The Disappearing Line Between Style and Surveillance

Two decades ago, a Harvard sophomore stitched together a cruel little website. It raided student directories without permission, ripped women’s faces out of context, and fed them to an audience hungry to rate and ridicule. It was called FaceMash. It wasn’t clever; it was humiliation as entertainment, and it announced to the world the worldview of its creator that people are raw material to be mined.

That student was Mark Zuckerberg. Today, the company he built has rebranded itself as Meta, but its instincts haven’t shifted an inch. After engineering platforms that rewired teenage attention spans, fractured democracies, and turned our private lives into advertising inventory, Meta has unveiled its next act. And it might be the most chilling yet.

A pair of glasses.

They look like ordinary Ray-Bans. Familiar, iconic, the eyewear of movie stars and counterculture rebels. But inside their frames lives a machine built to erase the boundaries of consent. A camera that doesn’t announce itself. A microphone that never stops listening. A display only the wearer can see. Even the so-called “safety light” that signals recording has been engineered to vanish in daylight, with cottage industries already selling stickers to blot it out entirely. Every design choice points to the same goal, which is to make surveillance invisible and, therefore, unavoidable.

What happens when the recording stops being visible? Social cues collapse. If someone raises a phone to film you, you know it. You adjust, object, or walk away. The phone is a signal. Glasses erase that signal. You could be on tape without ever knowing it. A confidential conversation, a private disagreement, or your child playing in a park being captured, uploaded, and stored. There is no moment to refuse because you don’t know the moment is happening.

Legally, the terrain is permissive. In most U.S. states, only one person needs to consent to a recording: the person holding the device. Which means that in practice, these glasses give anyone a license to capture anyone else without disclosure. And while some jurisdictions demand “all-party consent,” those laws are the exception. The technology has been built to thrive in the gaps.

Once ordinary people begin wearing cameras on their faces, the expectation of privacy in public life begins to collapse. Stalking becomes effortless. Doxxing finds new fuel. Children can be filmed for sports or malicious purposes without their parents ever knowing. Pair these glasses with off-the-shelf facial recognition software, and suddenly, strangers are not just strangers—they are profiles, histories, and vulnerabilities waiting to be cross-referenced in real time.

This is the true genius of Meta’s project. Not technical sophistication, plenty of companies could build cameras into eyewear, but normalisation. By partnering with Ray-Ban, they didn’t just manufacture hardware. They bought cultural camouflage. The glasses don’t look futuristic; they look familiar. And once familiar becomes normal, resistance collapses.

Meta will market this as progress. They will sell the convenience of hands-free photography, live streaming, real-time translation (as an Australian living in Italy the live translation is even attractive to me I must admit). They will paint visions of augmented intelligence, with maps hovering in your vision and captions appearing as someone speaks. But beneath the gloss lies the same bargain Meta has always offered: trade your privacy, trade your safety, trade your trust in one another, and in return receive the privilege of being watched more efficiently.

The real product here is the dismantling of the last unmonitored spaces in daily life. It’s a test of how far a corporation can push surveillance into the fabric of the ordinary without triggering revolt. If people accept this, even begrudgingly, the precedent is set. From there, the next generation of devices will hide even deeper, until the very idea of being unrecorded feels antique.

We are watching the slow death of the visible camera. The raised phone, the clicking shutter, the laptop lens. Meta wants those signals gone because signals give people power to resist. In their place, we are offered lenses that look like any other pair of glasses, worn by anyone, anywhere recording everything. Yes... it's time to add "smart glasses" to the ever growing list of device usage policy.