So far I am yet to be tempted into purchasing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. To a certain extent this is a function of possessing a large, misshapen and comically convex head upon which no pair of sunglasses has ever looked remotely appropriate. Nor am I one of those consumers who professes to be “really into gadgets”, a preference I’ve always found weirdly unspecific. It’s subtly telling when people claim to be into “gadgets”, because they’re never talking about, say, a tin opener. What they really mean is something gimmicky and expensive that almost certainly requires the services of a datacentre and enough water to irrigate Kent.
And even if I were to surmount these two obstacles, you then get into the ethics of the thing. I’m nobody’s idea of a PR expert, but if your shiny new product keeps requiring patches and updates to prevent people from using it to do degenerate things to women, perhaps it might be worth walking it back to the research and development stage.
Of course, Meta has no intention of doing anything quite so dignified or responsible as that. The prospect that users of its new glasses might wish to film people covertly and without consent appears not to have occurred to one of the world’s leading tech companies. Nor the possibility that owners might try to disable or cover up the little LED that displays when the camera is recording. Instead, the company has embarked on a publicity blitz, reassuring us all that our privacy is, if not quite their number one priority, then certainly there or thereabouts.
But unlike most items of consumer tech, smart glasses are not the sort of thing to which one can simply opt in or out. These things are already out there – around nine million from Meta alone – scanning our streets, capturing and processing content, blurring the boundaries between the real and the virtual.
Unlike security cameras, they are not fixed but mobile, arbitrary and largely unregulated. They raise issues that go far deeper than a piece of overpriced eyewear, deeper even than the dense thicket of technology and regulation, into the most basic questions of how we treat each other, how societies function. Specifically: what happens to our shared public spaces when we are forced to confront the presumption that we are all being filmed, broadcast, processed? What happens to our cities? What happens to our trust, our bonds, our relationships with our fellow humans?
Much of the current concern over smart glasses has understandably focused on the lurid and the macabre: the creeps and the perverts, the changing room voyeurs, the internet pranksters and school bullies. But while any new technology will attract its share of malign actors, nefarious intent is not in fact a prerequisite to harm.
Simply put, the very act of filming somebody without their permission – for whatever purpose – is in itself a form of violation, perhaps even of theft. On a philosophical level, it is the blithe assertion of one person’s liberty and rights over those of another. On a political level, it expresses an asymmetry of power, a very capitalistic form of resource extraction. It strips the unsuspecting individual of agency and mines them for content.
And yes, we have long been bleakly aware of the surveillance apparatus around us: traffic cameras, security cameras, personalised ads, some bored lad at GCHQ with a list of keywords and access to the emails of everybody you know. But Kylie Jenner isn’t posing suggestively on the A46 trying to sell you a speed camera. Wearables, by their very nature, straddle the realms of fashion and culture, and are thus the perfect vehicle for reimagining the public panopticon, the AI training zoo, as a kind of chic lifestyle choice.
For the same reason, legislative fixes – inevitably reactive rather than proactive – only get us so far. Denmark recently introduced an innovative copyright law granting citizens ownership of their own likeness, which mostly covers deepfakes and AI-generated imitations. But who realistically has the time and will to trawl the entire internet for illicitly procured content? In any case, by the time it’s up, it’s up, and by a similar logic the tech giants have long operated under a praxis of launching first and dealing with the fallout later.
Which is why social stigma remains one of the most powerful weapons. The increasingly pervasive deployment of the term “pervert glasses” is a decent start, but other perfectly good slurs remain unclaimed: Stalker Specs, Nonce Goggles, Depraviators. Above all the ridicule must be merciless and unstinting, a ritual shaming entirely in proportion to the magnitude of deviance.
But of course, even if society succeeds in killing the Meta glasses, others will surely learn and follow. Samsung and Google are launching their own glasses later this year. Apple’s effort will probably emerge sometime in 2027. And perhaps the thing few have considered is who – with the exception of the partially sighted, hard of hearing and those otherwise in need of assistive technology – asked for any of this? If smart glasses are the answer, what was the question? Perhaps, as with AI chatbots and fridges with web browsers, there was none: just the lavishly funded persistence of a tech sector intent on manufacturing consent for the things it has decided we must have.
In so doing, it may succeed in turning the high street into an unwitting hub of surveillance. A society fearful of itself, paranoid and mistrustful. A public sphere exposed and disassembled and reduced to its constituent pixels. Where there is no longer a right to be anonymous, to be inattentive, to be forgotten or left alone by our fellow citizens. Where something as simple and innocent as a human gaze has been reimagined as an item of transaction.
Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist
