I’ve done a thing: BanRay.eu – it’s about nipping a bad idea in the bud. You should check it out.
In these technofeudal times, it’s easy to strike out at the most blatant examples of bad products and services, and missing the more insidious stuff. But targeting the blatant has its benefits, and there are few companies as publicly terrible online as Meta. And Metas cooperation with Rayban in creating camera-glasses that have built in video/audio capabilities and always-on recording, are a new category of stupid that I want to do something about.
The backlash that Google experienced when they launched the (experimental) Google Glass more than ten years ago – and which gave rise to the wonderful insult “Glasshole” – has disappeared into the public memory hole. And it’s difficult to keep a profitable idea down. So Meta are making inroads with their glasses since it’s techologically better than what Google offered, and being tied to AI services makes them somewhat more useful.
Of course it’s a powergrab for monetising yet another aspect of our lives, and even if you’re not instinctively suspicious of anything the FAANG are doing the last months has seen so many misuses of this technology that you should really actively combat it. It’s not enough to say “oh but I won’t buy them” when your neighbour might.
If you take a look at for example www.reddit.com/r/RaybanMeta/ you’ll see plenty of folks trying to circumvent even the nominal “integrity protections” that Meta has included in their glasses (i.e. an LED that lights up when you’re recording) and Amazon sells stickers you can just stick over the indicator light as “lens protectors“.
But the tech-broes modding their glasses and someone making a buck on stickers isn’t the problem. Rather, the problem is that this is a completely new class of consumer product that – once again – is pushing the envelop on what “personal integrity” and “corporate surveillance” means. But this is also an opportunity – as there’s a window to act before this class of products becomes so common that we won’t even think twice.
Most technologies appear as slow mutations. the mp3-player combined with the cellphone and your pda to become a smartphone that you carry with you everywhere. If instead the smartphone would show up fully formed – including the tremendous spying and enshittified ecology surrounding it – there’s a good chance that it would be regulated or face a public backlash! Who in their right mind would have agreed to have adware / spyware installed on their phone 30 years ago? It wouldn’t have happen, yet here we are. Boiling frogs, Overton windows, etc.
So I made a sticker design that you can either print yourself or buy from me (5 for 60 kr) and slap up wherever you think the glasses should be banned. Behold!
By a stroke of luck the campaign name wrote itself: BanRay.eu. One could hardly have asked for a better name! I did a few back-and-forth with the design, some affordance testing (i.e. “What do you think this means, mom?”) and created the campaign site in a few hours. Getting the stickers took the longest, but now it’s all up and you can order them here: shop.hintlab.org
It’s prohibitively expensive to ship stuff outside of Sweden – not to mention outside of Europe – so if you want to print these where you are (or in different size, material, whatever) I’ve released the design under a Creative commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0 — Free to share and adapt with attribution) I’ll happily link to your webpage. Oh, and I’ve AI-translated the page to a couple different languages, and most of the texts have been proofread by humans (that’s indicated on the page). Many thanks to all those who’ve helped me with this!
My goal with this is to be a small force for good, by spreading some awareness. In a better world all billionaires would be exiled to an island to spend their lives LARPing a innovation conference with Monopoly money, instead of running lose in society. But we live in an imperfect world, so here we are.