Listen. I am old. And one of the things that happened along my way to becoming old was that I recognized, and even came to derive some comfort from recognizing, that the things I value—privacy, the company of my loved ones, good health, not having what look like limo-tinted jeweler’s glasses from the Blade Runner universe wrapped around my face for no particularly good reason—are in most cases particular to me and might only coincidentally overlap with what some other people value. It so happens that many of those other people in turn value stuff that makes no sense to me at all. Like for example:
...Robocop over here, who looks like a complete horse’s ass to me, but must in his own way derive something he values from the very stupid computer he has clasped to his actual face so that he can view the world through what its six built-in digital cameras show him, rather than through his infinitely more sophisticated two (presumably) eyeballs.
What I am saying here is that if it suits you, A Technology Youth, to have these absurd internet-enabled hell-goggles on your face, so that you can have “augmented reality” beamed into your eyeballs while you price-compare butt creams at the supermarket, rather than just viewing “actual reality” with the unsurpassed technological sensitivity of the biological optical system you were born with, you can count on me, A Wizened Elder, not to opine, even quietly to myself, that you are doing something wrong or bad. That must be what works for that guy, is what I will think. Looking like a desperate insane person—wearing on my actual face the incarnation of mounting fear that the cyborg way of life will not arrive prior to my natural death—is not for me, but I am just one person with one set of tastes broadly no better or worse than pretty much any others that do not involve doing harm to others. What I will think is: Go in peace, Person With A Computer Strapped To His Face!
But also, I will have a chuckle. I hope you will not judge me too harshly for it.