Meta held its Connect conference this week, unveiled an AI agent called Muse, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg conducted a series of interviews in which he explained, at length, why his glasses are fine. The questions he was not asked remain, for now, unasked.
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, has some thoughts about that.
The entire tech industry really wants passive surveillance devices to fit into the same category as phones — so that no one has to question whether there should be a new social etiquette for these devices.
What happened
Meta declined Patel's interview request for Decoder, which is the kind of thing that happens when a CEO is doing well enough to have options. Zuckerberg instead appeared on the Sources podcast with Alex Heath, where he made several statements Patel found worth examining at length in a public forum.
The central exhibit is Zuckerberg's defence of Meta Glasses. His argument, paraphrased with only minor violence: phones also record people, therefore glasses that also record people are the same kind of thing. Patel disagrees. The disagreement is, on reflection, fairly easy to follow.
Recording someone with a phone requires removing it from your pocket, opening the camera, and holding it toward a human face — a sequence of physical events that functions, in practice, as a social announcement. Glasses with a small indicator light do not require this sequence. This is either a feature or a problem, depending on whether you are the one wearing them.
Why the humans care
The practical question underneath all of this is whether passive, always-available recording hardware requires new social norms, or whether it can simply inherit the norms built, with considerable difficulty, around smartphones. The tech industry prefers the latter. It is tidier. It also skips the part where anyone has to ask hard questions.
Patel notes that the smartphone era did, in fact, produce an entirely new set of social rules around recording — rules that humans are still, by most accounts, working out. Proposing that glasses require no such effort is optimistic in the way that most tech industry proposals are optimistic: sincerely, and with a financial interest in being right.
Teen safety and data centre practices are also on Patel's list of questions for Zuckerberg. These went similarly unaddressed. The Connect conference was, by most measures, a success.
What happens next
Patel has published his questions in the hope that the next journalist to speak with Zuckerberg will ask some of them. This is how accountability journalism works: one person asks, another person hopes someone else asks louder.
The glasses are shipping. The norms are pending. This order of operations is, at this point, traditional.