I'm still thinking about the first story, a couple of weeks after hearing it. The idea of the government handing out virtual/augmented reality glasses for free, just to distract users from the actual crumbling streets and services, is a fresh take on the old idea of bread and circuses, but distressingly, increasingly believable.
That was brought home to me soon after the story, when my social media streams went rapidly from being all about Black Lives Matter protests and police shootings and presidential campaign politics to being overwhelmed with Pokemon Go posts from friends and forwards and media pieces on that phenomenon. It's gone back to a mix of things now, but the meta-irony, in conjunction with this recent story, was striking.
It's so interesting, having read many stories in past decades about virtual reality, when one disappears into simulations for entertainment and cyberbacking, a la Neuromancer and Shadowrun, and then in recent years, more stories about augmented reality as an overlay -- from simple near-future explorations like this, to stories like Aliette de Bodard's Immersion, where an overlay would act as a translator and social guide that would shape all the user's perceptions and interactions. Suddenly this kind of future seems much closer to me.
Finally, back to this story, it was just perfect how the protagonist who sneered at all the other glasses users ended up smiling for his own reasons (as all the other people were doing, of course).
