Tessaract now, before it's too late!

I don't have anything snarky to say about augmented reality (AR). It's an old concept (at least as old as some of the cyberpunk motifs of the 1980s), but there's now the underlying technology to make it a reality, however virtual. It's way too early to tell what the important applications of this technology will be.

Unfortunately, every new technology has its share of snark-worthy enthusiasts.  AR applications like the one that lets you see, through your mobile phone, where people you follow on Twitter is not, ipso facto, "world-changing." However interesting this technological trick might be, the majority of the population has yet to see a good reason to be interested in Twitter. Another obvious problem: not everyone wants to be tracked, geographically. Therefore, anyone who applies the adjective "world-changing" to this kind of application deserves to be verbally smacked.

Another sure sign that someone isn't worth treating seriously, as a guru of a new technology, is an inability to talk about said technology without using argot. Most argots sound a lot like the arcane, impenetrable language of critical theory, an  academic movement with a high BS quotient that reached full blossom while I was in college. Based on the name of one of critical theory's founding figures, I'll use a neologism, Horkheimering, to describe this species of argot.

Horkheimering is pretty easy to spot. Many critical theorists Horkheimered to death very simple concepts, such the unsolvable philosophical conundrum, "Is the blue you see the blue I see?"

Here's some Horkheimering from a recent blog post about AR:

It's important to put AR in the context of how it functions in relation to other synthetically-oriented technology:

"Social Tesseractions assist in shaping contemporary notions related to Sociorelational information. Just as raw geophysical encounters evoke varying psychological and communicative responses [think: Communication Accommodation Theory], Tesseracting engenders similarly relevant synthetic loadings. In attempting to establish a conceptual structure surrounding Social Tesseractions, contemporary theorists display a pervasive tendency to shrink all synthetic interactions to a geophysical/biological endpoint. In order to establish whether Tesseraction can be considered a tangible phenomena, this assumed standard of endpoint interaction should shift from a reductionist angling towards more appropriate markers...."

Social Tesseraction is described in full at Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1 – a project that discusses ”...the formation and evolution of synthetic environments.”

While it made a good plot device for a couple of classic science fiction stories, I doubt that the mathematical concept of a tesseract is the only possible way to describe "sociorelational information." (I also have doubts about sociorelational, too.) However, the word tesseract is the ideal building block of argot:  obscure, technical, and oblique. Classic Horkheimering, to be sure, but how does these word games advance the adoption of a new technology?