A Lovely Harmless Monster

the three pillars

The three pillars of tech bullshit we need to shun are blockchain/crypto, large language model chatbots ("A.I."), and head-mounted displays.

Let me say up front that I know that a lot of people have found personal social and psychological value in VR. I'm not denigrating their experience in any way. But my sense is that the relatively cheap VR tech that already exists is perfectly capable of meeting these people's needs. Outside of better battery life and more comfortable gear, I don't know that anyone's clamoring for any innovations in this space. No one whose primary use case is VR Chat is upgrading to Playstation VR 2 (which as of this writing I don't know can even be hacked to work with a PC) or whatever Apple's new thing is, not just because of the monstrous cost but because nobody actually wants what they do.

For people whose main interest in VR is video games, they can rarely justify the hassle of setting it up, the physical symptoms that come with prolonged use, and the nervous isolation of being completely separate from and unaware of their physical surroundings.

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