Wearable technologies

Clothing is such a successful and well integrated technology that we generally forget that it is a technology. For most people reading this blog, almost anything you are wearing is the result of highly mechanized and capital-intense methods of production.

And clothing is not a voluntary technology — it is mandatory, both socially and legally. If you try to walk out in public without clothes, people will think that you are crazy, and you will also get arrested.

There is much worry, as our society edges ever closer to universal wearable technologies, that we will lose privacy, anonymity, freedom of unmonitored movement. Once we pop in those convenient AR contact lenses, we might find ourselves tagged by the NSA, Google, rogue hackers in Belarus, or god knows who else.

But we long ago gave up our ability to remain “untagged”. The clothes we wear — those extremely mandatory clothes — tell a rather detailed story about who we are and where we fit into society. And rather than fight that ability to be identified, most people have been socialized from an early age to embrace it, to incorporate it into their very sense of self.

The social control exerted through fashion can be quite pernicious. For example, if you are too poor to afford expensive clothes, there are many places where you will never be welcome, or even permitted to enter.

So don’t be surprised by young people who are not at all freaked out at being constantly tracked through the newest wearable technology. Being continually monitored and identified, wherever you go, might very well come to be considered the height of fashion.