Meta's AI camera glasses turn ordinary people's worst moments into searchable, shameable content, while the people who build and cheer for them guard their own privacy ferociously.
The pitch for Meta's camera-equipped AI glasses has always been win-win: they'll whisper a name when you blank on it and spare you the social awkwardness. The author says he is mildly face-blind, could not reliably tell two aunts apart until he was twelve or thirteen, and that failing to place someone he knows feels worse than embarrassment. It feels like shame. Confine the glasses to name recall, he says, and he would buy them tomorrow.
What the actual product mostly does is film strangers on the sly and hold them up online. Once it is wired to facial recognition, it becomes a doxing factory: whoever can put a name to the passer-by arguing, picking their nose, slipping on ice, or eating with their mouth open wins the traffic.
Being watched is not the same as being judged
The author calls this scrutiny. It is worse than surveillance: it is the constant sense that someone is grading you. Bentham's panopticon ran on exactly that logic, prisoners never knowing whether they were observed, and so performing virtue at all times.
Larry Ellison, who goes to great lengths to keep his own life out of view, is the loudest heir to that idea: everyone else should be recorded constantly, because then we will all stay on our best behaviour.
Zuckerberg, Schmidt and Thiel are the same breed. They say you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, then buy buffer land around their homes, blacklist reporters who wrote about them, and fund lawsuits to destroy outlets that exposed them.
They understand privacy. They just do not think you deserve it
This is more than hypocrisy. These men know perfectly well that scrutiny makes an authentic life impossible, so they claim that freedom for themselves and want everyone else to wear a mask cut to their measurements.
The author offers an everyday example: a party is roaring along, someone raises a phone to record, and the room goes cold. He admits he has been that person, watching his young daughter concentrate on a drawing until the moment died and she moved on.
Everyone needs a corner where nobody is looking and mistakes are allowed, or they never find out who they are. Camera glasses will not produce Ellison's world of universally well-behaved citizens. They will produce people too afraid to try anything, and with no idea who they might have been.
Why it matters
In a world where everyone films, the first casualty is not privacy but the room to be bad at something. When every clumsy moment can be archived forever and filed under your name, people trim themselves into the safest possible shape in advance — and growing up happens precisely in those unwatched seconds.
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