If we want to empathise, we must always question who really ‘benefits’ from our ‘empathy’. But VR empathy machines, especially slick UN-sponsored empathy productions built to milk donations from millionaires at Davos, definitely do not foster any type of critical reflection. To quote Wendy H. K. Chun’s excellent talk at Weird Reality: if you ‘walk in someone else’s shoes then you’ve taken their shoes’.8 If you won’t believe someone’s pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don’t actually care about their pain. I think empathy machine apologists are lying to themselves. The ‘embodied’ ‘transparent immediacy’ of virtual reality (or much less, 360 video) does not obliterate political divisions. Even a culturally advanced medium like books can barely chip away at the problem, so VR definitely can not. In this political sense, VR can’t actually offer any embodiment, transparency or immediacy to anyone. At best, VR can only offer the illusion of empathy.
I imagine a spectrum where at one pole we have an assembly line worker, and on the other we have a mathematician trying to prove a famous conjecture. The productivity of the former is constrained only by physics, and may glean a few percent here and there with better tools, methods, and discipline. The latter, by contrast, may have the best tools, methods, and discipline, spend an entire career working diligently, and still not succeed. We live somewhere in between.
what does it mean to be productive if what you are producing is bad? Or even if it is good for you, it may be bad for others, who may endeavour in turn to make it bad for you.
But perhaps 5% of designers and engineers have a different view — they sense that users have interests or aims which go beyond their immediate goals or apparent preferences. Thus a product which helps with goals, or which satisfies preferences, could nonetheless be a waste of a user’s time. And a user could — despite responding to many emails and seeing many photos — eventually regret using such a product, because the product derailed a deeper concern the user has.
What is even more important to a person than their current goals or preferences? The process of refining, discovering, and clarifying those goals and preferences.
The Ongoing Collapse is a growing collection of data sources and links positioned as a reflection of the state of the world in the terms that it likes to use. It is built and maintained by Tobias Revell.
What can we learn by mapping pace against panarchy? Picture a stack of adaptive cycles, with frantic fashion at the bottom, and nature’s biophysical processes, broad and slow, at the top. Reaching from each cyclic layer down to the next is an arrow labeled “remember,” for memory is an important influence that slower cycles exert on faster ones. And stretching from each cycle up to the next is the arrow “revolt,” representing the actions that, in the time of the back loop – of release and subsequent renewal – can enact structural shifts in the cycles above.
