Augmented Reality

Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles have taken augmented reality (AR) to the next level. Rather than trying to put digital content onto the real world, they convert the real world into digital content and augment that. (This, at least, is my reading of the ‘virtually lag-free’ statement on Apple’s web page.) Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series occasionally riffs on the potentially dystopian aspects of AR, such as in the episode ‘Men Against Fire‘ and ‘White Christmas‘. But AR has some interesting implications from an ecocyborg perspective.

These googles are effectively augmenting their humans — they, like many everyday IT tools we take for granted — turn us into cyborgs while using them. Critically, however, they are a ‘shortcut’ to ecocyborgs. They can change our perceptions of the environment around us digitally, rather than through engineering. Do ecocyborgs necessarily have to be meat (and/or veg) ware? Must they be entirely physical phenomena, rather than at least partly virtual? By altering how we see the world around us, these kinds of tool might be able to help us live comfortably in spaces we would ‘naturally’ find uncomfortable. It is not so difficult to imagine a company running your habitation telling you to leave your goggles on for ‘the best user experience’…

Much more interesting, however, is that the virtual augmentation of physical space manifests multiple realities. If everyone is wearing goggles, there is no longer a single, common, shared world-out-there to discuss. Instead there are multiple, independently constructed realities — parallel digital overlays on the (single) physical world — that cannot necessarily be unified. Ecocyborgs are the death of nature; augmented reality the death of science. Sort of. You’ll still die if you walk off a physical cliff your goggles have told you is a more pleasing plain. But maybe your grieving friends can use simulations of you to continue to interact with their conceptualizations of you after you are dead. (Another theme explored by Black Mirror.) Perhaps this can be done so seamlessly that they don’t even know you are dead — for them, you are still alive, so long as they keep the goggles on.

The potential of AR is immense — imagine visiting a ruin and being able to see it restored. The meeting use case explored on the Vision Pro website could render travelling for conferences a thing of the past. However, the ability to wilfully alter one’s reality is a power that can easily be misused. Your goggles could, for example, ensure all the people you see are beautiful people — which is the thin end of a potentially very sinister and/or creepy wedge.

A central principle behind the ecocyborg is the coevolution of (post-)humans, (post-)environments and technology. We change our environment, supposedly imposing our will on it — making it more ‘us’ — but forget that changing our environment changes our ‘selves’, which logically and ironically makes us less ‘us’. The self that made the decision to change its environment is not the self that ends up living those changes. Each of these changes is mediated through technology, which also coevolves with humans and their environments in accordance with demand, materials, trade and pollution.

AR allows us to change at least the appearance of our environment with no more physical effort than the click of a button or the swipe of a hand. How will that change us? Will it make us more tolerant of deficiencies in unaugmented reality? Why go to the effort of mowing the lawn when AR can just show you your garden with a mown lawn rather than the ‘unsightly’ long grass? Or will it make us less satisfied with the way things are because AR is always showing us something better? Will we become so attached to AR devices that we wear them habitually, or even start to experience mental or physiological symptoms when the devices are switched off or run out of power? Are there religious uses for AR? Maybe fundamentalists could use AR to show demons and angels fighting over strangers’ souls, or perhaps even censor material around them that is contrary to dogma. Flat earthers can see the world as though it really is flat. Could AR mean the end of the beauty industry? Perhaps we will generate avatars of ourselves for others in AR to see us how we would like to be seen… Will it then be rude — even discriminatory — not to use AR to see people how they want others to see them? And what about the clashes of different people’s augmentations of reality? Will we fight over them? Will we hack others’ ARs to force them to see things our way — or even to see a flat plain when there is a cliff? At a larger scale, will companies pay AR manufacturers to cover up evidence of environmental misdeeds — nobody sees the polluted river unless they take their headset off — by then a sort of ‘red pill‘ experience?

More importantly, does AR mean the ecocyborg is no longer necessary? I think not. The Vision Pro is to sight what the Sony Walkman was to hearing. But humans have many other senses and needs, which ecocyborgs will be required to satisfy: hunger, thirst, thermal comfort and immune system training at a basic level, but also gadgets and the energy to power them, sanitation, circular consumption and distribution of materials, and space to allow free expression.

