The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Essence in Apple's VR Flop SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER A few people have pointed out that the much-vaunted Apple Vision Pro—meant to be the savior of AR/VR and usher in the paradigm-shifting cyberpunk age—has in fact unexpectedly, kind of, sort of, regrettably… flopped . Okay, so there’s actually a debate on that fine point. Rumors claimed the device has sold 200,000 units, which is supposedly impressive. However, others claim most of those were presales, and since release things have stalled. In fact, nearly half of those early buyers now reportedly plan to return the headset, citing various problems: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/apple-vision-pro-returns-headaches-vr-b2496609.html Don’t worry—this isn’t meant to be a pedantic tech review. But to dispense with the preliminaries, let’s just acknowledge that the Apple Vision Pro costs a whopping $3,500 for its very lowest base price. For the highest end 1tb storage models, after taxes,  and  other recommended or qual...

  Beyond Lenocracy John Michael Greer I think most people have had the experience of watching a jumble of unorganized thoughts sort out all at once into a lattice of meanings, with a single word filling the role of seed crystal. It’s something that happens to me tolerably often.  Much of the direction of my life was set, for example, one day in my early twenties when the word “decline” became such a seed crystal, and helped me see that the future taking shape around me was neither progress nor collapse but the common fate of all civilizations. I’ve recently had another such verbal seed crystal drop into my mind. This one wasn’t anything like as worldshaking as the concept of decline has turned out to be, and it also had a curious feature; I grasped the concept in an instant but I had to invent a word for it. The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from  leno , the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps. L...