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Sweethearts! I love distrusting modernity as much as the next science fiction enthusiast, but let's try to think about the nice things, here.
We're looking at prototype stages, right? The Starbucks card is an early form of cashless, contactless payment. At the moment, it's corporate sponsored, because they can afford the infrastructure, just as the Oyster card system in London is a major public work. There's a bunch of other stuff going on a bit like this - children in the UK have a "Connexions card", which I think acts as an electronic wallet - it limits the amount of money fraud or theft can cost the child, makes it harder to steal, contains identifying data and the like. That's pretty scary - and it gets scarier if you kill the cash economy and tie payment to an ID card - but it's not scary because it might make it more likely that you would go too Starbucks. That's just the test - like Nectar cards aren't scary because they might make people more likely to shop at Argos.
In Finland, of course, cashless and contactless payment is already done using mobile phones, which seems altogether more sensible. You're already carrying a computer that can track expenditure; it does it when you make a phone call.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch - presumably the square barcode is a way to send a request for a text message with the information for that specific bus stop to the phone of people whose phones are not sufficiently advanced to go onto the Internet and request the information, right? That seems more service than sinister. And isn't it _quite cool_ that you can get that instruction out of an abstract pattern? Case in point - barcodes. They mean nothing unless you have a barcode reader, and then they communicate meaning. My Delicious Library install allows me to scan the barcodes of things I own into a library of virtual things I own. It's handy! Same token, my phone can scan barcodes and tell me whether I could buy whatever I am looking at more cheaply elsewhere. This is pretty standard implementation of a bunch of existing technologies - barcodes, Internet connections, Javascript - but it's imaginative, useful and actually pretty cool. Bottom line, that twisty square is just the equivalent in the outside world of clicking on a link - a single-action way to request information.
It's all pretty nice, really. |
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