’s not a must-read unless you’re weirdly fascinated by the story, but it’s a good overview.
In my quest for something light after that dip into true crime, I read both of Blythe Roberson’s nonfiction books, How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful? Of the two, the latter has much more to recommend—it’s a book-length account of Roberson’s quest to visit national parks from coast to coast. Roberson has worked as a standup comedian and a writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and I have to say she’s currently more of a comedian who writes than a comedy writer, if that makes sense. While her books are full of funny jokes, they’re not as witty as my most preferred comedy writing—think Wodehouse, Sedaris, Crosley, Adams, Ephron, Parker. I think she has it in her to really ratchet down the writing so that every line sparkles, but she’s not quite there yet.
Night Fever, the latest comic by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, is a weird noir novel about an ordinary guy on a business trip who’s struggling with insomnia and wanders into a secret underground society that leads him toward a criminal double life. I love all of Brubaker and Phillips’s comics, but this one is special. It has the feel of an early David Lynch film, or a much more successful investigation of the gossamer-thin veil between the supernatural world and real life that Kubrick seemed to be going for in Eyes Wide Shut. If you like Jim Thompson novels and/or Lee Marvin movies, this one won’t let you down.
The Lois Common Denominator
Superman comics and Charlie Brown comic strip collections were my pathway to literacy, and in return I have developed a deep and lifelong affection for both of those characters. While there have been many great Superman comics produced in my lifetime, the last half-dozen or so movies with Superman in them have been….Very Not My Bag. Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill both looked the part of Superman, and they both conjured the earnest farmboy heart of the character at certain points in their movies, but Superman Returns, Man of Steel, and all the attendant Zach Snyder-driven Justice League films completely failed to understand Superman as a character.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the Superman: Legacy casting news that came out earlier this week. It remains to be seen if James Gunn has written a good Superman movie, but David Corenswet certainly looks like Superman and Clark Kent, and both his sleazy character in the film Pearl and his tragic turn in the show The Politician have somehow convinced me that he has the range to play an alien god who is raised on a Kansas farm by the most decent Americans in the history of the world.
But the news that I’m most excited about is the casting of Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. Lois is the most important character in Superman comics because she’s Clark Kent’s tether to humanity. She’s an ambitious, empathetic, brilliant journalist—but she’s also impetuous and prone to jealousy and anger, and even though she’s the best reporter on the planet, she can’t spell to save her life. Superman both looks up to her and is terrified of her. She’s perfectly imperfect—in other words, human. Margot Kidder doesn’t get enough credit for the work that she did opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman. She dug through some of the pretty clunky Superman comics that were being produced at the time to find the heart of Lois—and through Lois’s heart, she found the heart of the movie.
Neither Amy Adams nor Kate Bosworth had enough to work with in their turns as Lois, so I can’t fault them for not getting the character right. But Brosnahan proved in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel that she has the charisma to steal a scene from some of the world’s best actors, and she can make them fall in love with her while she does it. Her portrayal of Midge Maisel is a world-class mess—she’s selfish, oblivious to the sacrifices that everyone makes for her, and willing to step on anyone in her quest for fame—but Brosnahan somehow convinces the audience to cheerfully follow her every step of the way. The only other actor who I’ve seen pull off that particular trick in a somewhat similar role is Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.
It’s frankly a crime that Brosnahan hasn’t been in four or five incredible movies at this point in her career, but this role could be the one that puts her over the top. Because if James Gunn got the script right, Lois Lane will run away with this movie and everyone will leave the theater talking about how great Brosnahan was.
That’s a huge if, I realize. But Gunn has one of the best records when it comes to writing and directing modern comics adaptations. I loved the first and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and The Suicide Squad was a pretty great superhero movie too. He will have to switch tones for this movie; I don’t think Superman is the right vehicle for dick jokes and gross-out comedy. But I think Gunn also understands that. He’s no one-trick pony.
I realize it’s a little ridiculous to be talking about my anticipation for a superhero movie that is scheduled for 2025 and has yet to film a single frame. But I think it’s a crime that out of the dozens of superhero movies we’ve seen over the last 15 years the first and greatest superhero has yet to get his due. A lot of people claim that Superman is boring, or too powerful, or too much of a goody two-shoes for modern audiences. I disagree. A person who can shatter planets with his bare hands but instead makes a conscious choice to be gentle, kind, and useful is one of the best stories that there is.
I hope your summer is going well!
Paul