Augmented reality is coming fast… And Apple is poised to succeed in this space, if it respects its customers’ important need to be alone.
Like having my patella struck with a reflex hammer, my knee jerk reaction to any wearable computing device is suspicion.
Google Glass, the information feedbag, was the worst. Idiots walking around with it on… Just made me want to punch them.
Even the idea of it… Like having Facebook or Twitter notifications pinging you from the dashboard of your car, it just seems like a fucking terrible idea for humanity.
A bad idea for the wearer. And a terrible, asymmetrically bad idea for those around him or her.
The problem is that with each new Internet-connected attachment, device, screen, and our increasing addiction/reliance on all of the above, we offer ourselves up as test subjects, waiting to suffer from any number of new (patentable?) conditions and invisible injuries.
In 1900 approximately 80% of Americans lived on farms and as a result we were self-reliant, learning to make things, fix things and solve problems by ourselves.
Today, we not only live in a throwaway culture where we simultaneously don’t know how to make or fix anything, while we seemingly have less and less time to actually be alone.
We need to be alone in order to begin to learn, and understand as much as is possible, who we really are.
“Who am I?” is not a question one finds the answer to on the Internet. Self-actualization is not a public experience, it is intensely private.
The concept of a “public” is merely imagined… The public, after all, is comprised of individuals.
Apple should continue its efforts to promote itself as a defender of privacy, and not an advertising based business.
As augmented reality grows, privacy implications grow with it… Apple can win by being the “Anti-Facebook” and “Anti-Google”.