VR with guns / Pastry with greens
![A computer display reading "SHOOT SAFE" in red letters, overlaid on the right-hand side of a forest scene in an Apple Vision Pro display, shown from the POV of the wearer](https://flaminghydra.com/content/images/2024/03/shootsafe-2.jpg)
Today: John Herrman, contributing editor at New York magazine; and Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, and Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography.
Issue No. 26
American Gadgets
John Herrman
Chard Poopers
Laurie Woolever
American Gadgets
by John Herrman
A few days after the Apple Vision Pro came out an image projected itself in front of my brain and refused to go away: a man wearing a headset, hunched and shouldering an AR-15. A stupid image. An intrusive thought. And yet I could not stop imagining it, a match made in hell, a pair of weapons and toys with their own stupid stories to tell, and perhaps a new stupid story to tell, together.
One is a novel technological platform designed in California and sold by a company whose products are enjoyed by tens of millions of Americans, despite costing hundreds of dollars apiece; the other is a mixed reality helmet. One is illegal to use while driving; the other is an assault rifle sold for civilian use, routinely implicated in mass killings. Both are purchases that people justify with theoretical scenarios: an imminent future in which the world is subordinated by cyberspace, or the metaverse, or whatever; an imminent future in which one finds himself shooting many people in rapid succession. (In self-defense!!!)
Itβs a paywall, but a small one
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