A selfie was taken in virtual reality and no one seems to be bothered

Think about this for a second: We’re already carrying metal rods dedicated to taking pictures of our faces as they obscure landmarks, beautiful scenery, even the faces of the people we’re trying to take photos with, all to post them on some ephemeral electric signals which generate light on a piece of glass so that people across the globe can look at our face.

Facebook isn’t a service made for transporting selfies of course, but Snapchat and Instagram might as well be, and heck, in reality Facebook is just become a vessel for people linked Instagram accounts… Alright fine, all social media—barring twitter — have become selfie transport devices.

That’s fine, I’m not gonna sit around here and bash selfies because that’s passé. This is 2016! This year, we bash bots, AI, and VR/AR/MR/FR (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Fucking Reality).

Less than a day ago, Mark Zuckerberg demoed the latest Oculus technology live on stage by having a conference call with two other people. Take a seven minute break and watch it below if you haven’t already!

At around the 6 minute mark, the bizarro splice of Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake (Martin Zuckerlake henceforth), suggests to his wife Priscilla that they should take a selfie while they are virtually standing in a 360 video of their home.

Let’s dissect this photo for a second because it’s heavy, Inception-level world-in-world madness.

Real Zuck, is looking at Priscilla’s real face and facial expressions, through a screen that is strapped onto his head that is placing him in a video of their house, while his avatar is holding virtual phone that is calling Priscilla into her office. Priscilla is looking through a real phone into a video of their home, and standing in that video is Virtual Zuck’s pre-generated set of emotions, while Real Zuck’s photo floats motionless over Virtual Zuck’s face.

The virtual person here that is in 3D, looking like the nightmare of a Pixar movie, is holding a virtual phone containing a video stream of a person, while the real person is wearing a headset to make him look at said phone, essentially allowing Real Zuck to video call his wife through a screen within a screen.

As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough already, Real Zuck decided to recreate the phenomenon of people taking screenshots of their video calls and calling them selfies, in the most obscene way possible: with a digital selfie stick!

Here stands the opportunity to change the way we do photos and video conferencing forever — hell, even with all my hate for selfies, you could at least reimagine that—but no! Instead, some poor sod over at Facebook had to make the render of a selfie stick so that we can not only take the worst selfie ever (namely the video call selfie), but can do it with a virtual render of the biggest waste of factory space ever (the selfie stick), with a terribly emotionless virtual render of ourselves while we use a virtual phone to video call someone—in the middle of a fucking meeting that is happening with two other horrifying virtual renders of people, that is happening in a render of a house that has no one in it but a dog!

This could of course lead into an exploration of why we make amazing technology only to demo it in the worst possible application, but not today.

Today, we’re asking ourselves something else.

What is a selfie if no one in the photo is the real self?

Of course the final product of a selfie is always only a representation of the real self, but in this case that’s not what’s happening. In this case, it’s as if you’re taking a photo of yourself and calling it a selfie.

The question of what a ‘selfie’ is as we go forward will actually bring with it a lot of other pertinent question about the self in general actually. This sort of thing will start happening more and more, giving us even more layers to hide behind and pretend that everything is okay, while we hide all the real emotions behind two layers of abstraction. Going forward, we can take photos for Virtugram of a virtual kale salad we’re about to eat while a virtual render of our partner sits in front of us with a virtual phone taking a photo of their texmex ramen fusion, when in reality it’s a lonely Saturday night and we’re lying on our couch with a giant black box strapped to our face.

That second part was actually not related to selfies, but that’s going to be fucking reality!

I wonder if people in the future will start to confuse people’s real faces with their avatars. Will the avatar become more ‘selfie’ than the real self? What happens when we program bots to walk along our virtual render in pre-rendered representations of our homes? When we program redundancies into them to make them feel natural (like when digital screen readers take a breath before they start a sentence), will one of those redundancies be to make the bot take a selfie? What is that selfie of? Since we can’t see what’s behind that avatar, much like our own avatars, is that selfie any less valid than ours?

We’re entering a world where things that don’t exist have a self. What transpired less than 24 hours ago is the first public non-self selfie ever taken and it felt almost natural as it was said out loud on stage by one of the most financially and socially powerful men on planet earth. All of these things are really making me wonder…

If a hologram can take a selfie, then what is the self?