Smart glasses are here, and they promise to make every moment of your life monetizable - whether the people around you like it or not. In a recent Guardian column, humorist Dave Schilling recounts a party in Los Angeles where a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills - technically a "friend of," which is Bravo reality TV parlance for someone not in the main cast who appears sporadically thanks to a social connection - was in attendance. Rather than simply enjoy the free champagne and passed appetizers, Schilling found himself plotting how to snap a photo without her noticing. He settled on the clever mirror trick, which yielded the desired "whoa" text from friends. But it also left him feeling like he'd contributed to the persistent shattering of privacy in our teetering society.

"What the hell is my problem?" he writes, admitting he felt one LA party away from tossing his morals in the trash and buying a pair of smart glasses. These devices, from companies like Meta and Viture, cost about $300 to $500, or nearly $1,300 for a high-end variety from Xreal. They're essentially computers you wear on your face, capable of mirroring your phone or laptop screen, sending and receiving calls and texts, and - most importantly for the burgeoning creep economy - capturing pictures, audio, and video.

Schilling describes smart glasses as "one more incursion by technology into what is left of the natural world," allowing users to quadruple-task: naturemaxxing, framemogging some unc feeding pigeons, checking in on their Kalshi, and livestreaming the whole thing. He already owns a phone, a tablet, a watch, and glasses that all connect to the internet and feed him hourly distractions while pumping him for data. He can't imagine any company going to market with a brain implant with wifi capability, because once you've stuck a microchip in someone's head, you can't sell them anything else to wear.

But the gadget parade continues: a nose ring that lights up when you get a new like on YouTube, a hat that broadcasts your TikToks 24/7. "My body is not my own," he writes. "It is the property of Meta, a vessel for the free flow of information into the company's willing gullet."

The problem is that the sweet online engagement is often driven by videos full of people who never agreed to participate. Many courts have banned smart glasses in their proceedings, but people still try to bring them in. Cruise lines, movie theater chains, and restaurants are restricting them, too. Norway is planning a temporary ban for certain public places. Eventually, there won't be anywhere to use them outside of an old barn, a closet, or an abandoned Hooters restaurant.

So if almost the entire world thinks smart glasses are primarily for perverts, why does the tech industry keep pushing them? Surely the obscene profits Apple collects from the umpteenth edition of the iPhone have seduced Silicon Valley into chasing another world-changing innovation that no one can live without. Except we already have the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and the iPad. Schilling says he has enough gadgets to pretend he's a particularly washed James Bond, engaging in mundane adventures like creating a shopping list or tracking how many times he blinks.

When so much of our economy is tied to content creation, it makes some corrupted sense to give the workers trapped in the coalmines shinier pickaxes. Schilling can live with needing a fancier Bluetooth microphone, a camera stand, a ring light, and maybe a funny prop like an inflatable flamingo to keep people's attention. After all, he's the dope who willingly chose to get into media. But it's worse when you use other people to fuel your need for digital attention without asking first. Smart glasses let you do that on a scale, and with an ease of use, that is unparalleled. You could film two people having a domestic spat or a grisly car accident without even having to go into your pocket.

Smart glasses have one actual, unique application: monetizing every last second of life, whether you want it to or not. Now, we can all be a "friend of" in the Real Housewives of Wherever the Hell You Are, performing our silly little dramas for an audience that might never be satisfied.