Late last year, a company with origins as a “hot or not” website decided to return to their roots with the premier invention for creeps, perverts, and antisocial freaks. I am, of course, talking about the Meta Ray Bans (and now Oakleys), AI-enabled glasses that film your entire day and allow you to prompt AI about it, while offering the potential to take a low-quality video or live-stream every action you take to your tens of followers.
As Ideas Guy’s resident tech-etiquette expert, I’ve got a lot to say about the way people should use these things. I was a lot more lenient on AirPods and Lime Scooters because they have valid, though teetering on silly and unnecessary, uses. But I may have met my match with the Meta Ray Bans.
It really comes down to one question: can’t everything Meta Glasses do be done with an iPhone? Is the labor of pulling out your phone and opening the Camera app too much for you people now?
In my professional opinion, one should not buy or wear these things unless they want to look busted while simultaneously alienating the people around them and also letting the world’s biggest company review footage of every second of their life.
But— and here at Ideas Guy we respect all walks of life, even the irreparably stupid ones— if that’s still what you want to do, here are some exceptions under which you should maybe, MAYBE be allowed to spend an exorbitant amount of money on a pair.
You can make your boyfriend wear them to prove he’s not looking at other girls
You’re checking out the waitress. I am not! Yes you are. I saw the way you looked at her. No, I’m not, I swear! You always do this. You always do this! Sorry I’m not some BUSTY BLONDE who—
If this has ever been you, Meta Glasses are the perfect solution. Strap them to your boyfriend at all times and you’ll have complete proof that he’s not looking at other women. It’s 2026! Therapy and inner work are dead and surveillance culture is the solution.
Ok, sure, you can have them if you’re a mountain biker or doing some other GoPro shit
Ski accidents might skyrocket because of the number of people getting “software update required” notifications on the slopes. But hey, if you can keep them on your head successfully, and ignore the fact that you’re ignoring the natural beauty around you in favor of videotaping every single thing that happens, you might end up with a cool video to post for your tens of followers, punctuated by a bunch of instances of:
“Aw, shit, guys, can you wait up a second? Yeah, stop the bikes. My Meta Ray Bans fell off for the third time. Goddamn it. Yeah, well, you guys go on without me. Gotta dust these bad boys off again.”
You can have them if you’re a surgeon and you’re super tired
God, sometimes it’s been a long day and you forget which part of the brain is which. AI glasses could really help here!
You can have them if you’ve NEVER had over three Instagram Stories posted at a time
The only people who currently own Meta Glasses, that I’ve come across online at least, are clout demons. They want to make anything and everything into an Instagram Reel. They need to be constantly recording because anything, everything could be Content, and it would be bad business to miss a second.
Having these freaks roaming around is no good. Not for their relationships with reality, not for the people they’re surreptitiously filming, not for the traffic they might accidentally walk into while chasing down a woman to harass for a weird pickup artist video. Filtering out the Influencer Demons won’t solve all the problems with Meta Glasses, but it’s a good start.
I’m partial to keeping this rule really, really stringent; anyone who has ever posted more than 3 Instagram Stories is at risk for being an Online Oversharer, someone who would be turned evil by Meta Glasses. We need to keep these to people who have no risk of oversharing online, people whose story bar is a flat __________ rather than a . . . . . . .. . .
Myself included.
You can have them if you get “EVERYTHING I WITNESS YOU DO IS GOING STRAIGHT TO PALANTIR!” engraved on the side
Ugh, and this would be such a pain because engraving is like $20 extra at Sunglass Hut.
You are allowed to have them if you keep breaking your phone in a cartoonish way
Some might argue that literally everything these glasses do can be done with a normal phone. But some of us just have bad luck! Some of us are on our third iPhone of the week because we keep dropping them in sewer grates. If you’re prone to slipping on a banana peel and smashing the glass on your phone, these glasses might be a good option for you.
Fine, you can have them if you are genuinely visually impaired
I’m not heartless; I think AI-enabled glasses could really improve quality of life for a blind person. However, it’s still insanely greedy that Meta designed something that could completely change lives for visually impaired people, then said fuck ‘em and decided to chase the more lucrative perv vertical instead.
Also, a company that isn’t transparently selling all your data could probably make something similar. It probably already exists. In conclusion, get rid of your Meta Glasses. Sell them on Facebook Marketplace or something. Wait—
thanks for reading!!! don’t really have much else to say here today. although the number has been fluctuating a bit and I will probably lose some subscribers for this post, Ideas Guy Nation is 400 ± 3 strong and that is something to celebrate. thank you all for being here!!! xo
You are allowed to wear them if you record bystanders on chicago public transit and address the glasses as “computer”
A masterpiece