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Everything depends on the color of the electronic glasses you are wearing

Ramón de Campoamor was right: everything is seen according to the color of the glasses you are wearing. Before him, Calderon de la Barca said something similar, talking about dreams. Centuries before Calderon, Plato said something similar, talking about shadows.

Spanish poet Campoamor (1817-1901) captured with beautiful sadness in a poem we alluded in the previous paragraph the unhappy life that results of living a life of routine and boredom.

The existential uneasiness revealed by Campoamor takes place between the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the Technological Revolution of the 20th century, when the former was still happening and the latter was just in the horizon.

Immersed in a world of machines and technologies, human beings are trapped in a “world of betrayal” where “nothing is true, and nothing is false” either, Campoamor said.

The betrayal preventing us from separating truth from lies is the betrayal of presenting as real what it is only an illusion, and in hiding reality and calling it an illusion. This is the betrayal of erasing any distinction between wisdom and ignorance. “They are the same: an uneducated idiot and a great professor,” wrote Enrique Santos Discépolo in “Cambalache” (1935).

Why are we talking about all tangos, old poems, and old writers and thinkers? Because some of their wisdom could be use (if wisdom can be used at all) during the next few months and years to think about the new glasses that a well-known Internet search engine company will launch, so we can all experienced a new “augmented reality.”

This new reality will enable us to have constantly in front of our eyes the map to the destination we want to go, to take a picture just by blinking our eyes, to know immediately what a total stranger sitting next to us post to his or her social networking sites, and, in summary, to be always connected to Internet. All of that thanks to the new glasses.

The color of the glasses we use to see the world is no longer a poem written by Campoamor, but a technological device that soon we will all be forced to keep all the time in front of our eyes. In a few years, it will on our eyes (perhaps some kind of contact lens). Soon after that, it will inside our brain (using some kind of device to connect Internet directly to our brain.)

It is true that accessing immediately all the information one wants to access is a devilishly tempting proposition. That is what the new augmented reality glasses promise.

I wonder if the price to pay for the “augmented reality” is a “diminished humanness,” where we will lose the sense of mystery, doubts, anxiety, and incertitude that has been part of human existence since humans are humans.

If fantasy becomes reality, then whoever controls the “color” of the new augment reality glasses will also control us. Perhaps the true betrayal is us betraying our humanness just for a pair of new glasses.

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