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Jack Holt
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In what should be surprising news — but isn’t — a reporter by the name of Kyle Russell had his Google Glass pulled from his face and eventually smashed. Coming from covering a protest involving a Google lawyer, Jack Halprin, who has started evicting tenants of a rental building he recently bought, Russell was heading home when a lady, who saw that he had Glass, shouted “Glass!” and tore the $1,500 wearable off his face. She then ran off and when Russell and a friend gave pursuit, turned and threw the piece of tech on the ground, smashing it.
Luckily, Russell and his friend weren’t hurt in the altercation but some are calling it a hate crime. However, because of the timing and what he was reporting on, some might chalk it up to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The girl may have seen smashing Glass as a symbolic gesture toward the Google lawyer and the company itself, even if it was a short-sighted gesture. As Russell stated later:
“Unfortunately, anything associated with Google has come to represent gentrification in the city, from the buses that take young software engineers to their corporate campuses in Silicon Valley to Google Glass. This is especially true in areas where gentrification and income inequality have become points of conflict in the community.”
His Twitter feed has seen equal parts support, Internet trolling/hate mongering, fair-gentrification arguments in what could be seen as a small sample of the larger San Francisco social struggle picture. Some are also seeing it as a call for making Glass more durable as Russell’s Glass is currently close to being unusable — as it doesn’t respond to voice or touch. Something that Google may have a hard time doing as it looks to make the tech more fashionable for the main stream.
source: Phone Arena
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