 |
| Filed under irony |
Just an innocent conversation with a twenty something. His enthusiasm met
by my glazed over incredulity. His subject, a new smart phone app that uses GPS signals from other phones to allow people to know when they were in the same neighborhood and how “totally” cool it would be to hook up with friends using GPS. When he finished, I asked if he thought people would actually pay for this service. I could not summarize the difference in two generations any better than his notion of a “totally cool app” because I cannot fathom why any one would pay some one else to track their comings and goings so that the data set could be used for marketing intelligence or just turn it over to a secret NSA subpoena.
Science fiction from 1984 to The Matrix shows a culture that has been beaten down by oppressive control of information, but always independence has been taken by meglomaniacal overlords. The iPhone (click the image to get the true meaning of irony) generation wants to build their own apps to voluntarily pay to turn that control over to anyone, no evil overlord needed. How could it happen that the sixties generation with their distrust of corporations, the military and bureaucrats could raise a generation seemingly without the ability to be suspicious? Somehow, we forgot to tell the stories of how bad guys use information to hurt the good guys, or as they said in WWII, loose lips sink ships.
The rest of the post.
No comments:
Post a Comment