I'm Rooting For The Machines
Who Needs Personal Freedom if I Can Get to a Show Quicker?
In all honesty, the original title of this post was going to be “Let’s Talk Biometrics,” but it sounded like I was going to start pitching a MLM product like Cutco Knives or something. Thankfully, I don’t have to pitch anything on his page because the idea of biometrics are already here and they are impacting both your sporting and travel lives.
Anyone who has traveled over the past five years are familiar with the program known as CLEAR at airports and concert venues. CLEAR allows you to sign up for a subscription which allows you to bypass security lines once your identity is registered. Your data is already stored with CLEAR, so when you sign up it confirms who you are by looking into your eyes. Once you get the OK sign, you get to walk right on by…
But imagine my surprise when I started noticing such programs are cropping up in sports. Whether it’s “convenient” or a “gross attempt to harvest our data” is up for debate, biometrics are becoming more and more commonplace. In Major League Baseball, they have a program called “Go Ahead Entry” where once you register (and provide a photo ID), you can walk into a stadium without flashing a ticket barcode to an usher. The program has proven successful, which is completely understandable given how many times my phone decides to NOT display my ticket when I have to show it to security, but it does give me a bit of pause.
While I’m a fan of the idea, and as of this writing I have opted into the Go Ahead Entry program, some “offline” friends of mine really are afraid of what the next step of this robot-influenced revolution is going to look like. I would call it something out of the TV show Black Mirror, but I’ve only seen one episode so I wouldn’t know how accurate that is. For those wondering, it was the one with the treadmills:
Typically, I would brush off concerns of my data being out there as just the cost of doing business. I’ve been on this planet for decades and if my country didn’t have a file on me and my activities tucked away somewhere by now, I would be incredibly offended. Like, “Yo, Uncle Sam I’m not even worth surveillance, my guy?”
But I recently had my moment with ‘biometric freak out’ the other day. But first, let me take a step back. A few years ago former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise for several reasons. Ballmer wanted Los Angeles’ #2 basketball team to have his own home, and he eventually built the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, CA. (Side note: It’s a long story, but to do this, he had to buy the nearby Kia Forum as well).
So the story goes, Ballmer HATES concession lines and when the Intuit dome was built, he wanted to speed up the idea of buying stuff so he could go back to enjoying to show as quickly as possible. This evolved into the biometric system that’s in place today. To experience a show at the Intuit dome you MUST have a smartphone, and everyone in your party must carry a ticket on their smartphone. That phone is connected to an Intuit Dome account that has not only your personal information, but your credit card information, your photo (unfunnily called “Game Face” ID), and it is encouraged that you have a “card” on your wallet app named Identity pass.
To see the Clippers?! Bro.
I had completely forgotten the basketball team named after a boat has a Condor for a mascot.
This for some reason feels like a bridge too far, but what am I going to do? The writing is on the wall. These days you can’t even get paper tickets, and more often than not you’re laughed out of the building if you try to pay for things with cash. So I guess there’s nothing left to do than to just submit to the robots. Stick your eyes out for CLEAR, your palms out for Amazon grocery stores, and your toes out for the YMCA pool in the year 2037. I’m ready.