Non-sense

A bear’s sense of smell is several hundred times better than a human’s. An eagle’s eyesight 4-5 times better. Birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Dolphins, bats and elephants have amazing hearing. The superior senses of various animals to those of humans emphasize to me how much more embedded they are in their environment. If we do not sense our environment in such depth, we cannot process information about it. If we cannot process information about it, what are we perceiving? How ‘off’ can our perceptions be and us still expect to survive in the environment?

Living ‘in’ the environment rather than ‘on‘ it means perceiving it in depth, and responding to those perceptions. Yet in comparison with non-human animals, it seems our perceptions of the environment are anything but deep. However, there is a fascinating podcast about spiders I highly recommend. In it, we learn about how a spider’s web is part of its ‘umwelt‘, an extension to its body that enhances its perception of the environment. The web is, in other words, a part of the spider — even if it seems separate. Technology has done the same to us. I can know about a fire or a flood on the other side of the world through the internet (the World-Wide Web). That web is part of my umwelt, and my senses extend far beyond the immediate environment my eyes can see, my skin can feel, my nose can smell, or my ears can hear. In a way, technology has corrected for the lack of sensory depth provided by nature. If I so choose, I can learn about the environment from the microbial to the galactic, all through the internet. There is even a livestream of the view of the earth from the space station — something no non-human animal could ever have seen.

The separateness of the spider and its web emphasizes a further point: while we may see cyborgs in sci-fi as the melding of meatware and hardware, there is in fact no need to go as far as surgical implants to become a cyborg. We can extend our umwelt through physical interaction with external technology. Thus, using technology, be it a land-line phone, radio, television, or the internet, already makes us cyborgs: our sensory perceptions have been enhanced; neurones in our brains are storing knowledge we could not access without these technologies, as well as information on how to use them. Humans began to become cyborgs with the invention of the telegraph.

There is another, more interesting lesson from the spider and its web. Unlike spiders, we share the technology used to extend our umwelt. Hence, in a way that was never possible previously, our umwelts intersect. Specifically, if a web is part of the spider’s sensory machinery — not to be seen as separate from the spider, and the internet is similarly part of ours, then since we don’t each have our own internet, we are now parts of each other, and the internet has made us so. Our consciousnesses are now interconnected. This is an astonishing thing for me to find myself writing — a sort of techno-mysticism (I am not the first to coin that term).

To separate us from the internet is to deprive us of a sense, like losing a sense of smell. But more than this, it deprives us of a connectivity with each other that is now part of our everyday existence. No wonder people joke about WiFi (and, funnily enough, battery life — something only a cyborg would worry about) needing to be added to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I suggested earlier that we can have superior, deep, senses of the environment through technology, emphasizing ‘if we so choose’. The internet also contains a huge amount of material that is nothing to do with sensing or learning about the environment; indeed it contains active misinformation, as well as fantasy. The internet can be used to escape from the environment rather than perceive it in greater depth. It can subsitute our senses of the environment with senses of alternative realities — non-sense. These alternative realities are now parts of our realities, affecting our neural wiring, discourse and behaviour. As much as the internet can enhance our awareness of the environment, then, it can also enhance our misperception of it, and how ‘off’ our behaviour is, as I raised in the opening paragraph. The question remains, then, of whether we can still expect to survive in the environment…

Time Travel

Einsteinian physics apparently tells us to conceive spacetime as a single concept rather than space and time as distinct. Even so, it seems to be the case that we can choose to travel in space in a way that we cannot do in time. The human sensory experience of spacetime is, at first glance, one in which there are at least practical differences between space and time as concepts.

Storm Arwen, which swept down the UK from the north on Friday 26 November 2021 gave me an opportunity to look again at the experience of space and time. Winds gusting at 150km/h and more from an atyical direction (gales usually come from the southwest) blew trees down near powerlines, and hundreds of thousands of people, including me, lost electricity for several days. The trees’ suicidal protest against the ecocyborg saw them entangling themselves in wires, posts and transformers throughout Scotland, but especially in the northeast.

