I Simply Refuse to Accept What Mark Zuckerberg Has in Store for Us Now

In recent years, I have resisted the siren call of the Apple Watch, a device designed to keep me somehow more tethered to the internet than I already, woefully, am. I have retired my Fitbit, spurning the step-counting data collector and hourly calls to get up and walk. And while my trials of virtual reality headsets such as Meta’s Quest and Apple’s Vision Pro have been impressive, I’ve found no real use for these products, which isolate me for long periods of time and freak out my dog.

I also don’t wear glasses. Not only is my vision stellar, but through occasional trips to the ophthalmologist, I’ve learned I’ll likely need reading glasses—nothing more—in a decade or two. I consider myself extremely lucky. Sunglasses don’t do much for me either, though once or twice a year, I’ll wear them at my wife’s insistence.

This is a long way of saying that I have little interest in glasses, feel strange wearing them for fashion when others need them to see the world, and Big Tech’s attempts to market “smart glasses” do less than nothing for me. I am begging you, please do not make me wear Mark Zuckerberg’s ugly-ass glasses.

Wait, what is going on?

Well, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has spent years trying to develop a pair of mass-market, consumer-grade eyeglasses equipped with augmented reality technology. First, Meta partnered with the European eyewear company EssilorLuxottica to produce Ray-Bans with built-in speakers, cameras, and a microphone. But bafflingly, they don’t have any AR capabilities. Now, Meta—without Ray-Ban’s help this time—has announced its actual AR smart glasses, called Orion, and let some tech reporters and reviewers test them out.

What’s augmented reality again?

While virtual reality is a fully immersive computer view on your eyes, augmented reality places computerized overlays onto your physical environment—remember Snapchat’s Hot Dog Guy? That was a taste of AR. Will Meta’s augmented reality put the baby photos of long-lost high school classmates in virtual frames on your home’s walls? Is this the metaverse they warned us about?

The Origin glasses can make calls, take photos, play videos and games, and connect to a wristband that lets you click different items as they appear in your field of view. (Yes, that’s another thing to wear.) The idea is that it’s a smartphone strapped to your face, giving you the power of the modern mobile internet without reaching into your pocket for your smartphone.

Haven’t I seen smart glasses before?

Yes. It’s the same general concept that led Google to market Google Glass a decade ago. (These devices were discontinued in 2015, rebranded as enterprise products for factory workers in 2017, and then killed for good in 2023.)

Google Glass failed because it was expensive, unnecessary, unwanted, and frankly, super ugly. “Glass, and the other things like it, won’t always be ugly and awkward,” Mat Honan wrote in Wired in 2013, in a retrospective of a year of wearing the device. “At some point, it’s going to be invisibly indistinguishable from a pair of glasses or sunglasses.”

But that prediction hasn’t come true—not yet, at least. Snap’s Spectacles are truly horrid, like something you’d wear as part of a half-assed Andy Warhol costume on Halloween. Meta’s line of Ray-Bans at least attempt to look fashionable, an ideal its Orion devices have perhaps abandoned. But if you don’t like the signature look of Ray-Bans, then, too bad. And they don’t feature any AR—just multimedia features—so what’s really the point? The Amazon Echo Frames, glasses that bring the magic of your Alexa device directly to your face, are perhaps the most fashionable smart glasses I’ve seen—and I’m defining fashionable here as simply, doesn’t make you look like you have hardware on your face.

Searching for early reviews of the Orion device on the web, I was pleased to see the Verge’s Alex Heath, Business Insider’s Peter Kafka, CNET’s Scott Stein, and Stratechery newsletter writer Ben Thompson sacrificing their countenances on the altar of SpongeBob Squarepants cosplay, which is the commitment necessary to trying out one of these things. “I’ve tried them, and they are very cool!” Kafka writes, saying they’re the first eye-tech that he can imagine actually buying. “They don’t make you look cool—you look like someone wearing tech on your face—but the ideas and engineering behind them are really fascinating.”

Stein puts it this way: “The glasses definitely do not look like everyday things, but they at least approach something you might see someone wearing around,” he wrote. “On me, they kind of pass as super, superthick arty frames.”

In an interview with the Verge, Zuckerberg hinted that perhaps he knows that his new glasses are bizarre, telling Heath that future models of Orion could be half as thick as they are now. “I think we aspire to build things that look really good,” Zuckerberg said. Does Zuckerberg know what looks good? We’re absolutely not so sure.

How are the reviews?

The early reviews of the Orion glasses are gracious. Shareholders seem pleased by the news: Meta stock rose 1 percent before the end of trading Wednesday. But it’s an odd pseudo-release because you can’t actually purchase these products. They’re just prototypes that you might try on at CES or another electronics convention. If anything, it’s a reapproach of the company’s metaverse plans, which once meant something very different and centered on virtual reality more than augmented reality.

Wait. I can’t even buy these horrible glasses?

Nope, mainly because they’re too expensive to produce right now. Meta told the Verge that they costs about $10,000 per pair to make because the lenses for the current prototypes are made with pricy silicon carbide. The next iteration of these glasses, expected in the next few years, the company says, will not be made with this material and, in return, will sport higher resolution.

Still, even in the far-off future when Orion is ready, there’s nothing that will make me want to wear these things.

The wearable tech market appears to be a collection of final-form surveillance devices intended to give the last vestiges of our personal data—meaning, the physical world—to Big Tech conglomerates in Silicon Valley.

Gadget geeks always want to have the latest and greatest silicon-filled junk, coughing up unknown thousands of dollars to do so. But I will do no such thing—unless Slate begs me, which, I’ll admit, definitely could happen.

I contribute enough to the information economy through my tweets, Instagram photos, and public writing—all available for tech companies to scrape and purchase from middlemen. In order to let more blood, I’d have to let Meta or Snap or Amazon latch onto my optical nerves, put Elon Musk’s Neuralink chip in my brain, and damn my physical environment to the ills of the internet. There would be icons on my kitchen table, auto-play videos in my bathroom, and pop-up ads from Chewy on my morning walks with my dog.

But worst of all, maybe, would be that I’d look like an irredeemable dork.