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As any good journalist knows, when there’s a question in the title, the answer is usually “of course not”. However, if one were to believe the wave of paranoid hyperbole circulating through the media, Google Glass will end privacy as we know it, turn us into drones, or at the very least, signify that we are assholes. Perrenial tech gadfly Adrien Chen notes:

“Google’s defenders will suggest that this is the ranting of a backwards luddite. They will point to cell phones, another relatively new technology. Would you call all cell phone users assholes? No, just the ones who talk in public restrooms when there’s a long line. But in the early days of cell phones, the loudmouth on his brick of a Motorola cell phone was very much shorthand for asshole.”

To which I reply, poppycock.

Chen resolves his own complaint with eight of his own words: “But in the early days of cell phones…”. Yes, there was not a well established etiquette when cell phones were introduced. This is the nature of disruptive technology. However, we’ve seen clearly in the relatively short period of time that humans have possessed hand held communication technology, that there is now a complex set of mores which govern their use. Are there still douchebags? Of course there are, but holding up the minority of society who doesn’t play nice at anything, much less tech etiquette, as evidence of a new technology destroying civility or privacy is ludicrous.

What really reduces these scare pieces to moronic ranting is their utter lack of historical perspective. While Chen and others reference cell phones, they seem to have forgotten that one hundred years ago, there was no GPS, no social media, no check ins, no tags, no photo sharing, no hand held portable photography, no instant communication across long distances, no ready and immediate access to all of the world’s collective knowledge. If you described to a Civil War veteran how we as a society would evolve our human need for expression into a global network of high technology devoted to sharing nearly every moment of our day in words, images, and videos, he would have surely thought you were describing a horrifying dystopian nightmare future where privacy was gone, and we were all slaves to our machines.

And yet, here we are. How have we survived?

Yes, Mr. Chen, you do sound like a ranting backwards Luddite. In fact, your use of the word is ironic, given how accurately it fits your perspective: hyperbolically fearful of incremental progress, while ignoring the incomprehensible distances already traveled.

It’s a brave new world, and if wearing Glass makes me a Borg, just call me Seven of Nine.