07.18.12
Chronicles of Annoying Pests
The French know annoying when in the presence of it. Perhaps the most annoying people in the world, to good effect, were Charles de Gaulle and the character of Jacques Clouseau.
So DD blog could only smile upon reading this:
In response to a storm of controversy surrounding its treatment of Human Cyborg Steve Mann, McDonald’s has issued a statement, claiming that it has investigated the incident and determined that it “did not involve a physical altercation” when the University of Toronto Professor and father of wearable computing was ejected from one of its Paris restaurants.
Earlier this week, Mann made headlines when he published a blog post alleging that employees at the Champs-Élysées McDonald’s had tried to pull his EyeTap Glass off of his head and, when that failed, physically pushed him out the door and onto the street.
In an exclusive email interview, he told Laptop that the alleged assault took place after employees objected to the EyeTap’s potential use as a camera — the device captures images in real-time but does not save them by default — and tore up a doctor’s note that Mann showed them …
” … Perpetrator 2 angrily crumpled and ripped up the letter from my doctor … My other documentation was also destroyed by Perpetrator 1,” writes the Human Cyborg on his blog.
The Human Cyborg tried to contact McDonald’s, or “McDoands” — depending where you are in the blog post — in many ways. All failed.
“I also contacted the Embassy, Consulate, Police, etc., without much luck,” writes the Human Cyborg. By the looks of it, a US-issued demarche may be out of the question.
The Human Cyborg at Ray Live Forever’s Singularity School. The
word “annoying” doesn’t really do justice to this. Jump on the grenade warning.
“What happens if you have smart people?” asks the Human Cyborg in the video, meaning “smart” as in closer to being your smart augmented camera phone. “I put this theory forward called humanistic intelligence,” continues the name-dropping Human Cyborg while scribbling on his ‘telematic’ note pad.
His talk is so awesomely wretched it’s almost tempting to watch the whole 50 minutes. But only almost — then sense prevails.. (Here the Human Cyborg describes what he’s doing when giving a talk without cluing readers to how unbearable it is.)
“Seemingly …wearing a computer on your face doesn’t win you any friends,” reads one famous tech nerd publication in a post entitled “A Man Got His Ass Kicked for Wearing Digital Eye Glasses That Looked Like Google Glasses.”
In terms of publicity, Steve the Human Cyborg-Mann has parlayed a relatively minor altercation at a McDonald’s to a pretty good coup for his invention.
But is it really such a globe-spanning media-shared tragedy to be ejected from a corporate fast food joint in Paris for wearing an eyeGadget?
Viva la France!
Here’s a clogged paper by the Human Cyborg, one which was awarded a prize, with a now unintentionally hilarious paragraph (he’s as bad a writer as speaker):
My performance and in(ter)ventions attempt to reflect the technological hypocrisies of large bureaucratic organizations on a moralistic or humanistic level by way of firsthand encounters with low-level “clerks,” rather than the more traditional approach of writing letters to management, politicians or the like. By mirroring the structures of bureaucracy and complexity, I engage in a Reflectionist approach, that I have found is, in many situations, surprisingly more successful than writing letters to high-level officials.
In other words, the Human Cyborg is telling readers he does “performances” in which he acts like a dick to ” low-level clerks” for the purpose of getting through to higher-ups. Remarkable! Bet you never thought of that before.
This involves flashing your digital camera at “CLERKS” so that “the MANAGER will immediately become available, and the INDIVIDUAL [like the Human Cyborg] will no longer have to wait in line or come back on a certain special day to talk to the manager.”
“The CLERK, in fact, will desperately seek a manager to avoid being photographed … The matter will rapidly escalate to the highest level of authority,” writes the Human Cyborg.
Quite. Helps when you can complain to the media when that don;t work though.
It’s here.
duggzthebuggz said,
July 21, 2012 at 2:01 am
And you complain about Google and the Atlantic…banal…:-).
nobodytall said,
July 21, 2012 at 3:51 am
I’ve had people take photos of me in an outrageously rude fashion, literally stepping in front of me while I’m eating at restaurants with friends, sticking the phone directly out, unambiguously and taking it. I have a beard, which is apparently cause for agitation.
Tele-molestation and tele-harassment is a severe problem, resulting in global cultural homogenization.
Tele-defacing is in the early stages. Rumors of phones with projectors; (trivially? combine capability with) designs for home installations that can track and paint laser-beam (information, contents of refrigerator etc tags, officially) epithets and drawings, animations, are in the works. Currently the only examples are mere laser pointers, often indicating personal anatomy, and video projections onto corporate towers, seen only briefly, at night, during “OWS” marches.