Hard article to read, but an important one. Here’s the thing: I know two people who own Meta “pervert glasses,” and I think if there is an innocuous use case for these glasses, they’re demonstrating it.

And yet, here’s Ellul on technical ambivalence:

And this technological nexus is characteristically ambivalent. Because the solution of one problem by technological means immediately raises a multitude of others, which result directly from those very means, it is impossible to say whether technique produces good or evil effects. It does both, simultaneously. We are confronted with a system in the strict sense of the word, what I will call the “technological system,” hence ethical issues may only be considered relative to the system as a whole, and not to specific instances.

Hard to pick a single killer line from this one. There’s this paragraph:

Appreciate for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product allowed customers to behave so objectionably that the company responded with a content ban, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”

And then this conclusion hits hard:

In saying the company will police the creepiest version of smart glasses content but sidestepping deeper questions, Meta is trying to have it both ways: It gets to tout its enforcement while creating the conditions for this content to exist in the first place.

Hate this so much. The company statements are weaselly and gross. This also demonstrates one of the worst things about this whole issue. I would never buy Meta smart glasses, but I know two people in my life who own them, and the privacy burden of this product isn’t borne by the owner of the device so much as by those around them. Barf, barf, barf.

Don’t think I’ve posted anything on this story yet because as the article points out, it’s hard to focus on this evil with so many other evils distracting us.