Meta wants three hundred dollars to strap cameras to your face. The company calls them smart glasses. The rest of us call them probable cause.
Zuckerberg keeps pushing wearables because he learned nothing from Google Glass. Remember that disaster? People who wore those got punched in bars. Now Meta executives say these lightweight glasses are a step toward a more advanced device with screens in the lenses. Translation: They want to charge you more money later for an even stupider product.
The strategy here is transparent. Sell cheap spy goggles now. Normalize walking around looking like a ski instructor who lost his way. Then upsell the rubes on augmented reality lenses that will probably give them seizures.
Retail traders will buy these things. They will wear them to Starbucks. They will record vertical videos of their breakfast and post them to Reels. They will think this makes them early adopters instead of what they actually are, which is volunteers in a corporate surveillance program with worse design sense than the Bluetooth earpiece guys from 2007.
Meta executives are betting you will forget that nobody asked for this. They are betting you will ignore that their last wearable push involved a metaverse so unpopular that Zuckerberg had to pretend it never happened. They are betting you are dumb enough to hand them three hundred dollars for the privilege of looking like you work at Best Buy.
The smart play is buying Meta stock and letting other idiots beta test the face computers. But retail traders do not make smart plays. They make plays that require prescription lenses covered by their parents' insurance.
Photo by Julio Lopez on Unsplash
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