2034 Phone Drone

Recently I commented on how folks miss out on real experiences because they spend all their time recording their experiences so they can "post" them for others. As if they're an advance cadre of ants sent out to do reconnaissance on new places to forage for food, get materials for the nest, or build a colony.

Oh that's right. They call that Yelp.

That notion of memory-deprived mindless recorders put me in mind of drones. All kinds of camera eyes pointing into all kinds of niches recording who knows what.

Sometimes this is good. Like when the guy caught footage of the plane crashing in San Francisco. CNN loved having the exclusive video. But they didn't edit the audio. In the background you can clearly hear the guy's wife or girlfriend gushing cluelessly, "Oh... you're filming it. Oh... you're filming it..."

Very creepy.

Even creepier, there's now an app you can get for your smartphone that does "auto-logging." It keeps track of your every movement from here to there---home to car, car to office, office to bathroom. And then posts updates to your friends or whomever, automatically. It's upgrade also uses the barometer, camera, and microphone in a device, along with its location sensors, to figure out what someone is up to and where.

At this point, it's a voluntary app. But what's to stop NSA-inspired cellphone manufacturers from installing it in secret? And sending that info to a nosy government, or business trying to sell you cushier toilet paper. 

In a novel I read recently, one character points out that if the government had forced us to wear a device that monitors where we are every second, we would have resisted it with our last breath.

Instead, we were offered iPhones.

And now we're all iDrones...

America, ya gotta love it.