PERCEIVING EXTRACTIVELY IN THE APPLE VISION PRO Presented at the 2025 CITAMS Media Sociology Symposium

This presentation explored the extractive history of augmented and virtual reality devices, beginning with the 19th century stereoscope, as contributing to modern understandings of the “real” and colonial understandings of gender, power, and labor that continue in AR/VR devices today. Drawing on understandings of extraction to discuss the Apple Vision Pro or AVP, a wearable augmented reality headset, this presentation frames the AVP as an extractive zone, as a device that constructs an extractive vision, and as a symptom of 19th century technologies of vision that formed along the contours of European colonialism.