Christina Lawrence always dreamed of surveilling her fellow citizens for a gigantic conglomerate, but she couldn’t because she is blind. Now, thanks to Meta’s smart glasses, her dream has finally come true.
“I can record all kinds of things without vision,” said Lawrence, “or consent! Then the glasses upload my videos of strangers to Meta’s LLM training models, and I get to contribute directly to the AI stock bubble, which I have been assured rich people are currently shorting.”
Why does this mean so much to Lawrence? “I think every little kid wants to grow up to be a retail security guard or a union turncoat, but historically blind people have been shut out of opportunities to spy on our communities for oligarchs.”
When Lawrence was growing up, her father’s job was watching for shoplifters at a Walmart Supercenter. “He always said how great it felt to defend the incalculable wealth of the Walton family by tackling poor people. but I couldn’t see the monitors in the Walmart command center or run intercepting routes across the parking lot.”
Lawrence’s friend, Elizabeth Grubel, recounted, “I remember when everyone was getting Ring cameras, but Chrissie couldn’t set them up or watch the feeds. She felt so isolated when we were all talking about how cool it was that the footage and biometric data we were collecting could be sold to law enforcement.”
But then Lawrence bought the Meta glasses, everything changed.
“For disabled people, it’s an indescribable feeling when new technology lets you finally be a part of something,” explained Lawrence, “like eroding people’s trust in their neighbors and shredding the fabric of society.”
Meta has faced criticism over the glasses, and it sometimes argues their accessibility benefits for blind people outweigh concerns about privacy.
“It’s a Bluetooth headset with a mediocre camera that can’t perform any access function remotely as well as a smartphone can,” commented Lawrence, “but I love contributing to the PR!”
“It’s so inspiring that she can be a part of all this now,” remarked Grubel, wiping a tear from her eye as she and Lawrence aimed their glasses at data center protesters.