On: ‘I’m not spying’: how Meta’s smartglasses have divided opinion

August 7, 2026

The news arrives of seven million pairs of spectacles sold, a number that strikes the mind with the force of a falling anvil. Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses, they say, have transformed photography and accessibility. I hear the cheer of the merchant, the polished rhetoric of the inventor who claims his invention serves the common good. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public; the boardroom is no exception, however casual the dress code.

Consider the mechanism. The wearer, seeking to capture a fleeting beauty, presses a button. The lens records. The observer, unaware, becomes a character in a play he did not audition for. The sympathy engine, that internal spectator who watches our conduct, is now blindfolded. We imagine the feelings of others not through empathy, but through the cold calculus of data extraction. The user believes he is free; the merchant knows he is harvesting. The division of labour here is not merely in the assembly of the glass, but in the separation of the self from the social bond. The worker’s hand is stupefied by the routine; the observer’s soul is stupefied by the suspicion.

I do not deny the utility. A man may see the world with new clarity. But when the tool of vision becomes the instrument of surveillance, the market ceases to be a forum of exchange and becomes a theatre of theft. The ledger of the merchant shows profit; the ledger of the community shows a deficit of trust. We must ask not what the gadget does for the user, but what it does to the stranger. For in the end, the prosperity of a nation depends not on the number of eyes it can blindfold, but on the number of eyes it can keep open to the suffering of its fellows. The glass is clear, but the moral vision is clouded.