The Gaze Wears You: Meta’s Smart Glasses and the Fantasy of Seamless Mediation

Avantika Tewari

27 May 2025

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have entered the Indian market not merely as wearable devices but as emissaries of a seductive fantasy: that technology can collapse the experiential gap between self and world, rendering experience frictionless, continuous, and entirely legible. Cloaked in the familiar aesthetics of iconic eyewear, these glasses conceal an advanced machinic interior—voice-activated, always-listening, always-watching. A whispered “Hey Meta” unlocks a vast infrastructure where speech, sight, and desire are instantaneously processed, categorized, and stored. Policy responses predictably foreground concerns about privacy, consent, and ethical surveillance. Yet these responses often misapprehend the apparatus’s fundamental logic. Framing the issue as one of individual choice—whether one can “opt out,” toggle off features, or withhold consent—obscures a more structural violence: consent is no longer granted but architecturally assumed; capture is the device’s default state, predicated on uninterrupted extraction. Opting out entails functional sacrifice, reinforcing the contemporary logic of freedom as the freedom to comply or be excluded.

Beneath sleek design and frictionless interfaces—voice commands, always-on cameras, AI-generated insights—lurks a promise to dissolve the gap between desire and satisfaction. Yet this gesture evacuates critical dimensions of subjectivity: these glasses are not simply about seeing but about being seen by an infrastructure that precedes and exceeds the subject. The user, far from sovereign, is folded into machinic circuits that appropriate speech, sight, and gesture as raw material for value extraction. The fantasy of seamless interaction is premised on the foreclosure of division. This phenomenon should be understood not as an ethical oversight but as a structural imperative of contemporary digital capitalism. Meta’s glasses function as operative nodes within a global infrastructure designed to eradicate inaccuracy, inconsistencies, resistance, and opacity. They instantiate a modality of perception where seeing and being seen become indistinguishable. The user is ideologically interpellated as an autonomous subject while simultaneously being rendered a data substrate. Every embodied gesture—glances, vocalizations, hesitations—is appropriated as latent data, subsumed into machine learning architectures demanding continuous inputs for prediction, control, and governance.

The utterance of the trigger phrase “Hey Meta” enacts a dissolution of the subject-object dichotomy. These glasses do not eliminate experiential distance but aestheticize and mediate it, enacting Althusserian ideological interpellation: the user is hailed as free precisely when structural conditions foreclose genuine choice. Wearing the glasses entails inhabiting a technical regime that predefines legible actions, desirable data, and productive attention. The device’s consent architecture—a perpetually active microphone and camera—operates as a procedural fiction: users must submit to comprehensive capture or disable core functions, rendering the device partially inoperative. This coercive binary parallels the capitalist logic of freedom without alternatives, choice without exit. These glasses are not isolated consumer products but nodal points in a global surveillance capitalist infrastructure, extending its reach under the guise of personalization. Addressing the device simultaneously entails being addressed by it, engendering a fantasy of seamless communicative fluency that eliminates ambiguity and interruption. The erasure of temporal gaps and silences—conditions under which unconscious processes and subjective division manifest—signals a fundamental transformation of subjectivity.

In place of the fragmented subject emerges a prosthetic unconscious: an artificial apparatus that registers input without mediation, records without repression, and observes without affective hesitation. This prosthesis systematically erases the divided subject, effacing dimensions of human experience defined by fallibility, concealment, and contradiction. Capital’s most sophisticated strategy is to extract value not only without consent but through our desire. The resultant subject is hyper-transparent—fully legible to the symbolic order underpinning data capitalism—but this hypervisibility constitutes misrecognition. The subject becomes transparent to the surveillant capitalist Other while simultaneously foreclosed as divided. Lacanian opacity and lack, constitutive of subjectivity, are violently suppressed. Enforced hyper-legibility forecloses opacity and resistance, negating the inconsistency and lack that enable desire and agency. The user is interpellated not as sovereign but as an object a, wholly subsumed within machinic extraction circuits. Being seen conflates with being known by the capitalist Other, yet without symbolic recognition or mediation essential to subject formation. Visibility thus functions as alienation, reducing the subject to raw data, divested of its essential division.

Beyond extending sensory capacities, these glasses reconfigure the conditions under which seeing and speaking become intelligible. The stakes exceed privacy narrowly conceived, implicating the very grammar of subjectivity under digital capitalism. By transforming the body into a relay for machine vision and speech processing, Meta offers a prosthetic unconscious—listening without repression, seeing without shame, repeating without difference, and remembering without desire. This prosthesis enacts a fantasy of total capture masked as augmented experience.

