Someone walks past me, on the corner of Mercer and Prince in the brilliant morning sun, wearing Google Glass, and I instinctively step back and into an alcove, away from the machine vision. Stray photons have taken seven hundred and seventy five thousand years to reach New York City from the outer halo stars of the Milky Way, and SoHo’s lone Googlenaut hoovers them up with his weak extra eyeball. I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for him. I’ve never seen Glass in the wild before. The thing sits on his shades like Minimum Viable Science Fiction. Toy future.
via Warren Ellis’s Morning, Computer.
I had a similar experience recently. We went to the NY Tech Meetup, saw the launch of Electric Objects & The Satellite.
I also saw my first Google Glass – what do I call them? Glasshole sounds so aggressive, Glasstronaut too kind – wearer. He looked like the kind of young rich white guy who has the cash to spend $1500 on a tiny computer you strap to your face. I had reaction of revulsion, so of course I started seeing him everywhere. How do I express kindly and firmly that I don’t want to be recorded by him? I don’t mind if he looks at me, but I don’t want him pointing a camera at me – I’m not a public figure intentionally. I don’t want to confront him or shame him, but I really don’t like this. He’s not doing anything wrong, not anything you couldn’t do with a smartphone – but it feels rude to not do it publicly, for my consent or notice to not be involved.
Of course he jumped into the elevator I was in. I grabbed the door and excused myself.
“I think I’ll wait for the next elevator.”
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This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International