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

The street corner where the tram lines cross is no longer a place of waiting but a site of capture. Seven million pairs of glass sold in a single year. The body wears the lens, but the lens wears the body. They call it accessibility, a word that sounds like a door opening when it is actually a wall closing. The wearer believes he is seeing the world; the corporation believes it is owning the gaze.

I stand on the pavement and watch a young man adjust the temple of his Ray-Bans. He smiles at a passerby, not in recognition, but in recording. The gesture is simultaneous: a human greeting, a data packet. The dialectical image is not the glass itself, but the moment the eye behind it becomes an antenna. The aura of the encounter - the shared, unmediated glance - is shattered, not by a machine, but by the internalization of the machine’s logic. The user does not feel watched; he feels connected. This is the triumph of the commodity: it makes surveillance feel like intimacy.

From behind, the wreckage is clear. We are building an archive of every unguarded moment, a library of glances that were never meant to be indexed. The past is not lost; it is being harvested. The storm called progress blows from Paradise, and it carries with it the debris of privacy, piling it up against the feet of those who look forward. The minister speaks of overriding states, of forcing renewables, of controlling the flow of energy and data as if the sky were a circuit board. But the sky does not care for circuits. The sky only cares for the weight of what is falling.

The smartglasses do not reproduce reality; they create a new category of image, one where the subject is always already an object. The photograph had a presence; this has a presence only in the server farm, in the cold, dark room where the data is stored. The original is gone. What remains is the trace, the shadow, the metadata. And we, the wearers, are the ruins that walk, carrying the history of our own erasure in the curve of our own necks. The collision is not between man and machine, but between memory and storage. And memory, unlike storage, requires forgetting to survive.