The future is never as you imagined it. We’re supposed to be in it. At least that’s what the cartoons said when I was a kid. Reality is nothing like those childhood predictions. It’s 2024, cars still don’t fly, and now the big news is that Apple has invented … diving goggles. We still have to diet if we want to lose weight, the price of beer keeps going up, and Tinder is full of abominable chicks. The future is a stinking scam! And aesthetically speaking, it is as close to what we dreamed of as a Tesla Cybertruck is to a Bugatti Royale.
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This week the streets are filling up with futuristic flies. In the old days we killed them with pesticides, and now we pay over $3,500 to become one of them. If you see a guy wandering around in a suit and diving goggles doing weird things with his index finger, dodge him, quicken your pace, and be on your way. He is not trying to spearfish. Nor is he making obscene gestures at you (I assume). He’s just bought an Apple Vision Pro and is most likely watching a movie, listening to a song, or trying to recover his damn password; Apple is forcing those who lose their password to reset it in the store, and what I don’t know is if it now also forces you to wipe the floor with your tongue in order to recover your favorite pet’s name. In any case, if Google were to do the same with Gmail, it would be cheaper for me to rent an apartment in front of its offices.
The tech gurus have decided that even though we stare at our cellphone screens all day long, we still pay too much attention to ourselves. So they have invented this gadget to get rid of the rest of the universe. Now you can walk around objects and humans without interacting with any of them, because everyone has to understand that you’re busy, maybe playing Minesweeper, or whatever the hell they call that thing people play in the office when the boss is in a meeting.
The first images of Apple Vision Pro users look like something out of a horror movie, a technological utopia, or a vision of hell. Guys having lunch together with their glasses on; another one talking to himself on the train with a technological scuba mask covering his face; another guy speeding around on a scooter with his AVPs on, looking extremely amused, but without a beer in his hand or anything; and some really clever guy who decided to take a drive with his new glasses to conduct an experiment that, for whatever reason, didn’t seem like such a good idea to the police when they stopped him. The award for the Smartest YouTuber this year should go to the guy who decided to test the resistance of his AVP by throwing them against the wall, then dropping them from 6 feet and smashing them in a thousand different ways. That guy is a natural; 3,500 bucks down the drain to finally show the depressing result and exclaim, “Damn, in the end they break!”
Aside from all that, in a time when social classes as such no longer exist, we may have to divide ourselves again into two large groups: those who go through life absent, and those who go through it present. The absent, permanently connected to ever-more-absorbing devices, will have everything just a click away (sorry, with AVPs I think it’s a wink; I don’t even want to think about the number of accidental emails I might send before breakfast when spring allergies bring on the morning sneezes), but they will have nothing in reality. (READ MORE: Take an Exclusive Look Inside Itxu Díaz’s New Book: I Will Not Eat Crickets: An Angry Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite)
Those present, on the other hand, will continue to be enriched by the old experience of sharing life in society — talking, looking into each other’s eyes, touching, kissing. The absent will be easily manipulated through any mechanism that combines pernicious ideas and technology. Those present will still be able to develop a modicum of criteria, contrasting their own knowledge with that of others, and learning much more about human beings through an afternoon of beers with a friend than those absent, no matter how many hours they spend watching Netflix documentaries of What Is Man at the bus stop.
Yes, I’m getting older, more intolerant, and cantankerous. Not like when I was young, when I was just cantankerous, intolerant, and old. And it overwhelms me to see people disguised as flies walking around outside and inside bars, mired in a world of lies and corruption. This invasion of spectacles scares the hell out of me. It seems to me like the prelude to the end of the world. I can’t understand how it’s come to this. It should be banned! It’s aesthetic terrorism! The end of civilization! I’m ashamed to be human! By the way, can anyone lend me their Apple Vision Pros to watch the game on Saturday?
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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