It arrives: a nightmare future-vision worthy of Philip K. Dick, Idiocracy, William Gibson, etc…
Does anybody really want a world like this?
Why does it seem so inevitable?
Film by Keiichi Matsuda
Arthur Magazine
All-Ages Counterculture Since 2002
It arrives: a nightmare future-vision worthy of Philip K. Dick, Idiocracy, William Gibson, etc…
Does anybody really want a world like this?
Why does it seem so inevitable?
Film by Keiichi Matsuda
Arthur Magazine 
Yes, people really do want this (see: Ray Kurzweil and other proponents of the Singularity along with the thousands of developers working on augmented reality applications right now).
Yes, like Tom said: people want it. WiReD has regular features in its pages about the next big thing in augmented reality development.
“Dennou Coil” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil, http://www.animecrunch.com/episodes/dennou-coil/)is an animated series from Japan that follows a group of students who live in an AR-enriched city in the near future. They end up involved in a mystery about a student who was killed while investigating virtual creatures that absorb the psychic energy of humans and then come into real space wanting more. Being connected to this AR network and its virtual landscape is the only thing that puts them at risk, however.
A similar plot line is featured in the animated feature “Appleseed: Ex Machina” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_%28anime%29). Basically, people are turned into homicidal zombies through their Bluetooth gear.
Looks like it is already happening on some level:
I, for one, am very excited about the possibilities of augmented reality.
What made this vision so horrific were the advertisements everywhere. Surely, if we have sufficiently good equipment, we will also have sufficiently good ad-blocking equipment. (I hope that all of you are using firefox already.)
Why wouldn’t I be excited about being able to maintain my motorcycle with the manual next to my eye, guiding me?
What ugly shapes.
I love that Adbusters used to be the crazy alarmist magazine that “only kooks” read, and now I feel like the “tastemakers” of the E-World(tm) use it to get ideas. This video was much more depressing than scary, because it is going to happen…unless something big changes things in a completely mind shattering way.
Just remember this glimmer of hope…the same people who would love to live like this are struggling with the questions that arose in them when they watched Avatar in the theaters… “Why can’t I live in a natural utopia and why do I live and struggle how I do…”
Perhaps there is hope yet…
Joey Magz: Not sure what Adbusters (admittedly a magazine whose purpose I’ve never really understood) has to do with this??? The film is a critique, a dissent. Go to the dude’s site and see what he has to say about what he’s depicting here.
As for the Avatar thing: That’s right. Check out our Jan 12, 2010 post on that very subject: http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/01/12/real-life-avatar/