The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Playing Tag

It isn't only the secret police and the ever-burgeoning prison industry who can benefit from satellite technology. Parental resources can use it, too.

Using the i-Kids satellite mobile phone, you can now track your child's movements to a radius of twenty to fifty metres. You can also select a "Safety Zone Alert" which will alert you by text if the i-Kids satellite mobile phone is conveyed outside a certain area. You can track your child's movements with KidsOK; and in the Land of the Free they're selling electronic tagging devices to sound alarms if a child leaves the house, leaves their room, leaves the broom cupboard. They're selling the Wherifone, which combines parental surveillance capacity with illiterate brand-naming to a degree almost unprecedented in modern civilisation. They're selling Teen Arrive Alive, Ulocate and DriveDiagnostics so that the location, direction and speed of teenage drivers may be monitored.

In this country, for £450 you can buy a "Personal Companion" to chaperone your infant to within a distance of two metres. It's a band which folds around the child's arm, and if she's being kidnapped she simply squeezes it, sending a signal to your mobile telephone. Naturally, when it is put on the market, kidnappers will not know of its existence and thus will not think to check the limbs of the children they are abducting, much less incapacitate them. Microsoft has apparently come up with a "cyber-teddy" with computerised eyes. Big Brother is cuddling you.

Soon, no doubt, we shall have electronic tags which emit a small electric shock to the brats whenever they cross that invisible boundary. We shall have whole bedrooms wired for sound and vision, with alarms that sound automatically when the little treasure watches the wrong television channel, doesn't do its homework at the hour allotted for homework, tries to remove one of its electronic tagging devices, or attempts suicide. We shall have devices wired to their little skulls which will stimulate their pleasure centres when they are Good, and their pain centres when they are Bad. You won't even have to lay a hand on them. In fact, it may soon be possible to look after your children without even meeting them more than you absolutely want to.

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