To facilitate a world where machines and their masters manipulate our reality, we will all be watching one another, all the time, on an unprecedented scale.
Even if nations somehow avoid this temptation, the fundamental nature of augmented reality means that space will be observed, recorded, quantified, and surveilled as never before. In order to augment a space, its dimensions must be taken. To do this on an ongoing basis, such measurements must be performed continually. To facilitate a world where machines and their masters manipulate our reality, we will all be watching one another, all the time, on an unprecedented scale.5
This, in brief, characterizes the problem posed by augmented reality.
Against this, we catch glimpses of a great promise – that the “digital depth” pervading our world could be revealed, a world currently hidden from view by these same economic forces and state actors – as a mechanism of control. The real world offers a potential of a universal, revelatory informational transparency, each object illuminated from within by its digitally inscribed meanings.
With that veiling of control laid aside, all of the connections, data flows, and control loops that characterize the made world of the twenty-first century become apparent, substantial, and apprehensible. Visibility – where it can be had, and for as long as it lasts – provides the conditions for addressability, accountability, and awareness. Objects no longer in eclipse can be seen for what they are – and whom they serve. Revelation redistributes power.
The capability to augment reality carries with it a number of key questions: Who ascribes these meanings? Who writes the illuminating scripts? How do they attach themselves to objects in the real? Who gets to overwrite the meanings of the real world? None of this augmentation of reality happens by itself, and all of it forces hard questions, ones that should not be reduced to an ignorant click on a terms-of-service contract. That would transform this redistribution of power into an act of disempowerment.
Peril undermines promise, just as promise undermines peril.
Much will be promised for the augmentation of reality, but the price remains untabulated. How much would we pay for reality? How much should we be paid to let others drive our view of the real? Can we even frame our experience of the real in transactional terms, or does that indicate the final triumph of Late Capitalism? A reality manipulable by the highest bidder could quickly evolve a license for unlimited, perpetual extraction of our inner lives.
Such fears have old roots, stretching back at least as far as Gutenberg, and have always been both fully justified and entirely overblown. Culture muddles through, walking a tightrope between tyranny and banality, forging a middle path. As Mark Twain purportedly said, the past does not repeat, but it often rhymes.
Yet this moment has its unique qualities. The genius twentieth-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan identified two media that map the place of the body.6 Architecture situates us within public space, while clothing defines our most personal and private space. We now add a third, augmented reality – both as intensely private as an individual world view, and, because augmented reality systems are always connected, as broadly public as the planetary noosphere. This new hyperconnectivity of place and reality, simultaneously deeply personal, yet thoroughly connected and thereby common, creates a lure to draw us in, like Pokémon at Peg Paterson Park.
Space – and dominion over it, as conferred by the right of title – forms one of the foundations of Law. We use attorneys – rather than armies – to wage wars over each patch of ground, legally arbitrating our spaces and our rights within a space. Changing space changes law, rights, responsibilities, and risks. Our culture of law reflects our spaces, just as our spaces reflect our culture of law. A world with pervasive augmented reality requires new laws, new regulations, new standards – and new behaviors.
Touch reality – or, rather, our perception of the real – and everything within the human sphere bends under that pressure. Innocuous though it may seem to lure and capture cute cartoon monsters via a smartphone app, other monsters from other and far less friendly realms of imagination lie in wait, queued at that same threshold of data and perception, pressure pushing them into the real. We will see the nightmare side of augmented reality, because we cannot experience the benefits without opening ourselves to their opposite.
We cannot know the precise shape of the future. We can look to the past for precedents, and to a present, where, as William Gibson wisely noted, the future already exists – unevenly distributed.7 At a public park in Rhodes, New South Wales, our augmented reality future began its colonization of the present, landing at Peg Paterson Park and claiming that space as its own, establishing a beachhead of augmentation within the real.
Although it may appear as though the events of that July night had no precedent, the entire arc of computing has led us through an accelerating series of innovations in the relationship between ourselves and our machines, bringing them closer. As they grow closer to us, our machines grow in potency. To understand where we are, and where we are headed, we must begin in chapter 1 by looking back, to our strange eventful history augmenting reality.
The origins of augmented reality (AR) bring us in chapter 2 to a present day of rapid developments in technology – and a battle fought by technology giants to create the first mass-produced AR devices, the so-called “mirrorshades,” devices that marry continuous surveillance with an intimate capacity to generate synthetic additions to reality.
Chapter 3 considers how these AR devices might use the information they gather about us, by looking at the whole history of user profiling and user “engagement” – techniques pioneered by Google and Facebook to make content so engaging, so precisely fit to the individual, they find it difficult to look away.
The promise of “digital depth” – the revelation of the inner workings of a deeply technological world largely hidden from view – forms the core of chapter 4. Can we balance the dangers of augmented reality with its enormous potential to liberate and illuminate?
Finally, chapter 5 looks at the ethical questions posed by any attempt to “write” on the world via augmented reality. Who writes, for whom – and who has the “right to write”?
Invented as a machine-amplified empowerment of our native human cognitive and perceptual capacities, augmented reality has evolved into a technology of control. Hence, it is with control we must begin.
Notes
1 1 Zorine Te, “How Pokemon Go Nearly Destroyed a Quiet Suburb,” Gamespot, August 2, 2016, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-pokemon-go-nearly-destroyed-a-quiet-suburb/1100-6442283/
2 2 James Lemon, “Pokemon Go: Residents call police as Rhodes swamped,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 13, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-go-residents-call-police-as-rhodes-swamped-20160713-gq4hb3.html
3 3 Kathryn Wicks, “Pokemon GO: All Pokestops removed from Peg Paterson Park at Rhodes,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 1, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/technology/pokemon-go-all-pokestops-removed-from-peg-paterson-park-at-rhodes-20160801-gqio00.html
4 4 Ian Bogost, “Every Place Is Exactly the Same Now,” The Atlantic, January 16, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/smartphone-has-ruined-space/605077/
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