Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has never just come out and said that its overarching goal as a company is to boil every last ounce of joy out of the basic experience of being a social animal, but the “boil-joy-and-suck” aspects of their business plans are easy to infer. Even beyond *gestures vaguely, but emphatically, at the last 20 years of online life*, it’s hard not to look at the company’s most recent patent—which would allow the AI-assisted facial accessory the company would really like people to stop calling “pervert glasses” to analyze all of your interactions with friends and loved ones, run them through facial recognition software and other analysis, and then feed you a “highlight reel” of your own life—and not think, “Oh, this was made by people who don’t think too much of the whole human experience, huh?”
Per 404 Media, Meta filed the patent for “Smart Cameras Enabled By Assistant Systems” back in February, before it was published last week. In essence, the patent would allow users of Meta’s allegedly smart glasses to turn the whole world into Facebook: Your glasses would record the people around you, tag them, identify when they do things, and then later use that information to present you with a social media-style automatically generated slideshow of things you’d already lived through. (The company’s language repeatedly uses a dinner party as the event our hypothetical memory-deficient voyeur would be ruining.)
Besides its obvious and horrifying applications for things like police surveillance and other Flock-esque attempts to shove ever larger portions of the world into monitored cameras—because we’re pretty sure the facial recognition and action-tagging aspects of these things aren’t going to stop at, say, “passing that really good cab sav Michael picked up in Tuscany last fall”—the patent itself is also a potent psychological weapon, because holy shit did reading it bum us the fuck out. Sometimes, extended interactions with Silicon Valley types and their writings leave you with no choice but to seriously Imagine A Guy, and coming up with the person who thinks people need AI glasses to remember their social interactions and replay them in minute detail three hours after you get home from a party is just exhausting. Just get an anxiety disorder like the rest of us, bud!
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