(1) Money disappears, replaced by “pay by SmartPhone”:
This is already happening now in China.
(2) SmartPhones are replaced by wearables:
Wearables become socially invisible.
(3) Wearables become legally required in public:
We pay for everything with them; not “wearing” equals indigence.
(4) Digital makeup becomes the norm:
People in public expect to be seen only through wearables.
(5) Removing your wearable in public is outlawed:
Not “wearing” is considered a gross invasion of privacy.
Is this the plot for a dystopian novel? Please tell me it has a happy ending.
Why do you think it’s dystopian?
It’s dystopian because it removes human agency. Outlawing removing a wearable is an invasion of body space, different from that of clothing, because it has capabilities that mere coverings lack: tracking, monitoring, reporting, surveillance, intelligence, etc.
Clothing isn’t surveillance, but wearables, even now, are, and will increase in surveillance capabilities.
It’s dystopian because when every interaction, conversation, and transaction becomes machine-mediated, then all of those things will be logged, probably centrally, effectively spelling the end of privacy. It takes all the problems with data pollution to their logical extremes, eliminating the ephemerality of a casual conversation with your neighbor or the fact that you bought a self-help book for cash while traveling on business.
The companies that provide these services are going to make themselves custodians of these data trails. They need a business model, after all, and mining this data to target ads seems like the obvious approach. But the centralization of detailed logs of _everyone’s_ life will create the ultimate juicy target not only for hackers but also for governments who can effectively deputize companies by invoking the third-party doctrine. No matter how good at security and how principled your VR/AR-provider might be, your most detailed and intimate diary will eventually be compromised and data-mined. Data mining will always be imperfect, so incorrect conclusions will routinely be made, and we will be powerless when those incorrect conclusions adversely affect us.
For the moment, I can still buy a newspaper anonymously for cash. Even if someone determines which paper I bought, they don’t know which articles I read, when I read them, how quickly I read them, or whether I ignored them all and used it for a papier-mâché project. When newspapers become exclusively digital artifacts, we lose not only the ability to line the bird cage but also the intellectual security of exploring different ideas without concern for the assumptions and conclusion others might make about us based upon the ideas we exposed ourselves to.
For the moment, I can draft comments like this one in a text editor on a local computer and post only the final result. Nobody learns how long it took me to write, what I deleted, what I wrote but didn’t post, or what stupid spelling mistakes I made in the process. What becomes public is only what I chose to present. I suspect you’d make the same argument about our AR avatars, but I would disagree. My AR provider will almost certainly offer online avatar creation tools that will log the entire design process. Knowing that every choice I consider and discard, even if I don’t ever make those choices public, is going to inform a data mining bot is going to inhibit my creativity by making me super self-conscious about the ideas I’m willing to entertain.
Adrian, interesting points – what about blockchain technology? Sure I share your sentiment but bitcoin affords some pretty serious anonymity, and there’s more to come.
Ben,
Blockchain is a public ledger, so not actually anonymous. In fact it makes it impossible do delete it forget things.
Good points, I was pretty vague – I was thinking in terms of decentralization and injecting (more?) noise into the system. While the ledger is public it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a correspondence between a given transaction and my identity – but perhaps that’s beside the point? I suppose blockchains don’t imply anonymity but you can do OTC trades with bitcoin in it’s current state. There’s also a lot of research being done on privacy preserving databases and data mining – but there’s still a lot of assumptions of cooperative agents. Also quantum entanglement?
This is a (minor) plot point on Ada Palmer’s recent Terra Ignota series, with all that it entails. Without spoiling anything further, I suspect you’ll love the two novels that have been released so far (Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders).