A person wearing ordinary glasses looks at you, and you generally know what kind of event is taking place. You may welcome the attention, ignore it, or find it intrusive. Whatever your reaction, the gaze is visible enough to interpret.
Smart glasses disturb that basic legibility. The wearer may simply be looking. They may also be capturing an image that can be stored, edited, and shown to strangers. The person in view cannot necessarily tell which encounter is happening.
That uncertainty is one reason to return to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Published in 1972 alongside a BBC television series created chiefly by Berger and producer Mike Dibb, the work argues that seeing is never neutral: what we notice is shaped by convention, social position, and relations of power. Berger’s account of the unequal roles assigned to observer and observed makes the wearer’s hidden camera more than a technical detail. Who looks, who is displayed, and who controls the resulting image are questions of power as much as perception.
The technology has changed dramatically. The unequal structure Berger examined has not disappeared. It has acquired a camera.
An encounter with hidden terms
A recent Business Insider report found that voyeuristic videos made with Meta smart glasses remained easy to find on Instagram a month after the platform promised a crackdown. According to the report’s framing, women continued to bear the brunt of the misuse.
It is tempting to treat this strictly as a moderation failure. On that account, the central problem is that prohibited or abusive material stayed online. Better detection and enforcement would keep such videos from circulating.
That response matters, but it begins too late. By the time a platform reviews a video, someone has already been turned from a participant in a public encounter into material for an audience. The first failure occurs at the moment of capture, when one person understands the situation and the other does not.
A handheld phone can also be used covertly, of course. But raising and aiming one usually sends a recognizable signal. It changes the scene. People may object, move away, cover their faces, or alter their behavior. Smart glasses can weaken that signal by placing the camera inside an object associated with ordinary vision. The act of recording begins to resemble the act of merely looking.
This creates an asymmetry of knowledge. The wearer knows whether the encounter is being preserved. The person being seen may not know whether there is an image, where it will go, or who will be invited to inspect it. Even if no recording is made, the possibility is now present.
The gaze becomes infrastructure
Ways of Seeing remains useful because it directs attention away from vision as a purely private act. Images enter systems: artistic conventions, social expectations, institutions, and markets. Their meaning depends partly on who has the authority to make and distribute them.
Wearable cameras compress that system into the gaze itself. Looking can become recording without an obvious transition, and recording can become distribution with little participation from the person depicted. The camera’s unobtrusiveness is therefore not a neutral design improvement. It changes who gets to understand and negotiate the social situation.
This matters particularly when an existing gendered practice is made easier. The reported smart-glasses videos did not invent voyeurism or the treatment of women as spectacles. They reduced the friction involved in producing and circulating it. A design can preserve the outward appearance of an ordinary encounter while quietly granting one participant far greater control over what the encounter becomes.
Consent is often discussed as though it were a box attached to the final image: permission granted or withheld. Smart glasses reveal an earlier requirement. Before people can meaningfully object, they need to know what kind of act is occurring. A visible indicator may announce that a device is recording, but any signal must also be noticeable and intelligible to the person in front of the lens. Information available chiefly to the wearer does not correct the imbalance.
Platform moderation faces a related limit. Removing an abusive upload can restrict its circulation, yet it cannot restore the original encounter. Nor can it give the subject control over copies already made. Treating the upload as the beginning of the problem mistakes distribution for capture and capture for consent.
Berger’s 1972 intervention concerned art, representation, and the social organization of sight. Smart glasses make those concerns newly literal. A gaze can now contain an undisclosed production process. The person being watched may be unaware that they have crossed from public life into someone else’s archive, feed, or performance.
Ways of Seeing matters now because it resists the comforting idea that sight is innocent until an image is misused. Technology does not merely give us new things to look at. It can alter the terms under which people become visible to one another—and conceal those terms from the person with the most to lose.