WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 25: Liza-Bart Carroll wears Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses during the Second Annual White House Correspondents’ Weekend TGAIFriday Lunch hosted by The Washington AI Network at The House at 1229 on April 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Washington AI Network)
Getty Images for Washington AI Network
In 2016, the artist Keiichi Matsuda launched a six minute video called Hyper-Reality. It depicted a world where a user wearing smart glasses was constantly bombarded with images, videos, texts, games, advertisements, and incoming calls. The result was dizzying and dystopian, an early warning about what our future in a persistently connected world would look like when viewed through a head-mounted device.
Nothing in the demo of the Meta Display glasses, which launched at Meta Connect last week and hit the market later this month, gave a sense that the initial visuals on the glasses would be as chaotic as hyper-reality. But as anyone who has had to close four pop-up ads and scroll past a video just to read an article online well knows, profit always wins over design, and there’s a world where head mounted devices could be just as cluttered and annoying to use as the web. And crowded design is probably the least of our worries – with these glasses and others coming in the near future, we seem to be headed towards a post-privacy, persistently connected future.
The rise of wifi and smartphones have already gotten us pretty far down the path, but the form factor of the phone has prevented us from getting all the way there. While phones are smaller and lighter than ever before, they are still fairly obvious – you can tell when someone is holding up a phone and taping something, for the most part, and you need to take the action of removing your phone from your pocket or bag to engage with it. Airpods and voice commands make things a bit more seamless – I often take calls or send texts with voice commands when I am out for a run or long walk – but I also can’t see the text in front of my face without picking up my phone.
But these glasses give us the ability to film without detection or suspicion, erasing the barrier that came with phones. Sure, there is a light that goes on when the glasses are being used to film or take pictures, but that’s also pretty easy to cover up. Asking people to remove their glasses isn’t a solution, as vast numbers of people need glasses to function in the world; you might be able to enforce this in private settings but just as most people have given up on the “no phones at the table” rules, wearing glasses all the time will likely become the new normal.
We could then be entering a world where privacy is never an expectation, and most people are simply not prepared for that. A lawyer friend once told me to never text something I would want to read out loud at a deposition, and I try to stick to that, but when I go through my WhatsApp I definitely find a few things I’d prefer to stay private. Prior to smart glasses, there were some firewalls in place to protect us; now, we’re always on camera.
Even in the smartphone world, people still behave in absurd ways on camera. Forgot political speech and protest – every day there is a new viral video of someone throwing an adult temper tantrum at the airport, in full view of cameras. Certainly there are now so many of them that a perverse law of averages applies – you might go viral for screaming at a gate agent for a day, but then someone will crash out in another way and you’ll be forgotten.
The only solution to this is to strengthen laws around protected speech and protest, which certainly doesn’t seem possible in the current climate, and to encourage people to learn emotional regulation, which doesn’t either. So we are now heading deep into uncharted waters, where someone is always watching.
And even if you’re not watching or being watched, are you ever truly disconnected? Part of the promise of these glasses is that you’ll have seamless interactions and be served with contextual information – rather than be faced with billboards that might advertise something you have zero interest in, you’ll be served hyper-targeted product information. There is a lot of upside to this: smaller brands can compete alongside big ones, and users will genuinely enjoy discovering new products and services they enjoy. But all that comes at a cost, as we’ll be more distracted than ever; how will we enforce distracted driving laws when everyone is wearing glasses? Self-driving cars are still far in the future in most of the world, so we have a delta of time when people will have notifications popping up inches from their eyes while they navigate a six lane highway.
And forget taking them off to avoid responding to texts from work. If the expectation is that you are almost always wearing glasses, then the old “my phone was in my bag” excuse won’t fly any more. Attention spans, already short, will likely crumble. There is at least a 50/50 chance that the person sitting across from you is responding to work emails at dinner and you might not even notice.
Despite all this, the glasses are a remarkable step forward, and one that will likely go mainstream. Complaining won’t solve anything – now is the time for commonsense action on protected speech, nonconsensual image sharing, safe driving, and the right to disconnect. Until we start plotting a course that balances technical innovation with privacy and safety, we are sailing in choppy waters.