If you were paying any attention last week, you may have heard the tale of one Sarah Slocum. It’s a story that has landed on Gawker, the UK’s Daily Mail, Mashable, SF Chronicle, The Examiner, LA Times, CBS, CNBC, and SFist. The story of how a young woman was attacked and robbed for wearing Google Glass, and how it is a terrible, terrible hate crime.
Molotov’s is a dark hole-in-the-wall, frequented by bar staff from other bars, tech people, travel professionals, finance workers, designers, writers, software engineers for bio-tech firms – in other words, it’s a place to get away from the world for an evening. There’s a pool-table in the back, it’s dog friendly and one of the few bars on the Lower Haight with a full liquor license. It’s popular for a PBR & Jamesons for $5. There is no Wi-Fi (unless you successfully gank it from the Laundry Locker next door), and zero cell reception.
It’s a pretty quiet, laid back place (if you like shouting over Motorhead, Rancid or Ministry at any given point in time). To get thrown out takes a pretty extreme level of personality dysfunction. Some, like Mat Honan of Wired, have managed this ignominious distinction, and have instead taken to spending entire days on Twitter describing it as a bar full of ‘losers’. (He also thinks House of Cards is overrated.)
Seriously I think that video pretty much vindicated my day-long campaign to end the punk bar name-calling.
— Mat Honan (@mat) February 26, 2014
Back to our story: Sarah Slocum is really, really excited about her $1500 Glass. She’s probably also really, super excited at being in San Francisco, visiting from San Mateo – a hideous, drab suburb on the Peninsula that sucks the life from you. To her, Molotov’s was no doubt a veritable Disneyland of freaks that she could tell all about Google Glass with drunken, missionary zeal.
One or two of the bar’s patrons are curious, or just willing to humor her – it is 2AM, after all. Most of the people don’t care. Some have ones themselves, but don’t wear it to the bar. She and her friends are being loud, irritating, showing off. It’s closing time. They are asked to leave, somewhat emphatically by one of Molotov’s bar staff, who is off the clock.
“OMG so you’ll never believe this but… I got verbally and physically asaulted and robbed last night in the city, had things thrown at me because of some wanker Google Glass haters, then some *bleeeeeeeeeep* tore them off my face and ran out with them then and when I ran out after him his *bleeeeeeep* friends stole my purse, cellphone walet and everything..”
One witness said the woman was “running around very excited” during last call, “and people were of course telling her, ‘You’re being an asshole. Take those glasses off.’”
“This is the video that I got on Google Glass at Molotov bar on Haight Street after being verbally accosted and flicked off by the Asian looking girl, I turned on the video, and after I told them I was doing so they got pissed and came after me,” Slocum wrote.
Probably after Slocum called them, “White trash.”
According to Albie Esparza, San Francisco Police Department spokesperson, Slocum reported that she was “engaged in a verbal altercation with three suspects,” because they “believed she was videotaping without their consent.”
“So after I was hostility treated by the two girls, verbally assaulted and given the bird by the girl in this video for apparently their privacy/tech animosity and hatred I decided that I should start filming this extremely strange, hostile and threatening behavior,”
“Unfortunately, I had not extended the video so it cuts out after 10 seconds. Here you can see them — two people, a male and a female — trying to block the camera. The guy waving his hands in my face here later rips the Google Glasses off my face and ran out of the bar.”
Watching the video, you can see the Slocum was already filming, without consent – which is when people started getting adversarial. One of Slocum’s friends threw a punch at one of the men in the video who had asked her to stop recording.
“I got verbally and physically assaulted and robbed last night in the city, had things thrown at me because of some … Google Glass haters,”
“What makes this story special is that no one has experienced a hate crime or been targeted for a hate crime, which is what it was, for wearing Google Glass.”
We would like to point out here that what happened was in no way a ‘Hate Crime’. No-one was kicked to death or dragged behind a pick-up truck. Unless a victim has been targeted out of a bias against his or her race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation, it’s completely false to characterize any incident as a “hate crime.” What it was, bluntly, was people reacting (poorly) to someone being a somewhat entitled twit.
Incidentally, one of the party’s involved says Ms. Slocum is misrepresenting the evening in question
Sagesse Gwinn Graham “I am the women [sic] who was excited to try on your glasses. I also witnessed what happened outside after the bar shut down. You are fabricating a lot here. You were incredibly drunk and very much instigating the altercation. A whole can of worms might explode in your face. You did not file a crime report and you dropped your purse. Many people witnessed it all.”
