Will You Be A Glasshole?

Some point in the late 1990s during one late Sunday night in Brixton, South London, I was waiting on a bus to go home. A guy came up to me, mumbling. I became nervous. Was he a nutter about to stab me? He had a hood on and it was drizzling lightly, if I recall correctly.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson, Neuromancer.

It turns out the nutter was talking on his phone, on a headset or an earpiece. I couldn’t see it, it was dark and wet, and the device was concealed in his clothing. While crazy people wandering around Brixton was nothing new, people walking around talking to themselves was a recent development. Mumbling, shouting, swearing obscenities. Mobile phones were everywhere. I couldn’t take the train to work in the morning without some loud-mouthed jerk yelling about how he was “Gonna be there in five minutes” and how kippered he was after last night’s drinking.

A few years later, Bluetooth headsets appeared.

Now, a decade later, there are numerous opinion pieces in countless magazines around the world, wondering “Do Bluetooth Headsets Look Stupid?” (yes) and how they can negatively affect your driving (talking on a cell phone and driving is totally like driving drunk, which is a TOTALLY PROVEN SCIENCE FACT.)

There’s a subtle piece of body language that allows you to walk through crowds unmolested. Lifehacker ran a brief piece on it, reprinting from Reddit:

When I walk through large crowds of people, to avoid walking into anyone, I simply stare at my destination. I look no one in the eyes. People actually will watch your eyes and they avoid the direction you are going. If I look into people’s eyes as we are walking into each other, we are sure to collide. You have to let people know where you intend to go with your eyes. It always works for me, try it!

Not everyone reacts favorably to new technology. While on holiday in Paris last year, Steve Mann was assaulted and forcibly ejected by McDonald’s employees after trying to remove his EyeTap glasses. Bear in mind, the Eye Tap is physically connected to Steve’s skull. This wasn’t the first time the staff at Paris’s McDonald’s have acted like modern technology is some kind of alien monolith, so there’s a precedent.

On his own blog, Mann says:

I have worn a computer vision system of some kind for 34 years, and am the inventor of the technology that I wear and use in my day-to-day life.

…

Although it has varied over the last 34 years, I have worn the present embodiment of this system (pictured below) for 13 years. This simple design which I did in collaboration with designer Chris Aimone, consists of a sleek strip of aluminum that runs across the forehead, with two silicone nose pads. It holds an EyeTap device (computer-controlled laser light source that causes the eye itself to function as if it were both a camera and display, in effect) in front of my right eye. It also gives the wearer the appearance of having a “glass eye”, this phenomenon being known as the ‘glass eye’ effect (Presence Connect, 2002).

Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist, described the McDonald’s incident with Mann as the first ever attack on a cyborg.

Cyborgs not only disrupt orderly power structures and fixed interests but also signify a challenge to settled politics, which assumes that binary oppositions or identities are natural distinctions.

Donna Haraway, Cyborgs

McDonald’s staff reacting to modern technology, yesterday.