I got a few suggestions:
- Spywear
- Panopticals
- Suckerbucks
- LensCrappers
The thing is, if these things had a reason for existing besides being data-collection apparatuses for big tech, I would love them. Not to wear out and about, but for various tasks where a heads-up display would be useful. Like, imagine working on an Arduino, ESP32, etc project and having the pinout overlaid. Or having them display the readout from a multimeter while you’re doing electrical work.
Here’s hoping the jailbreak scene on these is promising.
Glassholes
this is name for wearer, nor the device
Glassholeglasses then
An oldie but a goodie.
CreepTech
I’ll vote on ewaste. They’re ewaste.
Dayum. Simpsons really did do everything first.
i do like the idea of smartglasses but most of them are sketchy as hell. even realities seems pretty good given the polish of their features. also panopticals is great.
Privacy nightmares.
- Shady shades
- Opulenses
…but I think people found the best already: spywear
So many good products have been destroyed by the people making them. Especially from Meta. The Facebook Portal was a fantastic product and my family used them heavily during the pandemic despite knowing that they came from Meta. Not only are they invasive, but Meta started removing features from them when they cancelled them. My aunt called me because Zoom no longer works. I had to explain to her that Meta just removed that functionality.
Having a wearable camera with notifications would be pretty cool I guess. I just don’t want them to need a Meta account.
I’ll take “solutions to non-existent problems” for $500.
I don’t have a snarky term at the ready, but nightmare shades is what comes to mind.
I distrust these companies and the entire ethos surrounding wearable tech so much that I can’t help but imagine that products like AI (or XR) glasses are just the precursor to something even more awful like implantable tech or other cyberpunk-styled body-mods. I wore a smart watch for a while and all it did was teach me to read my texts twice and spam me with notifications. Once I disabled the move/hydrate prompts and the text and email notifications, it became quite useless on its own. With glasses, it will just become another distraction and data harvester.
More than one Silicon Valley tech dude has been outed as a techno-feudalist singularity-obsessed trans-humanist who read speculative sci-fi and came away with the worst possible interpretation. I can’t imagine any way to positively frame these things.
That’s…pretty much it.
Though I’ll concede the hardware could be useful (not as everyday wear but as a purpose-specific tool).
I did have a smartwatch for a while but it was a DIY kind (Lilygo T-Watch) where you could write your own firmware. Only reason I stopped using it was the battery life was like 90 minutes tops if you wanted to do anything useful with it (ESP32’s Bluetooth “low energy” is anything but).
Notifications were kind of useful (I already have my notifications pared down to only essential things) but I found it most useful as a remote control for my phone (media controls, quick actions, etc).
I’ll take “solutions to non-existent problems” for $500.
Problem, how to get images of women in public for later “study”.
Sloptacles
+1 for spywear
Camera glasses.
No need to make it super clever, just make it clear they are actually a camera that also functions as glasses. They are likely going to be a hug benefit for people with specific needs and are very convenient as a concept for a replacement to phone cameras, but unfortunately the most evil companies that spy on everyone is making them so they will end up being a net negative for society.
Yeah. Like I said in the post, I would love these for specific use cases if the software worked for me. Unfortunately, until the smart glasses equivalent of LineageOS comes about, they’re literal spywear.
Garbage
Garbâgé
Creepers.
Spyglasses
