by Bob Powers
Like most people, I love my gadgets almost as much as I hate my body. My physical form is as disgusting and unsightly as an iPhone is sleek and elegant. I’m sick of having to apologize every time I walk into a room for making people look at my hideous, mole-ridden flab pile instead of their tablet screens. Wouldn’t it be great if they could look at me and a tablet screen?
It's time for someone to invent the wearable tech that will cover my entire body.
Silicon Valley usually moves fast with the products we didn’t know we wanted, but on this front, they’re moving at a snail’s pace. With Google Glass and the new Apple Watch, they seem to think that we want wearables that are barely even visible on our bodies. Wrong! I want every surface of my skin hidden behind an LED screen or titanium casing of some kind or other, and I want it yesterday.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Throw a Samsung Galaxy s5 in a crowd and you’re bound to hit a gadget-obsessed American with body dysmorphia and an impatience for Autumn weather to arrive and give launch to bulky sweater season. The self-loathing tech consumer is legion in this country and we are tired of being ignored.
We want gadgets on our bodies. All over our bodies. We want our love handles replaced with sleek retina displays. We want our genitals to possess rounded corners. We are sick of seeing our flawed faces designed by God. We want to look in the mirror and see something designed by Jony Ive.
Think of it. If you’re self-conscious in a public setting, you’ll never again have to worry that your facial expression is betraying your mood, not with a new, state-of-the-art skull-sized emoji display. And if I can monitor my pulse and steps taken with a watch band, why can’t I keep track of how much sweat pours out of the back of my knees with a mobile computerized knee casing?
Who doesn’t like how they look in shirts? Um, everybody with a torso, duh. So how about someone disrupts The Gap’s monopoly on upper body coverings by selling us a chest casing with a 24 inch HD screen that constantly streams Marvel's The Avengers, or behind-the-scenes interviews with breakout star Laverne Cox from Orange Is The New Black? That’s a lot more visually appealing than some dumb sack of human blood and tissue, right?
There are naysayers for this kind of thing. Walking around all day covered in a gadget suit is “too hot,” or “too heavy,” or “almost guaranteed to cause cancer in nearly every organ in your body.” Hey, let the nerds in Cupertino work out the bugs. Just show me the buy button!
Full-body wearable tech isn’t the future. It’s the long-overdue present. Body image has never been lower. There's an entire populace of self-hating, out-of-shape Americans who love staring at screens just waiting to be the target demographic. Enough with the invisible glasses and tiny watches. Our bodies are only getting larger and grosser. Hurry up and cover them in a bunch of screens.
Illustration by Cole Mitchell