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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if you've ever seen Serial Experiments Lain. In it the protagonist slowly descends into an underground of hackers while finding herself isolated in a room with all sorts of mid 90s aesthetic crt monitors, servers, tubes and wires. And that is more what my current office looks like as opposed to someone hanging out on a couch wearing this headset. If the user interface is to be believed you can in theory do real work with just your eyes and your voice to dictate. It got me thinking. What is really a dystopia? What if our current keyboard and mouse desktop setups, laptops, and displays are the real dystopia?

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So I just watched Serial Experiments Lain last weekend, and the wires are a strong aesthetic in the show, but that is not what the show is actually about. The horror at the heart of the show is about depersonalization caused by constantly being Connected to the subconscious of other people. It's a show about the fears of a constantly connected world brought on by the internet, not the user interface of that connection.

The dystopia is corporate control and the lack of freedom to hack our device as we wish.

Notably that show features a gargoyle who seems very proud to be walking the streets with all their cool hardware.

With the Vision Pro, Apple is going to let us become the prettiest gargoyle at the ball.

there's a scene in Lain where a junkie is wandering around, wearing chunky AR goggles, haptic gloves and a backpack full of computer, festooned with cables, gibbering euphorically about how wired in he feels.

so the show portrays AR - at least in that setting - as almost degenerate.

of course, Lain has an unfair advantage in not really needing any kind of interface to live in the Wired.

I think the (standing-)desktop setup with keyboard, mouse, and monitor(s) is already close to the ergonomic optimum for any kind of work that is heavily text based (from Excel sheets to technical and prose writing to coding to email and chat, and forums like here), despite the ergonomic shortcomings that remain. (The one exception being pure reading or markup tasks, where tablet-style devices are great.) Our bodies haven’t really evolved for written communication, but it’s nevertheless still the most effective in many ways, given how our hands and eyes work. I don’t think there is any dystopia in it. Rather, we should embrace it for the many purposes it is effective for, and work to improve it within its paradigm, rather than chasing a fantasy of replacing it with somehow more intuitive or natural means, which generally turn out to only be good for casual or low-text use.

> What if our current keyboard and mouse desktop setups, laptops, and displays are the real dystopia?

Im not following. Why would that be the dystopia?

same antisocial outcome but shittier subjective experience

Shittier in that it’s real rather than virtual?

Shittier in that my partner's hands and sometimes back are wrecked from a relatively short time using them.

I’m not sure wearing headsets all day and air typing is going to be a lot better ergonomically.

You should look into how the Vision Pro works, it actually doesn't include air typing. You can use a keyboard from traditional to a small one in your lap, if you want to use a virtual keyboard you're not lifting your arms to select letters, and most text entry is voice because STT is good enough now.

> it the protagonist slowly descends into an underground of hackers while finding herself isolated in a room with all sorts of mid 90s aesthetic crt monitors, servers, tubes and wires.

My Meta account name is “regretbuy” (IIRC), but I love the menu scene in Superhot because it looks so similar to your description.