Saturday, November 24, 2007

Future Spime Wish

Injecting RFID tags into my pets, in pursuit of recovering them when lost; my recyclable consumer goods, in pursuit of not drowning in an ocean of garbage; my person, in pursuit of, I don't know, waving my arm in front of a door to unlock it or something, or letting my government retrieve the bulk of my corpse after an unfortunate run-in with narcotics traffickers; all these aims are well and good, but it occurs to me that the true killer app here is button management.

A jacket I recently bought came with some spare buttons in a small plastic bag attached to the inside of one of the pockets. A bag I have, embarrassingly, yet to remove, because there is no way I can keep track of it. So here's what we need, magical technoutopian future: trackable spare buttons that I can safely toss in a drawer somewhere, and clothing self-aware enough to send me an e-mail whenever a weakened button flies off, helpfully including the coordinates of the nearest spare. Or, for that matter, the location of the original, which I can retrieve or abandon, depending on the effort required. Abandoned buttons can go into a universal pool, so that future nattily dressed young businessmen in similar straits, walking down the street, can be alerted to the presence of the perfect replacement lurking beneath their seat on the train, or behind a file cabinet.