The loss of electricity meant different things for different people, but for me: no lighting, heating, hot water, cooker, internet, television, or mobile phone signal. Burning wood in the open fireplace provided a little heat, and we could toast crumpets on the fire. Candles provided a little light in the long nights of the late Scottish autumn. The Storm had taken us back in time over a hundred years, to when houses had no electricity.

While the ecocyborg frantically repairs itself to restore what we might laughably (given its unrecognizability to our ancestors) call ‘normality’, it doesn’t need to take a storm to travel back (and hence also forward) in time in similar ways. Mobile phone signal coverage on various bands means you can travel in space and go back to a time when you couldn’t stream films on a mobile phone, further back to when you could barely use the internet, or further still to when communication of any kind with a mobile phone was not possible.

Travel further in space, and you can reach times when households in the UK typically had no electricity. For millions of people, mainly in the Global South, life without electricity is just life. Access to safe drinking water is also a daily reality for one in three people globally, while two thirds of children aged 3-17 have no internet access at home. Hence, from a sensory experience perspective as humans, we can travel to the future and to the past simply by moving in space over the surface of the planet.

Clearly, people have lived, and do live, their whole lives without facilities that I take for granted, and find myself struggling when they are taken away. The technology permeating our everyday environments changes who we are, what we do, and what we expect. It shifts our skillset and adjusts our thinking. We are physically and mentally different as a result of technology in comparison with a counterfactual world where that technology is absent. Technology, through supposedly empowering us, also changes us: it is not, then, our pre-technology selves that are empowered; that self ‘dies’. Rather, it is our post-technology selves that are empowered – who that self is, is a function not only of the pre-technology self, but also of the technology itself, and in ways we do not control.

At some point, we may find ourselves in a position whereby the pre-technology self cannot be rediscovered. For example, if we did not have a fireplace in our house, or anywhere outside where a fire could be lit, or indeed anything to burn, or if lighting fires were illegal, then we could not ‘rediscover’ selves that used fire rather than electricity to keep warm and cook food; the skills and knowledge would eventually be lost. This critical threshold is the transition to cyborghood, and we become entirely dependent on the ecocyborg to maintain us. We are simulacra, being simulated on the ecocyborg.

Gardens

Gardens are the places where humans live out their fantasies about how their relationship with nature should be. Supposed oases of calm and tranquility in the midst of the ‘juggling’, ‘plate-spinning’ and other metaphorical acrobatics of modern life, they are small areas of designed land where we can exert control. Oases indeed they often are: for wildlife they can offer a refuge from the urban and rural deserts we have made. Hedgehogs, toads, bees, foxes, robins – all are noted to depend on gardens for their survival.

However, gardens can also be quite the opposite of oases. Gardening could be said to be the skill of making something grow somewhere it doesn’t belong whilst carefully removing everything that does. Roses, lavenders, peonies, rhododendrons, rosemary – all non-native plants common in gardens. Many are utterly useless to wildlife – to ‘native’ nature (though the picture is complicated); many cannot thrive on British soils and in British climates without perpetual dousing in lime, fungicides and insecticides. Even if derived from a native species, the cultivars themselves have been carefully bred to highlight those aspects of the wild plant deemed useful or beautiful. The result is a vile, gaudy array of cosmetically enhanced specimens; as fake as silicon breasts, botox smiles and hair implants.

The worst thing that one can ever do to a garden is to leave it to its own devices. A so-called ‘overgrown’ garden is known to reduce the value of the houses in the neighbourhood by several thousand pounds. (What kind of word is overgrown in a world of declining biodiversity?) We all know the kind of people who live in houses with such gardens, and we don’t want them for neighbours. Wild, unkempt people with tattoos; smokers, probably on drugs, with hundreds of illegitimate, neglected, barefoot children all half-siblings of each other, terrorizing the neighbourhood with foul language, greasy hair and second hand clothes. In the UK, Community Protection Notice legislation can be used to criminalize people who don’t keep their garden tidy. Some councils even have webpages where you can report an untidy garden (at the time of writing, four I could find were Barking and Dagenham, Bristol, Gateshead, Newcastle-under-Lyme). Put simply, we cannot bear for anyone to break the illusion that we are the masters of nature, and in some cases, enforce the fantasy with the law.

