A generous reading of Zuck’s “vision” for life

Are the Meta Glasses really about death anxiety?

So after wasting billions of dollars and (worse) our time out of pure confusion regarding why people don’t want to spend their one precious life interfacing with legless avatars whilst trapped in a brandable 2D hellscape, Meta now mounts the argument that perhaps one of the true purposes of human existence is to be able to record video content at all hours of the day, this time without the pesky constraints of needing to hold a phone with those meaty, soon-to-be-evolutionarily-redundant hands, the better to glide through your days and weeks and months and years easefully recording units of moving image and audio, then shedding them like flakes of skin into the digiscape, all (we’re told) for the overall collective ancient project of selling more products, better controlling one another, and allowing a corporation to mediate our reality.

(Note that the video linked above mysteriously seems to only exist as tweeted out by a Kylie fan page, though it does pull moments from one of the official Meta Glasses ads here, and one has little doubt that recording oneself making a smoothie #pov is the kind of use case Mark Z. lays awake fantasizing about at night)

I want to keep clowning on Meta AI Glasses forever — and very much enjoyed Gabriella Karefa-Johnson diving into the fray — but after watching way too many banal Glasses clips that Kylie and her sales-reps-in-arms have been posting, I’m attempting to keep the disdain at somewhat of a remove in order to seriously consider the universal aesthetic and emotional gambits at play with the so-called “cop/pervert glasses.” All legitimate concerns of privacy and surveillance aside (and that “aside” is doing a lot of work), what is the point, for the consumer, to live in a state of eternal documentation again?