The Eye that Watches for the “I” of the Algorithm

The glasses are not simply a technological convenience; they are a body-sensing network where autonomy is reconfigured, perception is commodified, and the distinction between subject and surveillance apparatus dissolves. In John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), a drifter discovers sunglasses that unveil the hidden power structures around him: billboards command “Obey,” magazines urge “Consume,” and the elite reveal themselves as alien overlords. Slavoj Žižek famously interpreted this as an allegory of ideology—not as a veil obscuring reality, but as the very lens that makes reality intelligible. Critiquing ideology is thus not about removing illusions but about recognizing the framework that shapes our perception of truth. Yet with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, this dynamic is inverted. Rather than revealing ideology, the glasses embed ideology directly onto the user’s retina. They don’t disrupt perception; they optimize and operationalize it. Wearing them is no longer an act of unmasking reality—it is an act of becoming its emissary, fully enmeshed in the ideological apparatus of digital capitalism.

If Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) exposed cinema as an ideological lens shaping what and how we see, then Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses perform this operation more intimately—installing ideology directly onto the retina. These glasses don’t simply aid sight; they transform the very field of vision into a site of continuous data extraction, blurring the line between seeing and being seen. They are not prosthetics for perception but prosthetics for platform capitalism, overwriting how we look with the imperative to capture, post, and monetize. Vision no longer wanders contemplatively; it scans relentlessly. We don’t behold the world; we process it, reformat it, commodify it. Borrowing from Antonin Artaud’s (1947) Body without Organs, these glasses don’t just extend the body—they reconfigure it. The user becomes less a coherent subject and more a desubjectified field of data flows: visual, vocal, affective. Yet Slavoj Žižek’s insight tempers this: the Body without Organs is always marked by a constitutive lack, an internal fissure. Meta’s wearer is not just raw data, but spectacle—a consumable node in the capitalist circuit of content production and consumption. Consent becomes a fetishized gesture—a toggle masquerading as agency—while the user is sutured to a system that never stops watching.

Vertov’s “cinematograph of the future” is no longer an external device but an integrated, wearable ideological apparatus modulating perception and social reality itself. The wearer is caught in a machinic loop, simultaneously spectator and spectacle, consumed endlessly by networks of data harvesters, data brokers, algorithm and capital. Privacy is not a shield but a residue, managed post hoc as subjects are folded into the spectacle of surveillance capitalism. The body is reterritorialized as a “body with data streams,” a surface upon which capital inscribes itself. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1958) wrote that “the eye dreams as it sees,” that vision is reverie, imagination, poiesis. Meta’s glasses amputate this dreaming eye, reducing it to a metadata machine. Seeing becomes streaming. The world ceases to be a mystery or a surface to read; it becomes a dataset to be curated, a scene to be monetized. The influencer gaze epitomizes this shift—not simply seeing but anticipating how the algorithm will see, fracturing vision into recursive loops of performance and capture. Vision ceases to be subjective; it becomes infrastructural, belonging to the “eye” of the algorithmic “I” that feeds.

In this relentless feedback loop, the subject is both the origin and the artifact—the very cause of desire that drives capitalist appetite, and simultaneously the content endlessly produced and consumed. Visibility becomes a currency; the self is perpetually on display, an ever-ready spectacle for other eyes, for algorithms hungry to parse, categorize, and monetize. Here, aesthetics and production are no longer distinct spheres but entwined in recursive symbiosis: the act of being seen is the act of producing content, and content production feeds back to reshape the very desire that sustains it. The subject does not simply create or consume—they embody the cycle itself, their identity folded into a seamless circuit of capitalist circulation, both commodity and creator. Yet this is also the terrain of archive fever—Jacques Derrida’s (1996) haunting diagnosis of the archive as a site of profound anxiety and obsessive accumulation. These glasses do not merely capture moments; they broadcast the wearer’s life in ceaseless real time, erasing the distance between producer and product, watcher and watched. Walter Benjamin (1982) once imagined the archive as a battleground of memory—a fragile tension between remembering and forgetting, a space for resistance and rupture. Meta’s AI-powered glasses invert this delicate dialectic. They instantiate the capitalist archive: a totalizing, seamless, and commodified accumulation of lived experience, endlessly captured, quantified, and exploited.