Far from being patches of peace, gardens are landscapes of violence and oppression. Trees are clipped and pruned, lawns mowed, edges strimmed, hedges trimmed. Each task has a special tool of whirring mechanical blades to keep nature in order. The chemical industry is also on-hand with solutions for problems that blades cannot so easily solve. In garden centres the country over, shelves are stacked with fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, weedkillers and slug pellets. Food for the things we like; poisons for those we don’t. Some gardeners simply give up and opt for convenient, low-maintenance suppression with tarmac, paving and chippings.

Provision for wildlife is equally selective. We napalm a dandelion (the seeds of which I have watched goldfinches eating), but import tons of peanuts and sunflower seeds from around the world to feed the birds with. I have seen sparrows dust-bathing in molehills, but we trap and kill moles, and build our own bird baths. Indeed, birds do well out of gardens, because we like their pretty singing. Baths, houses, feeders; a panoply of goods are available to attract them to your ‘space’. It simply doesn’t occur to us to feed the birds by planting native species (or allowing them to seed and grow of their own accord), which not only provide seeds that birds can eat, but also attract insects to provide further food. But that wouldn’t involve buying things; that would mean we weren’t doing our bit for the economy as well as for nature. Mammals fare rather less well. We don’t mind hedgehogs, but rats, mice, squirrels, and moles are not provided for. Amphibians and reptiles are generally forgotten about, and insects and other invertebrates are, if not pests, then just plain disgusting; exceptions are bumble bees, ladybirds, butterflies (not moths or caterpillars) and worms.

Gardens are displays of wealth and power, and hence of self-esteem. The further we can take the larger area of land from whatever would happen to it if we did nothing, and the more maintenance required to sustain it thus, the greater our wealth and power and sense of self-worth. Lawns used to be such a display, because they required teams of gardeners with scythes to maintain them. Pathetically, lawns continue to reflect status, even though machines replace the gardeners. The lawn is a deliberate area of monoculture. One species only is to be there, and that is the particular variety of grass planted. Clover, daisies and moss are not to be present, regardless of the fact that clover is a valuable source of nectar for bees (several species of which are in decline), and the UK’s moss (and other bryophyte species) are of global significance.

Even in the Bible, gardens are scenes of sin and betrayal. From Eden to Gethsemane, gardens are where the perfect is soiled, the godly profaned. Gardens model our relationship with the environment and for once the Bible truly is prophetic. Our sin is excessively focusing on our own aesthetic; our betrayal the direct and indirect destruction of the species that quietly keep our planet alive.

Ecosystem ‘Services’

The concept of ecosystem services has its origin in the desperation of ecologists to provide some means of expressing the value of ecosystems in the dominant language of the day: that of the marketplace. For some reason the values of such things as flowers, crows, oak trees, marram grass, basking sharks, garden snails and millipedes are not apparent unless they can be expressed in monetary terms capturing the contribution they make to sustaining human existence. Without monetary values thus expressed, they are, in economic terms, ‘externalities‘; things that cannot be factored in to the analysis. The proper way to treat an externality is to acknowledge it, and to include that acknowledgement in the decision-making process. In practice, externalities are simply things to be ignored. Many argue, therefore, that ecosystem services, contingent valuation, and other efforts to express the value of the ecosystem in the language of the market place, are pragmatic approaches that at least prevent these matters being ignored by the “blind leaders of the blind“. Nobody seems to talk of doing a proper job of economic analysis in the first place…

The concept of ecosystem services is, however, a compromise too far. The language of ‘services’ is confused with the consumer culture. It implies we have a choice. We do not. We are not customers of the ecosystems we inhabit (even if we are consumers of it); and if we are not happy with the service provided we have only a limited capacity to move: We cannot currently take our custom to another planet, for example; and even within our home planet, people’s capacity to move may be limited by wealth, health, or institutional barriers such as immigration controls. This monopoly of planet Earth over our location breaks the assumptions of market theory; for now, it is one monopoly we are powerless to prevent. But those with paranoid tendencies might suggest it is no coincidence that the hegemony of the market place is responsible for environmental destruction on a massive scale. How else are we to end the tyranny of Nature’s monopoly?

