Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Duquesne Law Review

Publication Date

2014

Volume

52

First Page

335

Abstract

(Excerpt)

Rakoff shook his brightly dyed red hair as he shivered alongside the others waiting for the bullet train. It was a miserably cold morning, but Rakoff's fellow passengers didn't seem to mind. Most of those standing on the platform were taking their spare moments to work in the global workspace. It looked like they were talking to themselves, typing on invisible keyboards, or blinking, but in fact they were working, completing crowdsourcing tasks. Other waiting passengers were interacting with business contacts by projecting their avatars out into the virtuality. It was cold, but there was not long to wait now; smart sensors gathered a continuous stream of data about riders to re-route the trains according to where they were needed. About two minutes later, the bullet train arrived and Rakoff's implant chimed as train fare was automatically deducted from his UCoin crypto currency account.

As Rakoff's kilt brushed past the doors, terms, conditions, and limited liability provisions from the train downloaded into his implant and flitted across his vision in an exhausting and unreadable blur, leaving him dizzy and nauseated. Such a tedious, useless, and annoying waste of perfectly good computing power made him figuratively (as well as literally) ill. Multiple times per day, every minute of the day, in every city across the global village, every netizen was bombarded with legal terms that no one could negotiate, let alone understand, even if they had tried. Which they hadn't, because who would waste their time so pointlessly? Such terms were a particular source of frustration because their lengthy and cumbersome files interfaced especially poorly with the visual implant that had become so popular during the last year. Not only were these legal documents tedious and impossible to avoid seeing, but they often left implant users with a terrible headache that lasted for hours. In response to consumer complaints, companies blamed these types of headaches on bugs in the interface with the implant. Whatever the cause, ouch!

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Available at: https://dsc.duq.edu/dlr/vol52/iss2/6/

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