TL;DR: Fuck you.

Manufactured in China. Designed by douchebags.

The world — by which of course I mean tech “journalists” who earn a living making the Valley feel like it deserves reportage — seems to care about Google Glass, the idiotic new wearable computer from Mountain View.

(The actual world couldn’t give two shits about such a fey, ludicrous nonessential, but that as usual doesn’t stop anyone around here from thinking this is valid life’s work.)

Now I say “idiotic” not out of the typical ironic tech-envy that permeates the Valley, but because I’ve seen Glass in person, perched atop the literal douche-nozzles of Kool-Aid-drunk Google employees.

I have to admit that my initial reaction upon seeing a pair was indeed one of childlike wonder. As in, “I wonder what will happen if I kick this guy in the nuts?”

Robococks

(Incidentally, this is the world we live in, where rich cock-jockeys sporting techno-eyewear is news. Look at that little guy in the middle, coiffed so perfectly for his big photo-op and taking his little gadget as seriously as the world-changing technology it is. “I’d fuck me,” he seems to be saying — automatically translated by his stupid glasses into Portuguese or some shit.)

Some ‘edgy’ tech bloggers have used the term “glasshole” to describe these early-adopting dongle-schlobbers, because it allows them theoretical judgmental distance while remaining just cutesy enough to not sacrifice their intense bloodlust for actually being able to unbox a pair.

I prefer: “embarrassing overcompensated retards who need something to flaunt while their Tesla is charging.”

These Glass-sporting scrota would have you believe we’re destined for a world where information is at our fingertips — by which they mean not at your fingertips at all, as it already is — but stapled to the side of your head and interjecting its worthy informationality into your eyeball every second of the day.

Let me bone-conduct this straight to your inner ear: We’re not.

In my groundbreaking post on profile photo douchebags, I compared Glass to the Segway, and the comparison rings true even today, nearly two weeks later. Segway ignored the fact that Americans (and the American-influenced) are unwilling to pay for their laze. Costco provides freescooters for me to roll my fat ass around in — why would I need a Segway? (And how would I hold all my free samples?) Segway ignored that for most Americans, the rare times when they walk are considered workouts.

And Segway ignored the fact that they were making a scooter, for Christ’s sake.

Similarly Glass ignores our capacity for multi-anything. Lord knows we have the willingness, especially in the Valley — God help anything that stands in the way of a tech-nerd consuming his handcrafted, custom-filtered, bespoke news feed — but at some point even a morally destitute society such as ours demands actual human interaction with the humans actually standing in front of you, creepy and Asperger-y Asberger-y as most of them may be.

The Segway has its place. Underneath mall cops. Helping American touristssee the ruins of Romequickly enough to still make their reservation at Bubba Gump’s. Or if you’re playing Segway Polo like a fucking jackass. (The existence of Segway Polo, by the way, is responsible for more Muslim extremism than cruise ships, Vegas and the Lap-Band combined.)

Likewise, Glass could be useful augmenting specific, heads-up-display-friendly tasks. Air traffic control. Helping police on a manhunt so they can keep up with the very latest from the Tweetstream. And for rich cunts who want to film their snowboarding escapades at five times the price and half the resolution of a GoPro.

Everyone else, just look down at your fucking phone.

I'm going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.

There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have become necessities, and it's fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to use them just because they don't like the spying, especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by companies that don't spy.

This isn't something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to be tracked without cookies. Cell phone companies routinely undo the web's privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.

Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope.

In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.

Fixing this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one is agitating for better privacy laws.

So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.

And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com, where it got 23,000 Facebook likes and 2,500 tweets -- by far the most widely distributed essay I've ever written.

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