Source Body Text

I went to a party recently. A fancy one, filled with expensive people and interesting clothes. You might find this surprising, as I expend hundreds of words a week in this publication bemoaning human interaction, but I love parties. I like free champagne, passed appetizers and forced, go-nowhere small talk. Parties in Los Angeles are even better, because they usually involve at least one celebrity. In the case of this most recent event, the celebrity in question was a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills. Well … technically a “friend of”, Bravo reality TV parlance for a person who isn’t in the main cast and appears sporadically on the show thanks to a social connection to one of the actual Housewives. It’s sort of like being Newman on Seinfeld, or the vice-president of the United States. Easy work, if you can get it. Of course, I had to inform my friends who are reality TV fans that an orbiting celestial body had entered my field of vision. But how to prove this encounter really happened? Could I truly get the reaction I wanted from them without photo evidence? I began to ponder how to snap a picture without her noticing. Perhaps a reflection in a mirror? Pretending I was taking a photo of the canapes and whoops, I got you in the corner of the frame. I opted for the clever mirror trick and got the whoa text back from my friends, which means they were sufficiently gobsmacked by my brush with fame. I was satisfied, but left with the lingering feeling that I was part of a persistent shattering of the few walls of privacy left in our teetering society. I spent actual time from the ticking clock of my life to assess how to take a candid photo of a famous person trying to drink a glass of wine. What the hell is my problem? At that moment, I felt like I was one more LA party away from tossing my morals in the trash and buying a pair of smart glasses. Smart glasses are the latest intrusive technological innovation that no one asked for. Instead of just helping you see better or blocking out the punishing light rays of the sun, smart glasses are essentially computers you wear on your face. They can mirror your phone or laptop screen, send and receive phone calls and text messages, and most importantly for the burgeoning creep economy, capture pictures, audio and video. Smart glasses – from companies like Meta and Viture, which cost about $300 to $500, or nearly $1,300 for a high-end variety from Xreal – are one more incursion by technology into what is left of the natural world. Fly some hideous graphics in my face while I tromp through the park, so I might quadruple-task (naturemaxxing, framemogging some unc feeding pigeons, checking in on my Kalshi, and livestreaming the whole thing) and optimize my 30-minute lunch break. I don’t think I actually need more gadgets, and yet the product lines keep expanding. I have a phone, a tablet, a watch and glasses that all connect to the internet and feed me hourly distractions and furiously pump me for data. This is why I can’t imagine any company going to market with a brain implant with wifi capability. Once you’ve stuck a microchip in my head, you can’t sell me anything else to wear. There are still so many more hunks of metal and plastic with touch screens or artificial reality interfaces to shove into my pocket or on my body. A nose ring that lights up when I get a new like on a YouTube video. Maybe a hat that broadcasts my TikToks 24/7. My body is not my own. It is the property of Meta, a vessel for the free flow of information into the company’s willing gullet. But what if that sweet online engagement is driven by videos full of people who never agreed to participate? Many courts have banned smart glasses in their proceedings, but people are still trying to bring them in anyway. Cruise lines, movie theater chains and restaurants are restricting smart glasses, too. And now Norway is planning a temporary ban for certain public places. Eventually, there won’t be anywhere to use them, outside of an old barn, a closet or an abandoned Hooters restaurant. So, if it seems like almost the entire world thinks smart glasses are primarily for perverts, why does the tech industry persist in suggesting consumers buy them? Surely the obscene profits that Apple collects from the umpteenth edition of the iPhone have seduced Silicon Valley into chasing another world-changing innovation that no one can live without. Except, we already have the iPhone. And the Apple Watch. And the iPad. I have enough gadgets in my life to pretend like I’m a particularly washed James Bond, engaging in mundane adventures like “creating a shopping list” or “tracking how many times I blink”. When so much of our economy is tied to “content creation”, it makes some corrupted sense to give the workers trapped in the coalmines shinier pickaxes. I can’t just record an explainer video complaining about declining privacy or voracious technocapitalism. I need a fancier Bluetooth microphone, a camera stand for my phone, a ring light, and maybe even a funny prop like an inflatable flamingo to keep people’s attention. I can live with all that. After all, I’m the dope who willingly chose to get into the media. But it’s worse when you use other people to fuel your need for digital attention without asking first. Smart glasses let you do that on a scale, and with an ease of use, that is unparalleled. I could film two people having a domestic spat or a grisly car accident without even having to go into my pocket. Smart glasses have one actual, unique application – monetizing every last second of life, whether you want it to or not. Now, we can all be a “friend of” in the Real Housewives of Wherever the Hell You Are, performing our silly little dramas for an audience that might never be satisfied. Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist