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Augmented Reality

The realm of the Digital Fae

By Shiv MacFarlanePublished 3 years ago 14 min read
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It takes a special sort of optimism to bring children into the world, particularly in times of trouble. The more educated you are, the more you know about the world at large and the forces crashing around it like icebergs speckled with political lice, the more daunting it is to try and project for the future. My parents started with me and my siblings in the early 1980’s, so they didn’t have the Internet to feed them a constant flow of doom and contrast, but since both of them had had parents with military and intelligence backgrounds reaching back to the second world war, they had enough to go on to know that the world at large was neither safe, nor sound, and that interesting times were ahead.

Coming from a low-income middle-class background, my father is a construction worker who has spent most of his time in a cell: as a crane operator, he has a tiny four-corner office with a changing view, and it has fueled his interest in photography to the point that he maintains a better Twitter following than many of the social motivators I’ve seen. He has shared conversations on politics, physics, engineering, and colour theory with some of the web’s biggest celebrities, and at one point, he was the closest man on earth to the ISS exchanging tweets with Commander Chris Hadfield as he passed overhead. Phenomenal Cosmic Power, Itty Bitty Living Space.

My mother was born and raised in Belfast, Ireland, during the troubles. She has opened up more about her roots in recent years as the internet has enabled her to connect with relatives, friends, and relations from her youth, and the distance of a Canadian life allow her to reflect on the troubles through a different focus. She shows us pictures of old roads where she grew up, side by side with new point in place perspectives of how they’ve grown or changed since. She talks about the soldiers, with their well shined shoes, watching school children walk past bombed out buildings, as the commonplace things they were for her. She shows us the beauty of her homeland’s scenery, and the art and culture she grew up enmeshed with. She shares her love of natural landscape and long drives with my father, who has always reserved Sundays for exploring the world around them.

When I was born, the entertainment and technology industries were just starting their latest major courtship: the history of video games was in its infancy, but it boiled with fast paced, big profile, high stakes drama. The industry was riddled with international industrial espionage, bartering back and forth across the iron curtain, techniques in coding which, to this day, aren’t entirely understood. The influx of interactive creativity helped to drive my childhood education, and to reinforce the techniques of typing, logic design, and abstraction that would allow me to get the most out of a world that was suddenly bustling with new technology. My grade school years were filled with Oregon Trail, Logo Writer, Lemonade Shop, and Number Muncher, and for a brief period, Mario was my typing tutor. On television, kids a bit older than me were flying around the United States to attend championship tournaments to play Nintendo games and win fantastic prizes, and Bill Gates was seriously underestimating the amount of data any given person would need to get by with the technology.

What few people realized at the time, and what not everyone recognizes even still, is that this period of growth wasn’t just making a bunch of new tools and toys, and changing the commercial consumer world. The Virtual World was building a new layer of ecosystem into the human experience which was quickly developing its own tricks, traps, and hazards, offering prosperity to the kind of people who could adapt to its niches, and tragedy to those who fell into its many predatory pitfalls.

Humans rely on the internet not just for our communication, but for the subtle management of our every-day lives. It’s not just a bundle of cables running through the oceans, over the land, or even the array of satellites and towers that send it buzzing through the air, but it’s the Internet of Things, the tools and toys and technology that talk amongst themselves to make the whole thing work. From the barcodes that check your mail progress to the clock on your phone, the check to see if you’re still watching Netflix and the thing that orders more eggs when the grocery runs out, there is a whole world of buzzing information that lives around us, for us.

We interact with this unseen world through portals of electronic symbols and crystal glass. Our magic mirrors are made of rubies and silicon, and unlike what I was told growing up, most of us DO have a calculator in our pockets at any given moment: it just also happens to be a connection to the accumulated knowledge, and the accumulated cacophony, of the modern human race. We even sometimes name our business systems after Oracles and Wizards, and we use elemental power and complex symbols and formula to make real things happen in unseen ways.

In grade school, I used trigonometry to tell a turtle how to draw fractals on a screen. In high school, I got suspended for tricking the lab computers into letting us use Word again after 3 weeks of being blocked, by changing its True Name to Notepad. In College, I learned that everything about video games was a lie, a shell built around what we could see and hear and experience, because emulating reality was harder and more complicated than projecting blended maths, and in University, I started to learn that it wasn’t just video games that benefitted from this abstract falsehood. The world under us was taking on a new dimension, with the Internet of Things and our engagement with the Realm of Information adding a depth of to the Augmented Reality experience that had formed up based on our needs, even if seeing it, understanding it, wasn’t easy to do.

Tracking started getting better, and started getting out of hand: it wasn’t people reading through all the data, but machines, and sometimes those machines provide reports which people sign off to, and let other machines act on. Business machines automated ordering new inventory, moving things around the world to be available based on trends, tracking travellers by their passports, or tracking targets from the sky, the ability to see Who, What, Where, When, and How left very little of the human Why up to question. Humans dressed up these processes to teach them how to speak to us, not for companionship or understanding, but for marketing, often to ill effect.

In one example, a young girl’s father learned of her pregnancy when advertisers started marketing to him about her upcoming needs; in another a major grocery chain had a huge portion of their bottled water shipped to the southern united states through an automated process, only to find them donating to the refugees when a natural disaster destroyed local public services and stranded thousands. In both cases, the technology of our new habitat had interacted with our reality based on the information trickling through into its own, and changed the streams of the physical world by adjusting some marketing tasks.

It was about this time that people started realizing the potential to manipulate this, but only by giving up their own personal control of these manipulations, and letting the data move itself. Some directives, some parameters might be set, but it stopped being about people changing the force and direction of the tides these technologies relied on to ebb and flow. Despite the closeness that our two realities share, the fact is that human beings don’t exist in the virtual space, and even though the virtual space can interact through our technology in the Internet of Things, the great new habitat of humanity was, and is, still a projection of our systems and imagination. Bots, on the other hand, are simulations of people that have been created to roam the Virtual World as if they were people, saying and doing things to trick our systems into reacting in biased, controllable ways.

The trouble is, it works in both directions, and people are gullible. We now have an ecosystem that thrives next to our own, made of exchanged information and the unending flow of human whims, that is burning petabytes of data every year on exchanges and communications and executions that have no impact on anything of value. The majority of information exchanged through the web of connected tools we live with is never seen, experienced, or impacted by the humans who set it up to go. In fact, the better part of our efforts in security and self defense comes from efforts to detect and deflect vulnerabilities to these imaginary entities, these false actors who try to trick and steer our reality in a virtual way.

Bots have, meanwhile, created identities for themselves out of the castoffs of our impulses: we let them learn how to be, who to be, what to be, so long as they try to make the right kind of noises and be the right kind of influencers. They steal things, like money, like identity, like attention, like support, by rallying our tweets, trending our hash tags, posting inflammatory comments, and manipulating who sees what about their fellows online.

In short, they have become like the Fae, soulless, emotionless, hungry for the input of humanity’s frivolity and volatility, but never to be trusted with your name. They live in another space, next to ours, and their will comes from the stimulation and instigation we have given them to consume bits of code and build into actors. They have become virtual creatures of force and subtlety, to destabilize and confuse us, and to lure us with treasures and treats and tempting liaisons. They came from the realm of dreams we created, and they know no malice but our own, and yet they are driven to perform, and to feed on us, through the gateways we made and the magic mirrors we gaze in to. And so, we doom scroll.

My parents are both the products of a time when the world was more directly at each other’s throats, but at least had the distance to wonder at what might be going on. They are now with me all day, every day, despite being thousands of miles away. They talk about politics, film, and television, and they talk about a disease whose nature and origin are even more insidious than the plethora of conspiracy theories around it would have us believe. The simple elegance of biology and its confrontation with our changing needs as a species parallels the change in our habitat in surprising ways. We talk about the markets like they mean something to us, knowing at an instinctive level that the scarcity isn’t there, it’s just balanced against a holding pattern of churning inputs from the tribal human bands that vie for control of the ports between virtual and reality. We talk about the titans Amazon, one slowly waning as it is encroached on by the politics and industry of man, and the other bursting at the seams by the very same means.

But then, we also share pictures. We talk about travel, and we share stories about hope and happiness and faith. I can show my family a view into my life and my world, half way around the globe from theirs, where my reality is bent differently and changing daily due to one simple change in the design: I now have a child of my own. Where my parents kept albums of photos of carefully selected moments, I send them an onslaught of videos that show more real-time progression, and store them in the cloud for later. They were with us in the minutes after her birth, and they saw her first steps, her first bath, and any silly thing we’ve found since.

One thing we don’t do is put things on social media, because even though these moments are already there in that wilderness of digital technology, they’re tucked away in hollows that can’t as easily be dredged up and used against her. As part of preparing her for her life, we’ve gotten her an email address, various accounts on mediums of the day, a Registered Educational Savings Plan, and a bank account. A huge part of the planning and prep we do for her is not simply to help her succeed in the public, nor only to succeed online, but the blend of both that reflects our immersion into this new layer of our reality.

There are rules, and they are often very archaic, old rules that would play out the same way whether talking about the internet or a fairy tale: don’t use your own name; never give someone something that they could use against you; evidence lasts forever, so take care with what you say and do. Above all don’t trust the stranger: they may not even be a person, but a bot in disguise, trying to use their goblin tricks to get you to buy their wares, to eat their food, to whisper your identity into their ear. Ironically, the ability to connect all of humanity through a medium that should espouse the exchange of knowledge, truth, and information, has made it even more challenging to trust what we see and hear.

Never has this been more apparent than in 2020, when so many things happened so quickly, when so many agendas conflicted so loudly, and so many people rose as figures that were obviously and traceably supported by a legion of artificial voices, rattling with the mania of a singular and predatory drive. The world beneath our own, the shadow out of sight which we have filled with our trust in wealth, in truth, in knowledge and in community, has shown itself to be something different than we expected, and it’s hemorrhaging through the looking glass into our every day lives. It echoes and amplifies the existential challenges of our world, simultaneously highlighting all the once-dark secrets, and casting other truths in dubious light. It was as unprepared for us as we are for it, and unless something drastic changes, we have entered into an arms race with our own creation for our ability to trust reality, whether it be Virtual or the more traditional Analog experience.

The only thing we can change this year, going forward into every year after, is ourselves. How we react to the narrative of the online world may not initially have a huge impact on the fabric of this new ecosystem we occupy in tandem with our hand-made gremlins, but it will have an impact on the most influenceable part of the equation: our own selves, the consumers, and once the drivers of the Virtual World. The thing I want to change for myself this year is to try and be less of a combatant in the struggle to misalign and misinform, but instead to spread more positives than negatives, and to try and defend a path of growth that will, hopefully, make us a better informed, better protected, and warier society.

I will do this by teaching my daughter about the things that crawl around in the Virtual World, and how she can protect herself from the predators of her new habitat, while keeping up with the old conventional warnings about following strangers and running in the street. This generation of our species needs to realize and react to the fact that the increasing complexity growing in this second life we live comes with opportunity for stewardship, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and advancement for a greater audience than ever before in our history, if only we can avoid the pitfalls of avaricious, hungry, scrabbling things that thrive on our chaos, and hunger for our discord.

This is 2021: Trust, but Verify. And if you have the choice, be kind, you might be teaching the bots something new.

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About the Creator

Shiv MacFarlane

I write because I live.

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