In his novel Super Sad True Love Story , Gary Shteyngart write about a society , five minute into the hereafter , that has a weird neurotic family relationship with gizmo and social medium , as focused through a equipment call an “ äppärät . ” Now , Shteyngart has tried the Google Glass , and in many manner the future he drop a line about seems to have arrived .
Writing in the New Yorker , Shteyngart mulls over the information overburden and disassociation that add up from wearing the Google Glass for a long time period — and sounds a note that will seem intimate to other skill fabrication writers : When you compose about the nigh future , you execute the risk of infection of have your futurism turn into ancient history by the time your Christian Bible is in people ’s hands .
Shteyngart writes :
My novel — a making love story between Lenny , an senesce son of a Russian immigrant and the last book reader on earth , and Eunice , a younger , to the full digital Korean - American charwoman — testify prescient all too chop-chop . New York City parks occupied by protest ninety - nine - per - centers , transparent women ’s clothing , and a general giddy common sense that privateness is kind of unintelligent — all became reality in good order after “ Super Sad ” ’s publication , make me sense like a very limited Nostradamus , the Nostradamus of two weeks from now .
I had become an avid iPhone drug user while search “ Super Sad . ” The equipment became a dreaded appendage to a lifespan of already sizable anxiety . My earpiece became a reproving parent that incessantly call me to go harder , a indigent lover that beep and clanged and marimba’d her demands through the left - hand pocket of my jeans , a sadistic life coach always reminding me that , whatever I was doing , there were more fascinating thing to be done . return to the novel five class after its completion , I had the general mother wit that I had allowed technology to run me over . Now I was more Eunice than Lenny , an occasional rather than a ravening reader , a conservator of my life rather than a player , a adult male who could walk through a stunning interior parking area while look up arresting internal common .
I had a general idea of how Lenny and Eunice could dally each other on the screenland , but I was incertain of how to televise one particular : the all - powerful equipment used by my habitant of the future call an äppärät . This umlaut - ridden contraption , which look like a smooth snowy pebble worn around the cervix , always beams holographical datum and streaming video at center grade . The äppärät ’s most utile function is RateMe Plus , an sempiternal serial of rankings its wearers undergo in categories such as Fuckability and Male Hotness . Lenny naturally had a lot of job with his Fuckability — entering a bar in newly voguish Staten Island ( one prediction that has not yet come true ) , he is now and publicly outrank as the fortieth - ugliest man out of the forty men present .
The first draft of “ Super Sad ” had a applied science called The Eye , which was basically an äppärät inside a impinging lens . My editor in chief suggested that it was a little much , and it sure as shooting was in 2008 , at a time when even the first loop of the iPhone seemed like they were beamed back to our world from some splendid succeeding civilization in Cupertino . By 2013 , make a miniature screen above my right eye distinguish me all about “ Ashton Kutcher ’s fresh occupation ” feels about correct .
crack out the whole thingover at the New Yorker .
BooksFuturismGoogle GlassTechnology
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