There’s very little to be said about this viral video except that it’s a cute rendition of what will happen for maybe the first two weeks after Google Glass is launched. In fact, I suspect it will almost be impossible to get away with this stuff once Glass hits its tipping point as potential dates will be wary of your motives when you blurt out “Google Jennifer Swanson” before sipping your latte.
Imagine this dystopian future: You enter a bar on a date, spend a little time in awkward conversation, and then, bored, both of you end up staring at the readouts near your corneas, oblivious to each other. The birth-rate will fall. There will be anti-Glassites who snatch these things from people’s faces and there will be Glass-free zones where orgiastic explorations of the human animal will take place with reckless abandon for you will finally be free. Free! Men and women will be reduced to zombies, wandering aimlessly as texts scroll past their eyes like flies on a dead cow’s face. Slowly, surely, our major cities will descend into lethargy and a group of Luddites will arise to fill the vacuum. The Glassites will be pacified by porn piped right into their heads while the rest of the world – the dreamers, the drinkers, and the astigmatics – will take the reins. One day a nuclear dirty bomb, built using instructions found on the Internet by a Glassite who was vaguely upset with his score in Angry Birds Glass, will destroy most of the Northeast, and Glassites will descend into rabid madness as the media hubs of the world grind to a halt. With no more Reddit or BuzzFeed, Glassites will wake up from their slumbers, their atrophied bodies limp as old spinach. But by that time it will be too late. The anti-Glassites will rule the world, their Amish-like refusal to take up technology their only protection against the tyranny of Mother Google. They will rebuild civilization in their own image, which means there will be a lot of board games and barbecues.
Or maybe Glass will end up like the Segway – kind of cool, but vaguely useless. Who knows? What am I? A mind reader?