A decade-old video predicting the gamified, ad-heavy state of the web has become a chilling reflection of reality. The same companies and individuals who turned the web into a nightmare of banners, popups, dark patterns, and enshittified services will race to replicate this in AR if it becomes mainstream. There is no reason to suspect otherwise.
What actual incentive would anyone have to buy an AR device? You don't need one, and you can't become dependent on a device you haven't yet bought. Most of the time, your phone should remain in your pocket. Despite an epidemic of people glued to their screens, it is still considered bad etiquette to use phones during dinner or while crossing the street.
Glasses, however, are designed to be worn all day, and this will become the expectation for AR glasses as they evolve into lighter, sleeker devices. The same apps and services keeping you tied to your phone will follow you over to AR. Do you really want the hellscape end-state of the modern attention economy grafted onto your face? To see ads everywhere all the time? Even if you currently own an AR device and enjoy a clean, uncluttered, curated user experience, how long do you think that will last? The web didn't turn into what it is overnight.
Things take time to enshittify, but it's bound to happen. Pop-up windows were a plague in the 90s and early 2000s, and remained that way until browsers started blocking them by default. This forced the popups to migrate into the pages themselves, and they've been trapped there ever since.
Well, AR will be the escape hatch through which they break free of the constraints of the browser window and escape into the 'real' world. Is that what you want? REAL-WORLD POPUPS? Are you insane? Apple, Google, and Meta will create their own frameworks for businesses to display interfaces, ads, and popups in arbitrary places, and it will spiral out of control. History will repeat itself.
Keep using your smartphone. Don't become dependent on an always-on HUD. Put up some resistance.
If they want to envelop you within the cyberpunk dystopia, they should be forced to drag you inside it kicking and screaming.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing