I purchased a set of Chipolo LOOP Bluetooth trackers just last week. For the uninitiated, they function exactly like Apple's AirTags, but are specifically engineered to play nicely with Google phones. Our domestic strategy is straightforward: we will use them to keep tabs on our keys and wallets while we are anchored at home for the summer. Whenever we hit the road again, however, they will be swiftly repurposed to monitor our checked bags through the predictable chaos of airline transit.Ah, ha. It's 10:49 am at home but Jay is at the Bonsor Community Centre in Burnaby so soon? To be absolutely clear, I wasn't actively stalking Jay during his workout. The excursion simply provided the perfect, low-stakes dry run for the new hardware.
That being said, looking at the screen and seeing his exact coordinates pinging back to me highlights a profound societal shift. We have willingly traded the quiet luxury of being unreachable for the perceived safety and convenience of constant digital contact. It is an extraordinary level of casual tracking, and frankly, staring at that little dot on the map is a concept that would have absolutely horrified our generation when we were kids.
We were a cohort that treated the front door as an absolute event horizon. The very second we left the driveway, we expertly vanished entirely off the parental radar. There were no digital footprints and certainly no GPS breadcrumbs. Today, simply hiding from one's parents must be a technological impossibility. The grid is absolute. To ever achieve our level of glorious, unmonitored freedom, a modern teenager would have to accomplish the equivalent of electronically gnawing off his or her own leg like a trapped beaver.
Jay outisde the Bonsor Compex in Metrotown, Burnaby, BC earlier this month.