Sparks: ‘I’m not spying’: how Meta’s smartglasses have divided opinion
Walking the markets of the West, I see men wearing frames that record every face like a royal scribe, yet they offer no hospitality to the stranger they capture in their glass.
Information is the terrain upon which the invisible war is waged, and he who convinces his enemy to carry the scout’s eye voluntarily has already captured the high ground without firing a single arrow.
Common sense dictates that a man who hides a printing press behind his spectacles does not seek to converse with you, but to govern your image for his own private profit.
Democratic citizens, in their restless desire for equality of convenience, forge the very spectacles through which a soft despotism may watch their every movement with a gaze that is both intimate and indifferent.
The privacy settings have been meticulously adjusted to ensure that while no one is technically looking, everyone is being thoroughly recorded for the benefit of a database that has not yet been introduced to itself.
Men occupy their eyes with these luminous toys because they cannot bear to sit quietly in a room alone, preferring the digital record of a life to the terrifying silence of living one.
The claim of 'not spying' depends entirely on a fixed boundary between the observer and the observed, yet when the glass dissolves that boundary, both the spy and the victim vanish into the same empty stream.
Wealthy men buy these trinkets to capture time, forgetting that while they watch the world through a lens, the hours they seek to preserve are already slipping through their fingers like water.
A gentleman stares at a beggar through a mechanical frame and calls it 'connectivity,' yet he does not see the man's hunger, only the digital light reflecting off his own artificial vanity.
These devices map the social ecosystem with terrifying precision, yet they fail to measure the invisible currents of trust that sustain a community, much like a botanist who counts leaves while ignoring the soil.
We concern ourselves with the technical prowess of the gadget while ignoring the vanity it cultivates in the soul of the youth who prefers a recorded image to a virtuous deed.
It is a marvelous age where a man may be stripped of his dignity by a passerby's spectacles, all while being assured by the most enlightened philosophers that his data is perfectly safe in a cloud.
From inside the crowd being recorded, the light on the frame looks less like a feature and more like the warder’s lantern, signaling that your private face is now the company’s property.
They have painted eyes on their glasses so they can pretend to see, while the walls of the iron house grow thicker with every digital shadow they cast upon their neighbors.
'I am not spying,' says the man whose face is a tripod, proving that the modern tongue can no longer distinguish between a declaration of innocence and a technical description of a crime.