Google Glass isn’t out yet, but it’s already finding itself at the heart of our anxieties about technology and an interconnected
world. Google dreams of a world where anyone can share anything they see with everyone they know at anytime — to some people, that isn’t so much a technotopia as a nightmare scenario.
We’ve already heard the story about the Seattle bar that preemptively banned Glass as a publicity stunt/social statement. Yesterday, NBC News ran a story detailing some of the other places that don’t want patrons with cameras strapped to their faces. This includes large swaths of Las Vegas, in the form of strip clubs and casinos. Such places already ban recording devices of any kind, and since Glass is very much a recording device, it’s out. Same goes for movie theaters.
And that’s just the relatively innocuous world of commercial protection. A stripper, after all, has already agreed to have people look at them naked. The idea of voyeurs and predators enabled by a covert device is much more disturbing.
“My immediate concern for [Google Glass] was from a sexual predator view point,” private investigator Drew Donofrio, told NBC News. “Locker rooms, bathrooms, playgrounds … all [Glass] requires is a line of sight.”
It all comes down the basic problem that Google Glass would, truly, be a “disruptive” technology, and that isn’t always good. The “Stop the Cyborgs” campaign expresses a lot of general concern about what a world enabled by Glass might look like. It raises broad questions about what people might do with this technology, as well as what Google’s role in this new world might be. We all know that it doesn’t want to be “evil,” but is that enough of a promise? From the website:
“Generally we want people to realize that computer systems are not politically or socially neutral. They impact our lives, encourage and discourage certain behaviors but we typically don’t even question their design and intrinsic biases. Ordinary citizens need to get politically active in order to shape technology and the social norms around them. Don’t leave designing the future to the Geeks and the corporations.”
A lot of the general anxiety that has been floating about since the early days of social media is now coalescing around the possibility of this new device. It’s our fear that we’ve been walking into a wholly new vision of privacy and relationships step by step, without considering the consequences. The idea of surreptitious, constantly available recording appears to be that one step too far that forces reevaluation.
If Google wants a constantly connected world where people happily share the lives with each other and their data with Google, it might make more sense to just construct vast planned communities — Googleopolises — where everyone acknowledges their existence as little more than information packets to be categorized and observed by their benevolent adsense representatives.