June 29, 2014.

On the Go With Google Glass

"That was stupid, Winston, stupid!" he said. "You should know better than to say a thing like that."

WHAT'S THE MOST rewarding way to navigate a city: paging through a guidebook, thrusting your high-school Spanish at passersby or talking to your eyeglasses?

He pulled the lever back and continued:

It's not a joke question----not in the era of Google GOOGL +0.16%  Glass. Technology has changed almost everything about how we travel. But Google seems to be hoping that Glass will be one of the biggest breakthroughs.

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

For those who haven't seen Glass yet, it's basically a smartphone you wear on your face----either on a thin, cyborg-y sort of headband or integrated into a pair of glasses. The screen is a small, clear cube that juts in front of one lens; the speaker transmits sound directly against your head. Glass has been available to the public on and off—right now you can buy them from Google or (for Diane von Furstenberg-designed frames) Net-A-Porter, but the official launch is several months away.