In 1977, Richard Sennett defined the city as “a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet.” While this is still true enough, it no longer seems like the city’s essential quality (and maybe wasn’t even back then). Today’s public space, or our experience of it, is influenced more by Steve Jobs than by any architect or urban planner; the digital space to which iPhones give us continuous access, meanwhile, arguably fits Sennett’s definition better than the physical city does. A couple of decades since this process of transformation began, every new Apple product now seems to reaffirm or update the company’s beliefs about our relationship to our environment: In 2019 I wrote about AirPods as an antisocial version of augmented reality that reframes our surroundings as the background to the headphones’ auditory foreground (something that our phones had already accomplished visually, to some extent). When everyone constantly has headphones on, I wrote, “the public soundscape will increasingly consist of fewer voices and more ambient filler and sonic exhaust from the devices themselves—phone conversations, buzzing devices, unmuted YouTube videos.” To find yourself in this situation is to realize that putting on your own headphones is the only way to drown out the noise—a vicious cycle that further degrades the public space as we opt out of it.
Although the Apple Vision Pro seems to have settled into its role as an expensive paperweight by now, it too reflects Apple’s attitude toward public space and even cities themselves, as I discussed earlier this year. The Vision Pro launch video is set almost entirely within the home—simulating social interactions in such high fidelity that the user doesn’t need to conduct them in person anymore—but the single exception is telling: Amid a parade of comfortable living rooms, the video shows someone using the Vision Pro on an airplane, looking exasperated as a baby cries from a nearby row before putting the headset on and shutting off the outside world to watch a soothing A24 film. Air travel, of course, epitomizes unpleasant shared space; the ability to numb oneself to the experience is an appealing use case indeed. But it also suggests a cynical attitude toward the very idea of the public. In an essay about Airbnb, Rob Horning once observed that “you need Airbnb not because you trust strangers but because you don’t.” Just as Airbnb benefits from a low-trust society, so Apple benefits from a fallen public sphere that encourages us to cocoon ourselves in the digital, as delivered by the company’s products. And the more we do so, the emptier that space becomes. If all public space was as bad as being on an airplane, maybe we’d like the Apple Vision Pro as much as we like our iPhones.
Hopefully we don’t get there. One of the more pessimistic sections of Zygmunt Bauman’s prophetic book Liquid Modernity, published in 2000, is his discussion of urban public space. Bauman describes the ongoing replacement of “real” public space with two false versions: first, liminal spaces “whose sole destiny is to be passed through and left behind as quickly as possible,” and second, spaces of consumption where people congregate but aren’t meant to interact, as doing so would divert them from the goal of consuming more (“Whatever company they wish to enjoy they carry with them, like snails carry their homes.”) Bauman cites Sennett’s definition of the city as a place where strangers encounter one another, and argues that these two types of ersatz public space respond to that “challenge” by minimizing the likelihood that such encounters will even happen in the first place. The digital technology that has evolved in the 20+ years since this diagnosis hasn’t exactly made the problem worse, but it has reduced the urgency of solving it by giving us new channels to meet the needs that cities and public space traditionally have. Thankfully, the atomization of the physical city isn’t as total as Bauman makes it seem, and there are still pockets of conviviality to be found (cue “third places” discourse). The contemporary city hasn’t yet transformed into a continuous airplane interior that we must relegate to the perceptual background or otherwise tune out. But if it eventually does, hopefully you’ve kept your Vision Pro’s battery charged.
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Reads:
How To With John Wilson as a show about the “non-placification” of New York and the irrepressible humanity that the city nonetheless incubates. “The privatization of public space forecloses the possibility of unpredictability…What How To shows, however, are the eruptions of personality emanating from the cracks in this totalizing system.”
A Japanese convenience store that became overly Instagrammable because it had Mt. Fuji in the background solved the annoying tourist problem by putting up a big screen to block the view (h/t Dan Frommer’s New Consumer newsletter).