Through A Glass Darkly
One day, you won’t log in to this site or that email account at all, let alone with different credentials.
You’ll have a single ID ¹.
You’ll log in to that ID and every service you are subscribed to in any way (FaceBook, Twitter, What’sApp, email, Amazon, PayPal, the restaurant you booked a table at, the pizza delivery firm you ordered from, the taxi firm you booked a cab from, the airline you booked a flight with, etc., etc., etc.) will be simultaneously active and sharing information between them.
You won’t be able to separate them out … nor will you be able to log in to them in any other way.
It’s already here in the form of fingerprint scanning and facial recognition ‘security’ systems on smartphones, Alexa, etc.
The next step will be the smartwatch ² or even ‘GoogleLens’ contacts that you wear instead of ‘glasses’.
Eventually, of course, there’ll be the option of implants — so that you can’t mislay, lose or have your device stolen.
Then you’ll never be offline again … even when you sleep.
You won’t come home to a home.
You’ll live in a coffin hotel, with shared amenities — you’ll pop down to the food hall for your meals and use the communal showers to wash, collect your clothes for the day from the cleaning service and give them the dirty ones, etc.
What do you need space for anyway? All your possessions are digital and stored in the ‘Cloud’ — all you need is room to sleep in, with a couple of speakers either side of your head and a screen above your face ³.
And it’s not like you need a permanent address in the ‘gig’ economy, is it? Sure, you’re here today … but next week you’ll be chasing after another opportunity somewhere halfway around the World — hoping to get there in time to underbid all the other hopefuls ⁴.
I suspect that addresses will have elaborately appealing names and you’ll live somewhere like 3515 ‘Paradise Gardens’ ⁶— you don’t want people knowing they live in a cage.
</just a heads-up>
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¹ Like OpenID … but it won’t be optional — in fact, very soon now, opening a Facebook account will be mandatory … and if you don’t do it voluntarily, you will have to make do with your court appointed account.
² The real thing, not the silly toys currently on offer that require you to have a smartphone they link to.
³ If you want sex, you can book into a ‘Love Hotel’ — just enough room for the woman to go on top, provided she doesn’t want to sit upright.
⁴ Only for as long as there are jobs as such of course … because sooner, rather than later, the world of business is going to be completely upended by something significantly more disruptive than even automation — but that’s another story.
⁵ I might tell you about that some time too.
⁶ Room 35, floor 15.
