I Am Not in Your Video
Look at me.
I mean with your eyes. I am trying to work out how to say this to a man with a camera in his glasses without ending up as an angry-old-bastard clip. Already I am doing work for equipment I did not buy.
You may be a perfectly decent man. You may have forgotten the camera is there. For the purposes of this little rehearsal, I will grant you every favorable possibility. I would like the same courtesy extended to my desire not to appear on your phone tonight.
I do not have a tragic explanation ready. No stalker, no secret identity, no witness-protection paperwork tucked into my sock. I just don’t want to be filmed. I was hoping that could be the whole conversation.
But I can hear the objections arriving.
I am in public. Other cameras exist. A phone could do the same thing. You haven’t even pressed the button. If I have nothing to hide, what is the problem?
The problem is that I have to persuade you there is a problem. You bought something. Now I am supposed to know what it does, notice whether it is doing it, and find a manner of objecting that will not spoil your afternoon. I have become the unpaid attendant of your purchase.
And I have to keep my face pleasant while I do it.
That last requirement is worth sitting with. If you are one of the people using these glasses to provoke strangers for an audience, my refusal is useful to you. A woman objects to being bothered and there is the reaction. An old man gets angry and there is the joke. Walking away may provide the ending. Whatever the person does to stop being part of it becomes another part of it.
I have no appetite for helping you test this on somebody who has been on her feet all day. She does not owe your audience a smile. She does not owe it an explanation of why she failed to smile. If the entire joke needs a stranger who hasn’t agreed to be in it, perhaps you have not written a joke yet.
You have bought a camera and gone looking for the rest of the equipment.
I know. Cameras can protect people too. I want the worker to have evidence when a boss threatens him. I want the passerby who records an assault to keep recording. I do not want a bully to say privacy and have every witness put the proof away. There are people for whom hands-free tools make ordinary tasks possible. I have no interest in making their lives harder so I can enjoy a clean argument.
So don’t hand me the easy version, where I am afraid of a lens. I am afraid we are training one another to stop talking.
If I suspect every clumsy sentence can be kept, trimmed, captioned, and shown to strangers, I will give you fewer sentences. Not better ones. Fewer. I will talk about the weather with a care previously reserved for police interviews. You can call that a more connected world. I will be standing in it, saying very little.
We already know how to do this at work. We know which phrases survive being forwarded. We leave certain things out. A person can spend years beside a colleague and learn only the portions of his life that would look all right in an email to management.
I would prefer not to bring that talent everywhere else.
Australia is considering a prohibition on smart glasses in federal workplaces. On September 17, public service minister Katy Gallagher said she was seeking advice about prohibiting them in government buildings, citing privacy and security concerns. Considering. Not an enacted national ban on people wearing the things down the street.
I can already hear somebody calling even that limited proposal an attack on the future. Meanwhile I am impressed by the possibility that a person might be allowed to enter a room without everybody else’s new camera coming with him.
Government buildings have obvious reasons to protect information. But the awkward part for you and me is outside those buildings. I don’t carry classified documents. Most of what I say is of no lasting importance. Does that make it available? Must I acquire a state secret before anybody respects the wish to have an unrecorded afternoon?
The reports of men filming unwanted approaches to women, and schoolboys making harassment into online material, are not descriptions of every owner. They are descriptions of a use the rest of us now have to consider when a stranger starts being unusually friendly.
That is a nasty little loss. I have enjoyed talking to strangers. Some were idiots. Some made the day bearable. I would rather decide which kind you are by listening than spend the first minute examining your face for hardware.
Meta says it will ban offending Instagram accounts and disable cameras used inappropriately. I would rather have that than nothing. But punishment after an upload asks the person who was filmed to wait while other people decide whether what happened to her qualifies. She may already have been seen by the people she least wanted seeing her.
You get to start with a purchase. She gets to start with a complaint.
And when the complaint has been dealt with, or ignored, she still has to go out tomorrow. I wonder how much of her attention your convenience is allowed to occupy before anybody enters it on the other side of the bill.
I have repeated a story I should have kept to myself. I have made somebody smaller to make a room laugh. The absence of a camera did not make me good. It did, however, put some limits on the reach of my stupidity. I had to be there, keep telling it, find another room willing to listen.
I am not convinced removing those limits has improved my character.
Nor do I need you to improve yours before we can finish this conversation. I am asking for something less ambitious. If we are going to talk, I would like to stop wondering who else I am talking to.
I am willing to bore you. Mispronounce something. Tell a bad story that dies between us. You can dislike me afterward. You can go home and tell your friends you met a tiresome old man who made an unnecessary fuss.
They will have to take your word for it.