He invented glasses that allowed him to see the world in focus, but not optically, not just: they bathed people in one of two auras: a red one if the person was doing better than he was, a blue one if the person was doing worse. When he first prototyped them he had only a single pair, and each morning he took them out of the ionized bath in which they spent the night and set out for his walk, beginning outside a banker’s club where the first man out, the biggest banker, was fully crimsoned and nearly everyone was red (nearly everyone, because the glasses could sense suicidal thoughts, impending divorce, or even financial imposture), continuing on through downtown, where the reds and blues were mixed in equal measure, though with some surprises (a famous actress emerging from a limousine was a royal blue, and a man slumped at the head of an alley with a “Will Tell Jokes For Food” sign propped in front of him and no apparent teeth, was a bright red), and then on into the warehouse district, filled with optimistically red young people in flannel and corduroy and older blue backers in suits. After his walk, he went home and took notes, tightening the algorithm, ensuring that what the glasses saw was more than simple net worth or even average mood, but that they were delving deeper, measuring true human potential and confidence in the delta of that potential, and he capped off most nights by putting on the glasses and looking in the mirror, marveling at the perfect purple hue with the faint blue edge, which told him that he was doing the same as he was (this was tautological but also the baseline calibration for the glasses) but ever so slightly better than his reflection, which was a version of him that belonged to the past. This was one of the first selling points of the glasses when they went to market — that they could be used not only in public but in private. “Hue for you” went one tagline. “Eye color or I-color?” went another. The PerSpecs, as they were called, were an instant success, popular both as a novelty and as a spur to a thousand think pieces: “What We See When We See Others” was the headline of the first, which was one of the best, in that it came down ultimately on the side of the product, emphasizing the way they might promote and even produce empathy (he hadn’t even thought of them) and warning people that adverse reactions were illustrations of an inner imbalance in users more than the fault of the device, which was “engineered like a marvel, and available in sunglasses, single vision, and progressive.” He still went out on his walk every morning, and he felt his heart lift when more and more of the world turned blue—even, one day, the biggest banker in the club. Sometimes he even slept with the glasses on to see if they would cast an aura around the figures in his dreams. They did not. But something happened before the next time. Within a month or so, the think pieces started to turn. More magazines worried that constant assessment of relative value might have a lasting negative effect on society, and more tech sites began to carp about inconsistencies in the quality of their manufacture. And then there were the “walkabouts,” in which journalists and then celebrities wore their PerSpecs for a day or a weekend and recorded what they saw. That exposed the algorithm as subjective to some degree and possibly superfluous: one columnist saw her husband as blue and was then perplexed when her husband also saw her as blue. “In the end this was both a source of calm,” she said. “If we contain seeds of our own superiority but also furnish that same superiority to others, is this not ideal? But is it not also an indictment of the device, which is performing a task—one of comfort in self-concept—we could (and maybe should) without it.” The accompanying photo showed her in both red and blue, which he thought looked too much like a 3-D movie still and not enough like what his glasses showed. He was not bothered by the piece. Many inventions helped people do what they were already doing. But something about it took root and a poison tree began to grow. Sales leveled off, and then plummeted. His business manager told him that he needed to think about a change in direction, and soon. “If you get a call from me some day and it’s not yet noon, it’s not good news,” she said. He was in a conference where he debated the columnist and when they both put on their glasses he saw her red, though he lied and told her it was blue. “And you are blue to me,” she said. “Does that make you feel more at home?” he said to appreciative laughter from the mostly red crowd. He stopped taking his daily walk when he saw paramedics loading the Will Joke For Food man into an ambulance, and behind their red auras he saw the prone man still faintly red. He dreamed of blue kings and models and tycoons though he knew this was just a cruel trick his mind was playing on him. He woke one morning to a feature on a talk show about “corrosive narcissism” that used his glasses as the accompanying graphic. He opened the newspaper and the first article he saw focused on “psychological reclamation of the self from others.” Again, his glasses were the graphic. His business manager called him. He looked at the clock. It was ten-thirty. He did not answer. The answering machine blinked red.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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