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Mark Zuckerberg announces the end of mobile phones and unveils their replacement

 

As someone who was worn glasses since the first grade, gave them up for contact lenses almost as soon as they were available (and as comfortable as glass saucers; thick saucers, and nearly saucer size), and finally had to go back to glasses in middle age…I call bullshit.

Nobody wears glasses 🤓 if they don’t have to. 😎 That just proves me right. Zuckerberg is pushing this because NOBODY saw the “smart phone” becoming the ubiquitous internet portal it is now, until it was. BlackBerry’s and Palm Pilots were supposed to fulfill that role. iPods were supposed carry our music, and phones MIGHT be useful for GPS. If the GPS wasn’t prone to driving you into a lake. Zuckerberg wants desperately to sell the next smartphone, since those silly AR goggles games gadget worked so well….

So how do “smart” glasses work? Do we remove them and plug them into our cars, the way I do my phone now? That’s how I use GPS while driving, or access music, or take phone calls. I can operate that by voice commands so I’m not distracted by the screen. Removing glasses to drive would be mandatory, but then so is hands free phone access behind the wheel. Yet I see drivers with one hand to their ear all the time.  Imagine they don’t take their “smart glasses” off.

And instead of walking down a sidewalk or through a store with one hand before them, staring at their palm, now they gaze blankly ahead, not really looking ahead, but at the display before their eyes. Or driving that way.

And real glasses are expensive enough, even at Warby Parker. What if I grow weary of the style of my fake iGlasses? What’s that gonna cost me? And if they’re real glasses, do I recharge them every night? The battery in my phone is much larger than anything I’d be comfortable with in eyewear, and that needs charging every 12 hours or so.

Not to mention the weight. Glasses have improved over the decades. Lenses are polycarbonate, lighter than glass, and able to be shaped more thinly, too. My old glass lenses were thick coke-bottle bottoms, and heavy enough to make my nose sore after 8 hours. One reason I went to contacts was the sheer weight of my glasses. Even the flyweight models I wear now get tiresome in the later hours. And while the phone I type on right now is lighter than earlier models, it’s still a lot of weight to transfer to the temples of a pair of specs.

Which is the other place eyeglasses hurt: the ears.

Zuckerberg wants “the world [to] become our screen.” Really? Or does he just want to sell us something? I have the same problem with the rush to adopt and market AI. From what I’ve seen of Grok and Google AI search summaries, I don’t see the advances. Musk has GIGOed Grok into full Nazi, which at least teaches us not to trust AI. And Google search has not been improved one jot. Don’t get me started on the utter lack of composition skills in ChatGPT. Or tell me how AI is going to ruin the ability to write by replacing it. I read the internet: even the “pros” are mostly terrible writers. The few great writers humanity has ever produced, in any field, are the exceptions that prove the rule: Give the rest of us unlimited time and paper, and we still couldn’t compose a decent argument, essay, or simple communication, if it meant we could then live eternity with whatever idea of perfection tickles our individual fancies as the reward. The majority of us are suck writers, and AI is never going to take that away from us.

What is AI going to accomplish? Something, I’m sure; but not what the marketers of the intertoobs promised us. I remember when social media was “Table Talk” at Salon. It was going to recover the French salon culture of Proust, as we all had the fully democratized ability to prove our own genius for conversation. It quickly became what social media became through blogs and then Facebook and then Twitter and ever outward: the monkey house of Vonnegut’s story, where the monkeys play with themselves and shriek and fling poo. I assume in captivity they get bored and act that way; or maybe not. Either way, it’s a metaphor. Facebook was sold as a way for people to connect. Now it’s a locus for conspiracy theorists and as open sn agora as FoxNews is. Twitter is for Nazis. Nobody reads blogs (Hi!👋). The internet is mostly for “influencers” and other marketers. In short, we did for the internet what we did for radio; and movies,; and TeeVee. Commodified it to death. Only with the internet it didn’t take as long.

And now we’re gonna hang that in our face, so we can never escape our escape from reality, wherever we go?

Sounds like a Ray Bradbury story; or an episode of “Black Mirror.” One more version of a nightmare, in other words. Fortunately, I really don’t think it’s marketable.