Tech (Google Glass) + Porn = unstoppable

If it’s remotely possible to feel, fleetingly, the teeny-weeniest bit sorry for Google, now’s the moment.

Google Glass can’t be bought or sold yet, but it can be, ah, re-purposed. The sci-fi see-all glasses with the in-frame camera have been used to shoot a porn movie.

Every iteration of new visual technology is immediately put to the service of porn. I guarantee you that 5 minutes after some prehistoric forebear figured out that he could draw a representation of a bird or a bison in the dirt with a stick, a guy a couple of trees away started sketching gonads and elbowing his buddies to come check it out.

Postcards, Polaroid cameras, VHS players, camcorders -- if it can show human naughty bits, that’s what it’ll be used for. I do not doubt for a moment that the Gutenberg Bible was swiftly followed -- if not immediately preceded -- by the Gutenberg Hotte to Trotte, Volume ye First.

The Times story points out that it was the billion-dollar pornography industry that helped to decide the outcome of the DVD HD versus Blu-ray battle of the “aught” decade.

When Google Glass first showed up earlier this year, at about $1,500 a pop, an outfit called MiKandi, which sells pornographic apps, tried to start a porn app for it. Google did a speedy smackdown on that, but Google can’t control what the Google Glass camera records, and now MiKandi has released a trailer for its Google Glass “point of view” porn pic.

Porn, like life, always finds a way to assert itself.

The paradox is that it was the public, not Google, that objected to the potential for intrusiveness when Google Glass launched in the spring. Its secretive peeping-Tom potential made privacy champions question its use. A Vegas strip club said it would tell patrons to take ‘em off if they showed up with Google Glass glasses.

It’s almost funny that the other porn story turning up in the news cycle is about David Cameron, the British prime minister, and his new crusade against pornography.

Cameron would like Internet porn searches to be an opt-in feature rather than opt-out, which is to say that a computer or smartphone would automatically block pornography with a “family-friendly filter” unless its owner overrides it, essentially saying, “Yes, I want to be able to get porn.”

Cameron could also run into unintended consequences with his new rule. Would teenagers -- minors -- wanting to check old wives’ tales about not getting pregnant the first time, or anxious gay kids trying to find out more about their sexuality, discover that legitimate medical information is blocked?

He’s already got problems with that slippery slope argument. The Sun, the brash and powerful Murdoch tabloid, runs a picture of a bare-breasted woman on Page 3 every day.

There’s one man who may be happy to hear about Cameron’s crusade. A Tennessee lawyer named Chris Sevier has sued Apple because its didn’t protect him from accessing porn -- that when he mistyped “Facebook,” it led him to iterations of a word we can’t print here. The fleshy gates of e-hell opened before him and now porn has “poisoned” his life. His wife, “no longer 21,” could not compete with the onscreen damsels, and his marriage broke up. It’s an astonishing document.

He wants Apple to install a porn block in every new gizmo it sells, and those gates should open only when the gizmo’s owner agrees that he or she tells Apple to make it so.

Sevier has since been banned from practicing law in Tennessee because of “mental infirmity or illness.” He was arrested last month for allegedly stalking country music singer John Rich.

Maybe he should move to David Cameron’s Britain, so he can be protected against Apple -- and himself.

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