SH*T I'VE BECOME A CYNIC PART 1.

First a confession. Despite being a creative comms person who’s spent the vast majority of my career in and around the tech industry, not only had the Vision Pro launch just not got onto my radar, but during the first work-based discussion of “but what might it mean for XYZ client” I slipped into a lazy cynicism. 

My very modest age is showing, maybe in this Amazon age, some of my personal hope around technology as a force for progress has been dampened & I slipped into an “it’ll never catch on-ism”. Like a gammon for gadgets.

But for god’s sake, I was right there at the heart of launching and pitching Google Android to the world in 2008. I’M A NATURAL OPTIMIST WHO SHOULD BE A BELIEVER. 

Back in the Summer of ‘08 I’d spent a few weeks playing with a prototype G1 (IYKYK) and the first batch of pre-launch apps which included some of the first AR applications, like the one you point up at the sky and would show you where Orion’s Belt was and what the constellation which is like saucepan with a long handle actually is.  

I also discovered that if you dropped in the in-built Google Maps pin into the middle of Paris & turned on Street View you could do a slow spin on your office chair, and get a full Champs Elysee 360. AND it was a justified excuse for messing about / showing off in the office. 

This all came before a very busy few days doing back-to-back press previews, demos, briefings etc.

To quote the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones as he awaited his briefing slot; “So we’re here to see a phone where the most exciting thing isn’t the phone.”

RESULT people got that we were launching a platform and possibility of what Android could enable.

And to quote the ‘rather energetic’ reporter from The Sun who I’ll not name;  “Thanks for the demo, I jizzed a little bit.”

*** YES THIS WAS A DIFFERENT TIME ***

Not only was journalist / PR conversational metaphor choice more on the relaxed / borderline inappropriate end of the scale, but the underlying sense of possibility and openness to invention and innovation was almost universal.

Look, a new phone - COOL!

What interests me now is how we react, question and discuss innovation and invention. 

Back in 2008 between Google and Apple, the message was that our mobile phones (which we’d all assumed were one thing) were going to become far, far more capable and powerful than we could possibly imagine. 

For the first time, people started talking about “operating systems” for phones. 

From memory, nobody disbelieved Google, or Apple, for that matter, on the grounds that all phones launched before this point were comparatively flawed, or that few single handsets dominated market share, or that operating systems, or usability mattered to people…

A decade and a half after launching Android, why are we so quick to assess everything with the combined attitude of a miserable Dragon’s Den Dragon, or someone who’s had their imagination replaced with a spreadsheet. 

…Why is that we react to news stuff with an all-or-nothingness of “will everyone spend all of their time and money with a headset on” or the deflatingly dry “but what is the immediate logical use-case scenery for this product.” 

We ask the type of questions asked by humans who’d been pitched technological innovation as the solution to questions it cannot answer. 

But there I was asking these same questions myself….. and I actually owned a T-Mobile G1 from the day of launch. Why? It just seemed better, new and more exciting. Plus I was an excited, early-adopting, insider Android fanboy. 

To go back to 2008: 

PR: “Just imagine the software applications and potential for interacting with anything connected via your smartphone.”

Journo: “Like what?”

PR: “Well I can’t tell you right now because they’ve not been invented yet.”

Journo: “So we’re saying one day there will be millions of applications that people will be able to get to do tonnes of stuff, like better games, or sending a long text message and not having to pay for two text messages, We just need loads of geeks to make stuff and anyone can use it?”

PR: “Anything’s possible - you’re just got to imagine it and build it.”

Journo: “Sweet, and what’s the battery life.”

….

Not only should we all be getting our heads around what the sort-of abstract concept of Spatial Computing is (phone apps weren’t hard to understand) and that we’d do well to check how we’ve supplanted imagination and optimism with doubt and cynicism. 

Maybe, we’re just too aware of the fact that technological hope is nothing without the human intention and action to do something powerful and positive with it. Maybe that’s the issue. 

After a decade of developing a global dependency on smartphones, we get that they won’t be our savoiurs. We know they’ve helped some pretty amazing stuff happen, but they have some big old down-sides too.

Perhaps we’re so attached to screen-life that the thought of anything getting between us and our phones, screens and keyboards upsets us.

All I’m saying is that none of the above reasons justify approaching Vision Pro and the platform-shift behind it with anything but excitement, imagination and positive determination. 

….

And for what it’s worth, I’d abandoned Android for Apple by 2012. Never looked back.