Creepy technology uses your own feet against you

 The invasion of privacy made possible by technology went beyond disturbing years ago, when hidden security cameras began to be trained on public streets and unwitting citizens, and tracking devices in cell phones and automobiles suddenly prevented all of us from going anywhere without the eye of authority following us.

Meanwhile, social networking started seeming pathologically obsessive - and pathetically trivial – with Twitter.

Now these two oddly reciprocal aspects of the human pack mentality – the unsavory avidity to know everything about everyone and the equally distasteful impulse to tell others far more than they should want to know about us –  have been connected through an electronic innovation that should make all of queasy right down to our soles.

Meet the “social networking shoe.”  

The newest product from Daniel Isaac Group, a company whose Global Positioning System (GPS) sneakers debuted in 2007, has just revealed a new kind of GPS shoe called Blue GPS that has Bluetooth capability and will allow family and friends – and who knows who else? – to track the wearer via cell phone.

As the press release explained,  ”The wearer simply inputs up to five phone numbers of family/friends into his cell phone (eventually this capability will be able to be expanded to up to 20 people) and pushes a button on the shoe to activate a link with those on his list. The Blue GPS can be enabled with all cellular phones.”

So at $150 a pair, you can own shoes that tell everyone that you’re at work, at the grocery, en route home. Or maybe at the apartment of another woman, in the bathroom, in a crack house, or crossing the Canadian border.   

In his statement for the release, company chairman Isaac Daniel jovially describes the shoes as “a fun product to have. People will be able to see where their friends are — and have a better idea of estimated arrival time — without having to call them. And, because the wearer doesn’t have to be talking on the phone while driving, it will definitely improve safety.”

So, apparently, will a button on the shoes that can be pressed for an E911 call, sending a signal to  IDG’s monitoring division, ID Conex™. Monitors then try to contact the wearer and if he or she does not respond, the proper authorities are alerted.

GPS shoes might have some real value if parents could get their children under 21 to keep them on. Or if children over 21 could get their senile, wandering parents to keep them on. Or if people being kidnapped could keep their abductors from noticing that they have them on.  

But for social networking? Who would truly be delighted to have up to 20 family members or friends knowing exactly where he or she was all the time? And even if you didn’t mind having them alerted to the fact that you were at the gun shop or at a bar or at Krispy Kreme – again -wouldn’t it be a hideous mistake to get them used to knowing exactly where you are? What happens when you don’t wear them?  Will you come home from a movie to find the cops breaking down your closet door?

What if you tried to wear them on an airplane? (“Please shut off all cellphones, laptops and footwear at this time.”) With security the way it is now, you’d probably find yourself flying to San Francisco in your socks, while your mother frantically phones the airport authorities to find out why you’ve apparently been squatting under a scanner for five hours.

But the most alarming part of having your own shoes reporting on you is the step our whole society would be taking in them: even farther away from our vital right to be individually anonymous, independent and free. Sometimes – and for no wicked reason – it’s a great relief  to have no one know where you are. To be quit of responsibilities, troubles and the means of being reminded of them, even for a just a few minutes.  

To sit under a tree or wander a street without being watched – surveilled – is becoming impossible. To do either without phoning, e-mailing texting, tweeting, posting or otherwise imparting some lame thought or unnecessary information to our networks of acquaintances has already become unlikely. 

Around the world, their shoes have been all that most people can rely on to take them away from misery and the past and toward a new life. Blue GPS shoes may have a few valuable applications. But it’s a scary kind of creative genius that would co-opt our first and last means of escape.

Isaac Daniel, chairman of Isaac Daniel Group, and his company’s new Blue GPS shoes

Is there a doctor (of sociology) in the house?

Convulsions. That’s the only word I can think of to describe what the United States is going through now. 

And what’s causing them? People have focused strictly on an economy that’s pumping ever more weakly, but we have a wide array of symptoms: a rapidly deteriorating skeleton of steel and concrete structures; ruined or exhausted resources and compromised defenses; an obesity of wealth aggravating a flesh-eating poverty; an educational nervous system whose synapses aren’t firing. And now a painful rash of failing newspapers, inexorably spreading. 

This last is becoming agony for us journalists, for whom every sale or closing is like losing a family member to some horrible pandemic. A story in TIME online predicts more deaths and soon.   

I can’t believe these problems are unrelated and I suspect that money is not the real root cause, though it’s certainly a factor. What we need is a differential diagnosis.

What could account for all these ills? Could it be our attitude?

Yes, I’m suggesting that the U.S. has a psychosomatic problem – and psychosomatic doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real, just that they started in our heads.

Look at where those heads have been: For decades now, Americans have been absorbed with amassing personal wealth and spending it ostentatiously, needlessly, on unwholesome toys and pursuits, from SUVs and multimillion-dollar homes to environmentally destructive industrial products and practices. Until recently, the majority of us have voted for leaders who ripped away regulations, encouraged overdevelopment, neglected schools and food safety and the health-care system, turned corporations loose on the public like strep colonies in a neonatal ward, ignored – even defied – the warning signs of a dying  planet and a sickened generation of children and kept indulging the rich while depriving the poor.

Why did we do it? Why didn’t we invest our obscene incomes in better education and medical services and more nutritious food? Why didn’t we clean up the air, water and soil and the stupid, polluting cars and industries that poisoned them in the first place? Why didn’t we insist that our leaders accomplish these things?

And why are we letting our news organizations go under?

Apparently, because we enjoy being rich and not thinking about anything but our own comfort and fun. Or because those of who weren’t rich so wanted to be that we were willing to let the wealthy do as they pleased, in hopes that one day, that would be us. Only now – irony of ironies – we are all becoming the poor and afflicted that we didn’t used to care about.

And I wonder if, at long last, we’ll change our attitudes. Electing Obama was a tremendously encouraging sign that Americans at least wanted a new economic strategy for our nation. But I’m looking for a different sign, now. The one I’m hoping to see will show that we care about more than our own wallets, that we care what’s going on in the world and demand the most accurate information about it that’s humanly possible to provide.

If the last major newspaper dies, will Americans suddenly discover that they miss the on-the-ground, eye-witness, reliably researched news they used to get from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and all the other papers that invested money from subscriptions and advertising in huge networks of skilled reporters and editors? Or will our society just blow the whole thing off and contentedly derive its impressions of the world and what’s happening in it from YouTube and the aimless minutiae of Twitter?

Americans can’t run their country without dependable daily news and news organizations can’t produce that news unless Americans are willing to pay for it.  Foreign correspondents and  Capitol Hill reporters – and all the people who make professional-quality print, radio, TV and even online news possible - represent enormous amounts of ability, training and experience. If they can’t get paid for their work, they can’t do it at all and their skills will disappear from our society. And then we will become a nation of people without a clue, unable function and ripe for takeover by whatever oppressor wants power over us.

But maybe Americans won’t say “good riddance” when the news disappears. Maybe they’ll realize they need it back. I’m waiting to see. … with the journalistic defibrillator paddles in my hands.