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COMMENTARY
April 7, 2012
No escape
Google is a name that first swam into my consciousness about the fatal day (Dec. 4, 1999) that my then-13-year-old finally persuaded me to open an email account. He was tired of printing out notes sent to me via his account, then delivering them with snotty little comments like, "You know, dad, the problem with your generation is that you can't spell."Perhaps it was not on that very day, but soon after I realized that I was now connected to something called an "Internet," and holus-bolus to the rest of the shebang. The brilliant son in question (now armed with a degree in electronic engineering from a respectable university) then explained what a "search engine" is that there were several of them and that the coolest was something new called Google. Hold that thought. Time for an aside, on the curse of the baby boom generation. I belong to its parting edge, and having benefited from observing my near elders, as well as my exact contemporaries, I know all about it. People say we had it good, that we lucked out, that we never had to do a spot of serious work, that we were spoiled rotten by our parents, and now our kids are paying for our pensions. Dan Gardner to the contrary, this is all true. But points should be awarded for the humiliation we suffered from not having been properly educated, and therefore being compelled to submit to schooling by our own children. Even in the art of parenting, I began to notice in the 1970s that the average six-year-old was endowed by nature with a better idea than the average grown clown from my generation. And, as the case above shows, the little ones mastered even the technology that we invented: we hippies, mucking idly about in garages somewhere, in Greater California. A Whole Earth Catalogue of new consumer toys spilled out of the ether while we weren't really paying attention, and everything was globalized and connected up while we were looking for a commune to join (still are). Verily, the world itself became a hippie commune, and now it is hard-wired. Luddite one might aspire to be, but, as George Grant, the great prophet against technology, once said to me (while trying to explain the Volvo in his driveway), "Modern life requires a sense of irony." You could, in fact, retreat to a monastery, but not everyone has a calling for that, and, besides, I've noticed that when I email monks, I get very quick responses. That suggests technology has made serious inroads into the sanctuaries of silence, too. The point of today's column, as many a previous, is to wail. In this case, it will be against the latest Google offering to the planet, named Project Glass. It is, according to the media reports, an invention of the clandestine Google X lab, only now being universally publicized, because it is time for consumer testing. This latest device will be a pair of Google-goggles, which you wear on your face, and which will give you a HUD (that's heads-up display) of too much information, including GPS tracking to tell you where you are, and environmental sensors to alert you to things like the truck that is about to run you over. Oh, and a built-in camera to record the whole scene. The thing will be integrated through your smartphone via the Android platform (if you don't know what that is, you are blessed), and beyond that to all your other devices including, according to the marketing experts, all your computerized household appliances. You scroll and click by tilting your head. To those who lost the full use of their wrists on a previous generation of keyboards, just think of the repetitive stress injuries. Meanwhile, consider the urban environment, as you walk down the public sidewalk, "navigating" by the ancient method, but through crowds of zombies wearing these funny spectacles. Now, in addition to chattering with their invisible friends, and grooving to inaudible music, they will be wobbling their crania in response to stimuli that are of this world, but not in it. All of which could be obviated by a single asteroid. I'm not thinking of a direct hit, so much as a near miss, in which particles of the asteroid exploding in the upper atmosphere generate globally-distributed high-altitude electromagnetic pulses which in turn fritz-out everything from your new iPhone to the ignition system in your car. Permanently, with any luck. But there I am dreaming. Within a few years, we would have it all back and an economy roaring with the joy of recovery, though perhaps minus a certain proportion of the population who were, thanks to abject technological dependency, rendered incapable of feeding themselves during the electronic intermission. Don't be one of those people. Disconnect, now. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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