This might have been avoidable if people read Google’s own advice in its Code Of Conduct for Glass wearers. Don’t be “creepy or rude (aka, a ‘Glasshole’)”, Google said in a guide posted online for Explorer program members. “Respect others and if they have questions about Glass don’t get snappy.”
“If you’re asked to turn your phone off, turn Glass off as well, breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers.”
One witness later told a television station that some in the crowd were “just rather insulted that someone thinks it’s OK to record them the entire time they’re in public.” Indeed, the only person who appears directly harmed is the member of staff featured in the video, as they have been has been fired by Molotov’s. It’s possible that the bar was unhappy about the negative attention this has drawn to the otherwise quiet, local bar.
They’re not alone. Several establishments have begun a “No Glass Allowed” policy. These include watering holes in Oakland, San Francisco and Seattle. As Google Glass goes from a niche product to something actual people might use, you can expect to see more such bans pop up. Don’t be shocked if you see your local movie house ban Glass or other wearable device (although hopefully you won’t end up questioned by Homeland Security).
What do you do if your latest gadget is not on the approved list? You could always take the advice of San Francisco comedian Nato Green, who engaged Sarah Slocum in a hilarious conversation on her Facebook Wall ( since deleted, alas).
“…as my grandmother used to say, manners can be fun. If I were in a bar and I thought people there were assholes, I would leave the bar. There are literally another five bars within a 2 block radius. There are assholes everywhere in a city and yet one must be civilized and learn how to navigate the choppy social waters of clashing cultures. You can choose to escalate with people being rude to you by shouting “I’m going to film you” or de-escalate by moving to another watering hole.”
An 800 pound gorilla may be able to drink anywhere he wants, but if you’re not one, try respecting other people and moving on.
Mordechai Osdoby contributed to this article.
Wearable tech will only hurt my industry. I am a traveling IT contractor. Roll-outs, break/fix, etc. It will allow for more hands-on remote support, which means the on-site technician does not need to be as knowledgeable(more know-nothing’s in the field). Furthermore, as part of the reason for wearable tech is the ability to engage social media more meaningfully, or more often, it means that these items will all be GPS enabled. That causes major privacy concerns for all parties involved. Most likely, most environments we service are going to ban wearable tech outright, or create a methodology for and disabling wearable tech on-site and/or in-house.
A nicely written piece overall! I feel like you gave both sides a bit of room in your examination of things. However, I do have to say that as someone residing down here, I kind of resent the characterization of San Mateo as a ‘hideous, drab suburb on the Peninsula that sucks the li
Well, to me, this reads a bit like a hit-piece on Slocum. So if a disabled person or a gay person is a dick it’s ok for them to be harassed because they are different? In this article it is not proven that she was picked on because she was being dickish. To me, as a Glass owner, I feel that there is a lot of paranoia going around about glass being some physics-defying device that can record endlessly everything around the user. I think most Americans want to believe that we are important enough to surveilled by our fellow American. But we are not. If you see me in public, trust that I am not recording you and am not taking photos of you. Why can you trust me? Because you’re nothing to me. Not important, not interesting, just a random person on the street or in a bar. I don’t give a crap about you or what you’re doing. And even if I did, the battery on Glass (and on just about every Android device I’ve owned) is less than impressive. Which means that even if you are interesting somehow, I’m likely only going to shoot 10 seconds of you. That’s less than the combined total of photos and video taken of you as you tracled from your home to the bar by all the security and police cameras stationed all over the place. I mean, seriously, why is there no snarky sardonic commentary pointing out how idiotic people are for panicking once their fellow Americans can surveil them? “Oh, I’m fine with a camera on every corner, at every coffee shop, ATM and pharmacy, but a camera on the faces of a tiny fraction of fellow Americans? THAT’S GOING TOO FAR!!”
I didn’t know that being gay or being disabled was as easily taken off as a pair of glasses, thepete. Thank you for that illuminating simile; I come away from it more wise as to the ways of the universe and how things like being homosexual and being disabled work!
Or to take my tongue out of my cheek: methinks you’re jousting with a straw man there…
THe video in question that Ms. Slocum posted out there on Teh Intarwebs shows a group of people who are A) inebriated and B) well aware they are being recorded, C) acting like they’d like to not be recorded. So… what would you have done in Slocum’s shoes, given A-C above? Would you have stopped recording? Or would you have published that recording broadly and with consent actively denied?
This issue is partly about the tech, but it’s mostly about what happens when the tech gets into the hands of someone who can’t take ‘please do not record me’ at face value. It’s just downright surreal to me how many Google Glass evangelists – excuse me, ‘Explorers’ – refuse to stop conflating the two.