Smart glasses promise to deliver AI’s power to their wearers by capturing media, streaming audio, and projecting visual data in the field of view. The technology, Meta suggests, amounts to “the most frictionless way to get help, answers and suggestions—anytime, anywhere.” Smart glasses also aren’t new. The concept dates back to the 1960s, with multiple iterations based on lessons from design failures. We argue that this persistence has roots in the racial capitalist origins of computation: Charles Babbage’s theories and prototypes borrowed directly from plantation management practices of surveillance, surplus extraction, and control. Four cases elaborate on this idea: Meta’s luxury Ray-Bans marketed to elites; Amazon’s “smart delivery” glasses aimed at working-class drivers; eyewear that Indian textile workers are wearing to train their robotic replacements; and smart glasses targeted to disabled populations.

Maywa Montenegro is an associate professor in the UC Santa Cruz Environmental Studies department, where she studies knowledge politics in food system change. Maywa is an associate editor at the journals Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and Elementa. She is also a co-founder of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective and an incoming member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).

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