Cam me a Luddite if you wish, but I find the whole gamut from Facebook to Twitter to the endless aps
deeply cynical. They are all in for money £$$$$ and as much as they can get away with it.
And they could not give a twopenny fuck about personal liberty. So I find them deeply cynical.
Now what's the latest that they will have you queuing round the block for.
It's the 'Fitbit'. You know what, the Fitbit can actually track how much you have been sleeping.
And of course the squeaky clean Silicon Valley merchants advocate stupidly to the naive consumer
that the 'Fitbit' will track your sleeping habits unobtrusively. One doesn't have to believe them.
For the whole point of these devices –as John Lanchester points out, the reason they work, insofar as they do – is they make you self-conscious about how you’re behaving, and prompt you to behave differently. They notice your being virtuous, where no one else notices (or cares), and so prompt you to be more so. Being self-conscious about how well you’re sleeping surely can’t help you sleep?
Not something the think tanks from Silicon Valley give a monkey's about .
These day everybody is not there. For already we have an unprecedented range of tool for not being there. Sit on a train and observe at 95% of passengers looking at their
cell phones. No longer do people shift aimlessly as they wait for others for they can always be elsewhere, and not just in two places but three, headphone/mobile and now Google glasses coming to a face near you.
Here comes the 'game changer' the one that the 'Silly con' Turks will make a 'dent in the Universe'.
The cruder and more obvious problem with Glass is less to do with the user’s self-engagement, and self-withdrawal, and self-whatever, and more to do with the effect on the rest of us. Imagine a world in which anyone around you can be recording anything you say, filming anything you do.
We already live in a version of that world, of course – especially in Britain, global capital of the CCTV camera. But you can see a camera or a phone or a tape recorder when it’s held up in front of you. Glass is different. William Gibson tried on a pair briefly at a conference, and tweeted: ‘Expect Google Glass to be reworked into less obvious, more trad spectacles, sunglasses etc, for covert use seems a coming certainty.
This could be a disaster for lifelong spectacles wearers of the old-fashioned type. You already have to leave your phone outside places where they’re super-sensitive about recording images or words: blockbuster movie previews and 10 Downing Street. Can it be long before we’ll have to leave our specs behind too, or at least prove that they’re Glass-free?.
I can just hear the 'silly con' technocrats huffs of derision at this squawks about one's future freedoms
Although technology and privacy have had many skirmishes in the past, you don't have to be fluent in lawyerese, to envisage the coming generation of wearable computing having the potential to escalate the conflict to all-out war.
The already extensive ecology of Google Glass parodies dwells with some force on this point: we see a first-dater ask his date’s surname then check her page on Facebook. He finds out she likes dogs, looks up some dog jokes, then gets bored and, after photographing her cleavage when she bends over the table, starts watching a football match on his Glass. All of this unbeknownst to her. The user of Glass has the option to be permanently not-there. She can go into internal exile, at will and for ever. What’s that going to be like? T.J. Clark wrote recently in New Left Review that ‘the essence of modernity, from the scripture-reading spice merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating in the gym, is a new kind of isolate obedient “individual” with technical support to match.’ Difficult to better that as a description of selfhood in the world of Glass.
Source John Lanchester http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/john-lanchester/short-cuts
deeply cynical. They are all in for money £$$$$ and as much as they can get away with it.
And they could not give a twopenny fuck about personal liberty. So I find them deeply cynical.
Now what's the latest that they will have you queuing round the block for.
It's the 'Fitbit'. You know what, the Fitbit can actually track how much you have been sleeping.
And of course the squeaky clean Silicon Valley merchants advocate stupidly to the naive consumer
that the 'Fitbit' will track your sleeping habits unobtrusively. One doesn't have to believe them.
For the whole point of these devices –as John Lanchester points out, the reason they work, insofar as they do – is they make you self-conscious about how you’re behaving, and prompt you to behave differently. They notice your being virtuous, where no one else notices (or cares), and so prompt you to be more so. Being self-conscious about how well you’re sleeping surely can’t help you sleep?
Not something the think tanks from Silicon Valley give a monkey's about .
These day everybody is not there. For already we have an unprecedented range of tool for not being there. Sit on a train and observe at 95% of passengers looking at their
cell phones. No longer do people shift aimlessly as they wait for others for they can always be elsewhere, and not just in two places but three, headphone/mobile and now Google glasses coming to a face near you.
Here comes the 'game changer' the one that the 'Silly con' Turks will make a 'dent in the Universe'.
The cruder and more obvious problem with Glass is less to do with the user’s self-engagement, and self-withdrawal, and self-whatever, and more to do with the effect on the rest of us. Imagine a world in which anyone around you can be recording anything you say, filming anything you do.
We already live in a version of that world, of course – especially in Britain, global capital of the CCTV camera. But you can see a camera or a phone or a tape recorder when it’s held up in front of you. Glass is different. William Gibson tried on a pair briefly at a conference, and tweeted: ‘Expect Google Glass to be reworked into less obvious, more trad spectacles, sunglasses etc, for covert use seems a coming certainty.
This could be a disaster for lifelong spectacles wearers of the old-fashioned type. You already have to leave your phone outside places where they’re super-sensitive about recording images or words: blockbuster movie previews and 10 Downing Street. Can it be long before we’ll have to leave our specs behind too, or at least prove that they’re Glass-free?.
I can just hear the 'silly con' technocrats huffs of derision at this squawks about one's future freedoms
Although technology and privacy have had many skirmishes in the past, you don't have to be fluent in lawyerese, to envisage the coming generation of wearable computing having the potential to escalate the conflict to all-out war.
The already extensive ecology of Google Glass parodies dwells with some force on this point: we see a first-dater ask his date’s surname then check her page on Facebook. He finds out she likes dogs, looks up some dog jokes, then gets bored and, after photographing her cleavage when she bends over the table, starts watching a football match on his Glass. All of this unbeknownst to her. The user of Glass has the option to be permanently not-there. She can go into internal exile, at will and for ever. What’s that going to be like? T.J. Clark wrote recently in New Left Review that ‘the essence of modernity, from the scripture-reading spice merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating in the gym, is a new kind of isolate obedient “individual” with technical support to match.’ Difficult to better that as a description of selfhood in the world of Glass.
Source John Lanchester http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/john-lanchester/short-cuts
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