If you know me, you’ll know that a core portion of my life
involves incessant checking of the Drudge Report. I don’t use it as my only
source for news and views, but Matt Drudge’s autistic like constant updating of
the nineties-esque site provides me with the needed jolt of sensationalized
headlines to get my day going.
Imagine, then, the scene this morning where upon waking up, I used my smartphone to check the Drudge Report. What did I see staring back at me? The death of humanity, otherwise known as these:
What is this garish monstrosity? The latest design from
chronically try-hard Oakley? A pair of glasses linked up with a USB cable?
Nope. This is the first prototype of Google’s entry into the world of hardware and personal computing. The Google Glass is the world’s first device that combines a computer with eyeglasses designed for everyday wear. The full capabilities of the thing are still uncertain, but in this eerie video, the wearer uses the glasses to record video, take photos, perform Google searches, and get directions from the device simply by speaking a command.
Watch that video and check out the rest of the website.
Afterwards, record the day and time you witnessed this, so you have for your personal
records the exact moment you witnessed the decline and fall of humanity. I’m exaggerating,
but only slightly. At the very least, I think we can expect a further
coarsening of the culture. How? Supply and demand, baby.
Human beings place value on things that are rare and don’t
value things that are common. There are individual exceptions to this rule, but
it generally stands. A laptop computer is more valuable than a can of green
beans, for example, because a laptop has a large utility value, that is you can
do a lot with it, and cans of green beans are relatively common. As something
increases in supply, its value declines. Think of salt. During the Roman
Empire, the legions guarding the borders of Rome were paid their salaries in
salt. Salt was useful in the curing of meats and as a flavor enhancer, but was
also rare and difficult to produce. Nowadays, if you’re employer paid you in
salt, you throw it in their face and take them to court. Thanks to scientific
advancement and industrialized mining techniques, salt is common and cheap and
as such we value it less.
To a certain extent, this same general relationship holds to
intangibles. A jet-setting business man shrugs at his next flight to exotic
Tokyo, while a pasty poor teenager who has never left his mother’s basement
would be in a state of rapture at the mere thought of going to the land of
Ninetendo and anime. The first moments with a new baby are wonderful. Parents
like to sit and watch their newborn children learn to talk, walk, and so on.
But after a few months, the novelty wears off, and the adorable toddler
learning to mouth a few words becomes a mouthy teenager. As the supply of
something becomes more common, we devalue the particular thing. A single
cupcake brings joy. Ten cupcakes bring pain.
This holds true, I argue, for information. Information is a
commodity, like iron or wheat. It, too, has a supply and a demand. Prior to the
invention of the printing press, information was rare. There were few books in existence
and if a new book were to be made it would have to be copied by hand. Information,
as such, had a high value despite a globally illiterate population. Want proof?
Observe the strict control the Catholic Church, national governments, and other
elites placed on the dissemination of Bibles, ancient texts, and other sources
of information. The printing press, in a way, caused one of Europe’s most
destructive wars, the Thirty Years War, as Protestantism was able to quickly
disseminate throughout northern Europe as a result of its invention.
Now, though, the opposite is true. The supply of information,
articles, knowledge, the written word, books, newspapers, everything, has
exponentially grown. Thanks to the internet and the computer, we now have reams
of data on almost every conceivable topic.
It’s inarguable that the supply of information has increased,
but what is more important is the relationship between human beings and
information, and the subsequent devaluing of information. We are bombarded with
thousands of bits and bytes of data every day, every second. As smartphones,
computers, and Google Glasses become more common, this constant stream of
information will only quicken. It is simply not possible to process every news
story, every new scientific article, and every update and photo and video
posted by one of our friends. Accordingly, the value of each of these drops.
I think I could better get my point out by looking to an
example. Let’s take health. The amount of studies, research papers, news
blurbs, and the like on what is and isn’t healthy is overwhelming. One day,
carbohydrates are bad. The next, carbohydrates are good. Eggs will kill you.
Eggs are the best thing you can eat. Running every day places too much stress
on your joints and wears out your body. Running every day keeps you in good
cardio shape. And on and on it goes. For every piece of health advice out
there, you can easily within seconds find another piece of advice recommending
you do the opposite. What happens to the common Joe and Jane when confronted
with all of this? They devalue the information, and simply tune out. The
result? A national obesity crisis.
Politics is another example. There’s thousands upon
thousands of articles, research reports, and policy papers on any given
political topic. You can spend a lifetime reading about something as arcane as
the tax code, and you still would not know all that there is to know. How do
people respond to this? By devaluing and thus trivializing politics. Our
national discourse has been reduced to memes and images encapsulating some
half-thought out political point posted on facebook. People post these because
they enable to the poster to feel, and show, as if they actually care about
civic engagement without having to do any of the real work and effort that such
engagement involves. We have thousands of data points on Republicans,
Democrats, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, etc. It’s impossible to process them all,
so they great many of us tune out, slink away into our little bubbles, and fall
back on innate biases and ideologies.
The explosion of knowledge has caused, paradoxically, it to
be devalued. The most potentially informed people in the world become the least
informed. This ignorance is not irrational or stupid. It’s a rational response
to the saturation of something.
Let’s return to the Google Glass. What this technology promises to do is record every moment of your life. It’s a Faustian bargain in which every emotional, transcendental, or life changing experience can now be safely stored away in high definition. These moments, instead of being cherished memories, become data on a hard drive. Subtly, maybe not noticeably at first, we’ll start to devalue this. I know it goes against my image as an economist, but human beings are more than rational consumers. They have a spiritual side, a spark of consciousness that bends, but never reaches, towards the eternal, the mysterious.
Life, with its wonders, its pitfalls and disasters, its
successes, the birth of new babies, the death of the old, marriages, divorces,
sex, romance, violence, is a continual process unfolding in real time. To
constantly record it, to take it apart and categorize it, to never forget, to
eternally capture everything, reduces its charm. There is something to be said
for the memory, slightly faded, blurred by time, that is continually recalled
into the mind as a source of strength, or nostalgia, or fear. The Google Glass,
and the trend that it represents, is a small step, but a step nonetheless,
towards man as machine, a biological robot.
Plus they look really bad.
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