Services also implies substitutability. Suppose we design a machine that performs an ecosystem service more efficiently than that provided by Nature. As rational consumers we should discard the natural system in favour of the newly invented machine. For example, bees provide a pollination service for a number of crops we consume, including almonds. Latterly, however, this service has become unreliable and inefficient. There is a gap in the market for a more reliable pollinator. Perhaps one day this gap could be filled using advances in nanotechnology. Nanobees would be solar powered robots that would collect pollen, and redistribute it where it is needed. These nanobees could be designed to focus on particular species, so that pollen is used efficiently and sent only where it is useful. The nanobees could perform genetic analysis of the pollen to optimise the flowers it fertilises to deliver a better cropped product to the consumer. The nanobees could also collect nectar and deliver it to a honey manufacturing machine. Plus, nanobees would not sting. With the development of nanobees, no-one need ever depend upon unreliable, inefficient natural bees again. The bee would be irrelevant to human existence; if bees could not make a living for themselves from whatever humans do not need, then they could safely be allowed to go extinct. That is progress.

It is one thing to discard an old car for a new one that is more efficient, or to throw away a phone and replace it with a shinier model with more features. Surely it is a different thing altogether to discard a species in favour of a machine? Clearly there is a moral dimension. Another ‘externality’ then, but one that has in the past enabled us (albeit not without a significant struggle) to legislate against slavery despite enormous economic incentives not to. That said, slavery is still a significant contemporary problem. John O’Neill, now at the University of Manchester, has made a damning critique of contingent valuation, arguing that it is either bribery (if you are paid to compensate you for the loss of an ecosystem amenity), or extortion (if you are asked to pay to stop someone destroying it).

But the moral dimension disappears when all the consumer sees is the (fiscal) price. Suppose nanobees could be mass-produced for a fraction of a penny each. All you will see in the shop is better quality produce at a lower price. Bee-pollinated fruit won’t be as good, and it will cost more. How much more will you be prepared to pay for the poorer quality product just to save the bee? There is the extortion. Not in your face, not backed up with menaces, but side by side on the shelf, passively waiting for you to decide which to buy. Is this scenario so far-fetched? Exactly the same phenomenon occurs today with fair-trade produce (how much more are you prepared to pay to ensure the producer got a fair price?), and similar ‘ethical’ labelling: organic, cruelty-free, labour behind the label; there’s one for every flavour of do-gooder. And if you can’t afford to pay the extra? Thus the marketplace corrupts concern for anything other than money into something bourgeois. Ethics is merely status-signalling.

Ecosystems are not our servants; indeed, given our dependence on them, the relationship should be quite the opposite. The problem comes when we evaluate ecosystems and their constituent parts in terms of the transformations they achieve – their function: the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide, sunlight and water; the manufacture of salicylic acid; the pollination of almonds. Function can be seen in quite mathematical terms – the domain of the function is a series of chemicals in particular locations, and any physical resources (sunlight, heat, etc.) before the transformation made by an organism; the range is the same after. The transformation is the mapping the function performs. If we see things purely in terms of functions, we can ask ourselves whether a particular transformation can be achieved in a different way. An ecosystem is thus simply a series of functions that, if it is sustainable, forms, in broad terms, a circle – a loop where the domains of each function in the ecosystem are the ranges of others – for every producer of oxygen, there is a consumer.

The services culture takes this further, attributing human values to functions. These values give purpose to an ecosystem that is otherwise without purpose (simply a self-perpetuating loop that repeats until it can’t). Functions that have high human value are preferred to functions that have low human value. Where humans have the power to interfere, the circle is distorted: the distortion of the circle shows the values, the degree of distortion the power. Hence the forest becomes a field, the meadow a motorway, and the floodplain a housing estate. Ecosystems are circles within circles – each life its own self-replicating loop. What is distorted in the ecosystem is also distorted in the organism, all to reflect human values. So it is that the aurochs becomes the cow, the jungle fowl the broiler chicken, the boar the pig; thus does grass become wheat, rye and oats; and jungle becomes cattle ranch and palm oil plantations. Everything, from individual plants and animals to biomes, is distorted according to its utility. The circle is broken and becomes a line: the line of human progress, leaving in its wake chemicals that are not broken down or used by other parts of the system.