Robocracy
That thing is drilled into your ear and all you care about is talking up your any-time minutes
By Todd Aalgaard
Posted July 9th, 2007.
It's hard to walk past somewhere like Yonge and Dundas and not feel like you've been transported to a dystopian future in which androids or cyborgs or grey goo have overrun humanity and supplanted our society with a filing system for cybernetic bipeds.
A month or so ago I was working for a fundraising firm in town. I was paid to stand on the street corner in the aforementioned robot enclave and get on peoples' nerves while appealing to their conscience/bank accounts. I wasn't good at it, so my morale waned and my attention turned elsewhere. And when that happens you tend to notice very, very bizarre things.
When Serenity came out in the fall of 2005 I was blown away by Joss Wedon's take on the future: rugged, dilapidated, confusing, not glitteringly streamlined or balanced or beautiful at all. More specifically, I saw that hyper-futuristic receiver in Chiwetel Ejiofors ear and thought it was the bee's knees as far as telecommunication devices go, like the Star Trek communicator coupled with a hearing aid. A few weeks later, right on cue, the Bluetooth headset was released and I felt really, really cheated out of the innocent fiction of a crazy tomorrow. It kept up, this porno marketing smearing itself all over our streetcars and subway tunnels and screaming obscenities about convenience and style from the billboards over Yonge Street, finally taking human form and strutting right past me, ignoring my earnest appeals.
"Hi, there," I squealed, feigning the most ridiculous enthusiasm you've ever heard. "Got a minute for _____?" The parade just kept on a-marchin': businessmen, high school kids from North York, all sucker-savvy consumers with a technophile edge, unnervingly oblivious, and carrying on half-conversations — it seemed — with thin air. The whole scene gave me the creeps. Here we are, the sum total of years of innovation in wireless and compact electronics at its climax by simultaneously connecting and alienating an entire populace and, symptomatically, making us all look batshit insane.
I doubt any of them heard me.
I'm not a luddite by any means. I get stupidly excited about the latest iWhatever that Apple puts out. What fascinates and horrifies me is when technology becomes affectation and the boundaries between man and machine are blurred. Think about the necessity of sticking a low-frequency emitter in your ear canal to avoid the hassle of picking up a phone that weighs less than a few grams. Then think about where we're at in this future that we looked forward to as kids. We don't have flying cars, thankfully, because imagine the traffic issues in a world where a fender-bender means a ramjet coming through your roof. What we do have, at least by measures, is a burgeoning cyborg population.
It's gradual. First cellphones become the norm after their decade-long stigma as the tool of the white-collar, disconnected elite. Prices come down as production goes up, availability becomes damned near ubiquitous and the integration of new features added year after product year results in a digital Frankenstein in no way resembling its progenitor. The issue is convenience, the kind blasted from the obnoxious rafters over Yonge and Dundas — why just talk on the phone when you can do everything you really don't need it for at twice the price?
Our marketing overlords aren't idiots. Their ninety-figure incomes are based on twisting their mustaches and coming up with wild new ways to appeal to Joe Consumer's insatiable need for the next needless piece of crap. The inevitability, as everything they can cram into a phone busts Motorola at the seams, is a new, tireless effort to accommodate Western sloth at every level: along comes Bluetooth. And with Bluetooth comes an eerie step in techno-(de)evolution: integration with the human body. In a competitive marketplace, a loosely mounted earpiece resting in the auditory canal won't keep the drooling masses happy for long. The precedent is set, and it's out with the handheld, in with the attached. Or the grafted. Vive la robocracy.
Once a culture like ours becomes as technologically dependent as it has, gadgets twist and morph and take on smaller, more easily-assimilated forms to keep up with our addiction. The relationship between man and machine is a symbiotic vortex, pulling both into a spiral of advancement and debasement, expansion and reduction, interconnectedness and isolation until, eventually, the divisions are gone. We're not the Borg yet, but who knows. Maybe. One day.
Still, they came out with this phone that lets you chat visually in real-time. If they ever turn that into a wristwatch-mounted version, a la Dick Tracy, I'm going to eat all my words and lose all my money and welcome the days of RoboTodd.