Consider, for a moment, the “smart” shoe that controls television viewing. Designed for children, it has a special insole that measures the child’s activity and translates this into minutes of television time. An active child can earn a lot of TV minutes but a lazy one will find the set turning off in the early stages of Dora the Explorer.

And the only way to get the set back on is to run around the block eight or 10 times.
Now consider for a moment the ramifications of this kind of control technology in the adult world.

It is 3 a.m. and you can’t sleep. Indeed, you feel a little peckish and into your mind floats a picture of a large slice of strawberry cheesecake sitting in your refrigerator. You slip out of bed, slide downstairs and sidle up to the fridge, fork at the ready. And the door won’t open. You tug at it. Nothing. You kick it with a slippered foot. Ouch. The door won’t budge. And suddenly you know why.
You haven’t earned an extra piece of cheesecake.

Your activity level is too low and the fridge knows this. The only way to get at that cheesecake is to lace up your activity shoes and skip rope in the backyard for half an hour

Or how about this scenario? It’s a beautiful
day and you decide to drive to the woods and spend a couple of hours ambling down the old logging trail by the river. Piling up points in your activity shoes. So off you go with the best of intentions.

But you’ve only logged a kilometre when the
temperature plummets, the sky turns black and rain pours down. You scurry back to your car, stick the key in the ignition and nothing happens. And there on the dashboard is a digital message telling you that you haven’t had enough activity to earn a car ride. If you want to be able to to drive back home, get back out there and put in several kilometres on foot.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can haul out your cell phone and call for help.
Assuming you have enough activity points to power the phone.

Or how about this?

You are starting to think that your new activity shoes are running — and ruining — your life. You regret that New Year’s morning when you decided on a new regime of fitness and intellectual rigour, and believed activity shoes with intelligent insoles would lead to a better life. You often long to watch a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies late at night while eating pralines-and-cream ice cream.
But the set won’t turn on and the fridge won’t open unless you walk to the North Pole and back. Or so it seems.

Then you have a brilliant idea. During the American Civil War, those who were conscripted but didn’t want to fight simply hired others to go in their place. And you will do the same — with the added advantage of knowing that those you hired are not likely to be cannon fodder at Gettysburg.

You find two 12-year-olds with large feet, strap on the shoes, give them a couple of twenties and send them off to the mall.
“Walk,” you tell them. “And keep walking.”

That night you eat cookie dough ice cream while you watch Granny fall into the cement pond. This is the good life. You have outsmarted your shoes, your refrigerator and your television set. So what if you are gaining weight?

A few nights later, you grab the fridge handle and the door won’t budge. Indeed, a red light is glowing in the middle of the door. There’s a flaw in your plan of hiring walkers. You forgot about the updates that come with your activity shoes and, in the download from the central shoe computer, your scam has been discovered. The little digital memo on the fridge door now reports that, according to its information, you seem to have broken into two parts each weighing 100 pounds and nothing will function unless you go straight to the nearest hospital and get put back together.

And you will have to walk because you are obviously in no shape (or shapes) to drive a car

Ah, the wonders of technology. IE