The revolt against Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ is part of a growing storm

About this episode

New fronts are opening up in the opposition to big tech. The anti-data center movement is rolling, AI is unpopular as ever, and now, a widespread backlash to Meta’s new AI glasses—termed Pervert Glasses by the masses—is unfolding at breakneck pace. Silicon Valley, of course, is in denial about all of it. This week on the podcast, to help make sense of this latest revolt against a Silicon Valley project, I spoke with Chris Gilliard, an author, thinker, and surveillance scholar who’s spent many years investigating big tech’s efforts to seduce us with sleek, aspirational products, track us, and harvest our data. Gilliard is the author of Luxury Surveillance, a forthcoming book about this very subject from MIT Press; you may better know him as Hypervisible, the handle he uses online and on Bluesky. It was a great chat, and Gilliard’s work is absolutely vital. Hope you enjoy. In case you missed it, I wrote about some of the topics we discuss above in this week’s column: Other stories mentioned in the segment and the interview: “Luxury Surveillance,” Real Life Mag, by Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia. Heatmap’s latest data center sentiment poll. “Data Centers’ 'Oh sh-t moment’, P