It frightens me because I don’t think Utopia is worth the cost of human interaction. This may sound odd coming from a computer geek, but I like people. I like being around them. There are days when no video game, anime, computer problem or Battlestar Galactica marathon can cheer me up, and I sit alone craving human contact.

In the past week, I’ve watched a documentary called The Corporation (thecorporation.com) and participated in a long discussion of Ambient Intelligence (wikipedia.org). The Corporation advocates ideas of corporations destroying the world and making us all their consumer slaves in the post-apocalyptic shopping mall of the damned. Advocates of Ambient Intelligence are pushing for a world where computer systems replace direct human contact, even between parent and child in the same house.

Do these things seem bad to anyone else? American consumers are destined to be forced into solitary, mediated existences with nothing to keep them company but the microchip in their skull. If this is the “good” future, I want the bad one. Give me Megacorporate Arcologies full of worker drones and let me be free on the streets. I’ll take the fetid tenement and mechanical prosthetics if it means I can live like a real live person with other real live people.

So, while Corpotate Zombies talk to their children through a panel on the kitchen wall and their contact lenses let them show their spouse what they’re up to, I’ll be off in a cabin in the woods somewhere. I’m betting Celebration, FL (celebrationfl.com) will be the first to fall. Disney owns them, and we all know how Disney loves mediated experiences.

Oh well… maybe by the time it happens I’ll be old enough not to care. Here’s hoping.