A little too boy-in-a-bubble claustrophobic for me, but I suppose one would get used to it.
I didn’t look at this video and say, “Wow!” (as I expected to). Instead, I felt oddly vacant afterwards, as if Google Goggle Life would be a step removed from life. A script.
Don’t we call “making full narrative sense of what used to be messy” an obituary?
Sorry to be a downer, but I don’t know what to make of this. Is this Nietzsche’s last, last man?
What’s wrong about this? This would be awesome.
I responded, by the way, to your Rand-Jesus comment, if you want to keep that discussion going.
As to above, maybe it’s too “well wrought urnish” for me. Laying a glaze of corporate epidural icons over one’s eyes perpetually just seems creepy. It feels consumerist and maze-like, guiding you to book buys and restaurants and things that are “cool.” Where’s the pleasure of browsing a bookstore, as opposed to be directed straight to the book you’re thinking of?
I don’t know. I’d probably get them and feel I couldn’t live without them after a while. I feel that way about my iPhone. I’m glad I’ve got it. But we’re becoming cyborgs. Maybe this is okay.
Will these goggles come with pop-up ads?
Interestingly I do not have a smart phone, or a laptop, and I am hardly what one would all an early adapter (despite being a computer programmer). I find it so ironic that those in modern society that how much when agrees with the luddites philosophically has no bearing on how engrossed in and by technology they will become. I think part of your anxiety must stem from the fact that if such a thing did exist you would be powerless to resist it. I am more enthusiastic perhaps because I see it as jsut another option that I can take or leave as I see fit.
But there’s also irony in this device. A future novelist, I’m sure, will try to get to the heart of what it feels like to be wearing these glasses at, say, a funeral, with pop-up ads appearing above your frame of vision as shovels of dirt are heaped upon the coffin of your dead mother.
It seems wearable for life’s chirpy moments, but they may become so pervasive that people almost never ever take them off.
Ultimately, they’ll become contacts, I suppose. And if you cry or the device detects your hormones are giving off evidence of sadness or depression, perhaps you’ll suddenly get pop-up ads for therapists and prescription mood elevators, and be prompted to respond to questions like these: “Would you like to update your e-harmony profile?” “Would you like the address to the nearest Mormon church?” “Shall I call your best friend forever, Sally?”
—Santi
And here’s where we hit the limits of the hypothetical. We are envisioning two different outcomes of the same technology, both entirely plausible… Maybe I should get a smart phone.