Molotov’s
is the kind of San Francisco dive bar where you are guaranteed a
hostile response if you break the house rules about who’s next at the
pool table. As a reviewer noted on
,
the bar “can be intimidating if you aren’t rocking your punk rock
cred.” It’s a place to “bring your dog, order a two dollar PBR, and get
your grime on.”
frenzies do not ordinarily ensue when a fight breaks out and a purse
gets stolen at a punk rock bar on the lower Haight. But throw a woman
wearing Google Glass into the middle of the scuffle, a woman who
an entire city will be foaming with bile. The woman in question, Sarah
Slocum, a social media consultant from San Mateo and self-described
“glasshead,” instantly became the new face of the tech culture wars.
Most
people who have experienced real oppression will likely scoff at the
notion that having your $1,500 Google Glass ripped off your face outside
of a dive bar at 2 in the morning constitutes a hate crime. But that
doesn’t mean Slocum deserved having her phone and purse stolen, or all
the over-the-top negative sentiment that has been showered upon her ever
since. Drunk people do inappropriate things in bars every night. That
doesn’t make them evil.
But what about Google Glass? That’s where this story gains some heft.
Google Glass
is a fascinating device because it simultaneously appears to foreshadow
our cyborg future while also symbolizing — and enacting! — our growing
anxieties about the present. The ubiquitous surveillance state? Google
Glass plugs right into it. Technologically driven income inequality?
What could be more potent than this expensive new tribal marker for the
tech elite?
The people who don their cyborg head-dresses and
manage not to grasp how off-putting they may be to the lumpen
proletariat are betraying a revealing lack of self-awareness — so much
so that Google recently felt it had to publish a list of
“Dos and Don’ts” for Glass users. What more do we need for proof that Google Glass is the antithesis of punk rock?
* * *
The
details of what exactly went down last Friday night at Molotov’s are
rapidly taking on a Rashomon-like inconsistency. Slocum says she was
attacked — “flicked” at with wet bar towels, to be more specific — and
that her Google Glass was ripped from her face by a “hater.” Another
eyewitness claims a friend of Slocum’s threw the first punch.
Again,
typical stuff for the wee hours in a punk rock bar. But here’s what we
do know: Sarah Slocum wore Google Glass into Molotov’s. Some patrons of
the bar expressed discomfort at the possibility that Slocum might be
recording them using Glass. Slocum herself acknowledges that “after
being verbally accosted ” by one woman, she turned on Glass’ video
recording function, apparently operating under the extremely dubious
assumption that taking such action would result in more restrained
behavior.
That was dumb. Farhad Manjoo, newly crowned tech pundit
for the New York Times, captured the stupidity at the heart of this
story in one pithy tweet:
So
maybe the story should end here. It is one of the odd byproducts of
our hyper-networked society that every instance of inappropriate
behavior is immediately transmitted everywhere and becomes the gist of a
culture-wide aneurysm. Let’s all learn from Slocum’s example: There are
some places and times when it is inappropriate to wear a video-camera
on your face.
If Google Glass-like technology is ever going to
become acceptable in civilized society, a proper etiquette for its use
will have to evolve. In his account of a year wearing Google Glass,
“I, Glasshole,” Wired journalist Mat Honan wrote about all the times he
didn’t wear his Glass.
My
Glass experiences have left me a little wary of wearables because I’m
never sure where they’re welcome. I’m not wearing my $1,500 face
computer on public transit where there’s a good chance it might be
yanked from my face. I won’t wear it out to dinner, because it seems as
rude as holding a phone in my hand during a meal. I won’t wear it to a
bar. I won’t wear it to a movie. I can’t wear it to the playground or my
kid’s school because sometimes it scares children.
Honan
believes that eventually, as prices drop and the technology becomes
less obtrusive (Google Contacts!) and people become more generally
comfortable with state-of-the-art cybertech, wearable technology will
become as ubiquitous as smartphones are now. It’s a possibility that
can’t be ruled out. If the steady bubble of incidents involving Google
Glass can in large part be attributed to Glass users simply not
getting
that there are situations where it comes off as rude and invasive to be
wearing a video camera on your face, maybe they’ll eventually grow up.
But
the problems with Glass go deeper than etiquette. As stupid and
juvenile as so much of the “tech hate” is in the Bay Area now, there is
no denying that, as a society, we are reassessing how we think about
technology, and becoming more suspicious of it in the process.
The
emergence of the ubiquitous surveillance state is exhibit A in this
reevaluation. We know now that the original “Don’t be evil” Google is
one of the primary architects of a new order in which vast reserves of
data are collected every day about all of us. This data has enabled both
the NSA and advertisers to track our every movement in extraordinary
detail. How hard is it to understand the symbolism of Google Glass in
the context of this sea change? If we’re already nervous about our email
and our texts being scooped by spooks, the last thing we want to see
after we’ve been pounding PBR for a few hours is someone staring at us
with technology on their face that could be transmitting a live feed of
us to just about anywhere.
The increasingly obvious negative economic and cultural consequences of technological progress are exhibit B: During
the 10-second video clip recorded by Slocum, one bar patron can be heard saying: “You are ruining this city.”
There
are many reasons why the animosity captured by those five words is
unjustified, especially when it is brought to be bear indiscriminately
on anyone who happens to be employed in the tech sector. Tech culture is
as deep a part of the San Francisco Bay Area as the Gold Rush and the
Summer of Love and the gay rights movement. There are thousands of
people in the tech sector who contribute to its culture and vibrant
economy.
At the same time, in San Francisco right now,
art galleries are closing, nonprofits are being
forced out of their offices, and seniors are being
evicted from their homes. And if you happen to be losing your home, or even just your favorite
gay Latino bar, you really
don’t want to hear how tech workers are feeling demonized. Their victim-hood is low on your list of priorities.
Change
is constant in any big, dynamic city, but the rate of change in the San
Francisco Bay Area right now is so fast as to be palpably
destabilizing. And what is happening locally also connects to a deeper
unease,
a growing sense
that our increasingly sophisticated technologies are automating people
out of their jobs and putting downward pressure on wages.
In that
context, the emergence of thousands of Google “Explorers” as an obvious
tech elite avant-garde is bound to be perceived as irritating by those
who feel threatened by recent change. The people who are benefiting most
from the new economy are separating themselves from the rest with
silicon circuitry
on their heads. As Mat Honan wrote, “Glass is
a class divide on your face.” That kind of conspicuous consumption is
bound to inspire conspicuous resentment.
It could well be that as
Moore’s law kicks in and prices fall and the technology becomes less
obtrusive, and as we all educate ourselves on how and when flaunting our
cyborg tech is appropriate, we’ll arrive at some new equilibrium. The
current paroxysms about tech culture are rife with contradictions. This
morning I was looking through
reviews of Molotov’s on Yelp.
Not surprisingly, there are a handful of new reviews posted since the
Glass incident, more or less split evenly between people trashing the
bar as a seedy hole full of ignorant Glass haters and as a righteous
center of resistance to the new tech overlords. But I was struck by the
realization that the vast majority of those involved in the conversation
about what happened at Molotov’s last Friday night were probably using a
mobile, Wi-Fi-connected device to communicate, something that would
have seemed like sheer fantasy just a decade or two ago. Who’s to say
that the version of this conversation we are having 10 years from now
won’t be conducted via ubiquitous augmented reality devices like Google
Glass?
Maybe next time around we’ll be hating on the freaks who
are implanting new tech directly into their skulls. Which, come to think
of it, sounds pretty punk rock.
(Credit: martin-matthews via iStock)
Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.
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