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In the last Augmented Realist post, Towards a Digital Animism, I made the argument that conceptions of AR with ’scarce mappings‘ — that is, artificial limitations on the number and kind of augments that are connected to the things, people and places of the real world — are land-grabs by prospective rent-seekers.

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the potential downsides of allowing anyone to ‚attach‘ any digital payload to any thing or person or place, but curtailing that freedom in order to prevent bad behavior would be like preserving the technology of writing for a trusted elite while leaving the general public illiterate in order to avoid the promulgation of bad ideas.

In that last post, I gave the hypothetical example of an AR-enhanced Times Square, making the point that in a system where all augments are always visible, public spaces would immediately become too crowded with digital elements to see through or use in any way.

Your first instinct about how to address this issue might be to ‘ban’ or ‘outlaw’ people putting augments on real estate they don’t own, as Mark Pesce advocates in the book Augmented Reality.

It’s hard to overstate how much I disagree this position.

I believe that augments are speech, and that augments that are ‘anchored’ to real-world things or people or places are simply speech about those things.

Read the latest post on Augmented Realist for my (impassioned) argument why.

https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/augments-are-speech