“Maybe I’m recording everything you say. Maybe I’ll upload it the internet. Maybe I’ll leave it in context or maybe I’ll reality-show your ass into any appalling arrangement I like. So I guess the question is, do ya feel lucky? Or rather, do you feel I’m worth the effort of carefully vetting every single thing you say to me?”

Google Glass isn’t cyber-spectacles, it’s a camera crown, turning the wearer into an electronic Queen: you have to watch your manners and anything you do near them might end up online anyway.

Wearing glass seems like a great way to be far too much trouble for anyone to ever talk to. It’s like talking with hi-beams on. We’ll need Google dimmers, a gentle green light which lets us know when we’re not being recorded as opposed to the old red light which let us know we are. Instead, Glass has a green light which lets you know that you’re being recorded and that it’s time to leave. And it’s still worthless. Because it might take as many as five whole minutes for someone to work out how to remove the light. Which turns the device into a Regnidörhcs experiment: you don’t know whether the contents of the box are observing you or not, and you won’t until they affect the rest of the world.

So you’ll have to ask the wearer to remove Glass instead. It’s an observation gun: the mere presence of the device says far more than the intent of the wielder. Ownership of a device doesn’t give anyone the automatic right to threaten other people with it.
People are going to be asked to take it off, and some of them are going to be assholes about it.

On the upside, it looks like a fantastic way to prevent anyone from ever bothering you again. I talked about how headphones can shield you from the rest of the species over at Cracked, but Glass could gift us elective untouchability.

Advance further into the future with

• The Glorious Meat Future
• The Future of Drinking

We’ve named the future for an obsolete past. We talk about wireless technology, defining almost every gadget not in terms of what it can do, but what it doesn’t have to do anymore. Wireless technology is the modern horseless carriage, an incredibly dated term defining our future on how we don’t have shit everywhere anymore. The only difference is that the shit is now knots of tangled cables, leashing us to our desk in ways that even Alexander the Great couldn’t cut through because he needs to charge his iPhone.

Everything else advertised in terms of lessness uses that as its primary advantage. It has to, because the loss damaged everything else about it. Less fat in ice-cream, less sugar in soda, less thing in thing-based-entirely-on-that-thing. But wireless technology isn’t for people who want to pretend they can change their bodies without changing their lifestyle. Wireless is an epoch. Wireless will soon be only slightly less assumed than breathing. And the word still talks about a time when you had to help the computer physically carry electronic bits from A to B.

We should have a word which talks about what we’ve done, not what we don’t have to do any more. We’ve filled the air with music. For over a century you just needed a few carefully beaten bits of rock to hear harmony wherever you are. The music doesn’t come from the radio. The box doesn’t call the station and say “I’m here, send a packet of albums.” Every square meter of the world is washed with a thousand waves, and the radio antenna isn’t a key unlocking the secret, but a window through which it can climb into the small room of our sensory apparatus.

You’re being bathed in the latest news, heartfelt phone calls, tweets and tumbles and fun and love and an endless array of song. That’s worth a better name than “We don’t need to use a metal rope any more”.