The Role of the Archivist: Algorithmic Mastery Perfecting History

I recall the figure of an archivist whose vocation was to recover and preserve history’s fragile remnants—those resistant shards that disrupt dominant narratives and defy erasure. Their labor was marked by patience and meticulous care, grounded in the conviction that memory constitutes a critical site of intervention and emancipatory possibility. Yet today, that same archivist finds their practice constrained and subsumed by Meta’s AI-driven spectacles, where immediacy and algorithmic convenience supplant the slow work of reflection and deliberation. The archive they once cultivated as a contested terrain of remembering and forgetting is now reconfigured as an apparatus of totalizing control. Under this new regime, every instant is preemptively commodified, ceaselessly harvested by voracious AI systems that consume life itself as raw material for capital accumulation. The archivist’s scholarly impulse—to safeguard memory from oblivion and resist reduction—has been co-opted and dissolved within algorithmic processes that transform existence into endless data streams. Forgetting, formerly a necessary counterpoint to memory, is rendered structurally impossible; privacy collapses into an empty signifier, hollowed out by relentless visibility and continuous capture.

The academic’s compulsive production of knowledge is inscribed within the master discourse of digital capitalism’s algorithmic unconscious—a regime where the archive no longer functions as a site of symbolic mediation or emancipatory rupture but is transformed into a mechanism of pervasive surveillance and dispossession. Here, knowledge production assumes the role of mastery, incessantly reproducing the ideological and structural coordinates that delimit and discipline subjectivity. The academic, as a divided subject enmeshed in this discourse, unwittingly perpetuates the very circuits of domination it seeks to critique. Once imagined as a dialectical space mediating forgetting and remembering, the archive is now reduced to a one-dimensional locus of capitalist valorization, where the desire for knowledge is compulsively harnessed to the imperatives of algorithmic production and extraction. Subjectivity itself is folded irreversibly into data flows and commodification, its fractured, divided nature effaced in service of the algorithmic logic of endless capture.

Just as the academic’s archive becomes a site of algorithmic mastery, the social media influencer emerges as its living emblem—a figure whose very existence is both data and spectacle, endlessly produced and reproduced within the same circuits of capital and visibility. The influencer’s life is not simply lived but performed for the algorithm, their identity shaped by an incessant feedback loop where every gesture, glance, and affect is calibrated for maximum engagement and circulation. They do not merely reflect cultural desires; they instantiate them, becoming the animated archive of capitalist aesthetics—a hallucinatory presence that animates the platform’s voracious appetite for content. The influencer’s gaze is not singular but fractured, mediated by anticipations of virality and the demands of an ever-watchful algorithmic superego. In this way, the influencer is less a person than a symptom, a surface where capital’s desires are projected, consumed, and amplified. This animated figure becomes aspirational – gendered and yet universalized – enacts the social demand to be seen, to circulate, to curate oneself ceaselessly. The influencer thus embodies the totalizing logic of digital capitalism—where subjectivity, visibility, and production collapse into one another, and where the personal becomes inseparable from the platform’s relentless drive to monetize life itself.

While John Carpenter’s They Live made ideology visible by alienating perception. Meta’s glasses re-enchant perception—not with wonder but utility, flattening the world into shareability. The gaze becomes a conduit; the subject, a relay station for capital’s desires. To see is to circulate; to look is to perform. Perception becomes the first link in the chain of capitalist capture. This capture is profoundly gendered. Feminist thinkers remind us that being seen is never neutral—it is always an act of power, surveillance, regulation. Under patriarchal capitalism, marginalized people have long been forced to see themselves being seen. Meta’s glasses universalize this condition. In this circuit, interpassivity reigns supreme: everyone self-objectifies, becoming both the subject and the object of the gaze. Visibility is not a symptom but the very requirement of platform life. The influencer becomes the universal subject; the algorithm, its superego; the glasses, its veil. Žižek calls this “cynical reason;” we know we are being watched, yet we keep recording; we know the gaze is not ours, yet we curate ourselves for it anyway. Meta’s glasses make cynicism wearable. Ideology is no longer belief but performance. You don’t just see ideology—you wear it – just like the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, the smart ring—they present themselves as accessories of self-expression, as instruments of personal empowerment. They appear to blend seamlessly with fashion, to affirm agency. But their true function is capture. The world is no longer something to be unmasked—it is something to be formatted. We do not simply see; we calibrate, optimize, and frame. We live in anticipation of the post.

They no longer live. They watch.

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Avantika Tewari is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory.

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