GOOGLE GLASS: THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS A NICENIK SOCIETY
An interesting article in this week’s The Economist’s entitled
‘Ubiquitous Cameras’ (http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21589863-it-getting-ever-easier-record-anything-or-everything-you-see-opens)
which discussed the implications of the widespread use of Google’s Glass
headset.
Google Glass is a wearable computer with an optical
head-mounted display which can also take pictures.
Now most of the debate about Glass has centred around ‘oh, won’t
it be terrible all these Glass-equipped people going around taking
surreptitious photographs of us and invading out privacy’ this countered by the
inevitable, ‘if people don’t want their business archived in a photo, don’t do
guilty things in public’.
To me what Glass exemplifies is the increasingly rapid miniaturisation
of surveillance equipment and the thought that in a few short years it won’t
just be photographs the Glass-of-the-future is taking but videos (and probably
constant-stream videos at that, then we’ll all be ‘life loggers’). And once
this is teamed up with facial recognition we will truly be in a PanOpticon
society, where everyone will be able to see what we were doing at any moment in
our public life.
The result will be a radical change in how we disport
ourselves in public. Since the Rialto police in the USA began using body
cameras to record incidents in February 2012 public complaints against police
officers fell a staggering 88% and the use of force by officers by 60%. Body
cameras, it seems, incentivise people to conduct themselves in a more civilised
manner … nobody wants to see themselves looking and acting like a total prick
on YouTube.
But (and I think it’s a pretty big but) what this will
provoke is a massive experiment in social re-engineering with people being
obliged to act in a more censured way. They will know they are being watched
and will act accordingly. A good thing, you might suggest, but the upshot will
be that life, I suspect, will become even more boring than it is today.
As Jenni-Fur says in Invent-10n:
I
am fed up enduring the claustrophobic, cossetted tyranny of the nice.
Fuck
nice.
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