Face: The Final Frontier

A decade after Google Glass, are smart glasses finally becoming a thing? Plus, my takes on the Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. imbroglio, Netflix buying Warner Bros., and lots more! (Issue #190)

Before we get to today’s main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…

---

As if I needed help confronting my own mortality, I was sad to learn that one of the other guys named Brad Berens died last month at 74. Brad and I had a long chat many years ago when I noticed his/my name in the White Pages and called him. (If you don’t know what the White Pages were... ) He was a good man who worked for many years to improve the lives of seniors. Rest in Peace, Brad.

---

L’affaire Nuzzi continues to consume too much ink and attention. The bottom line: Olivia Nuzzi broke the Prime Directive of journalism by not disclosing a conflict and has deserved losing first her job at New York Magazine and then at Vanity Fair. Her former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, had every right to be hurt by her bizarre relationship with RFK, Jr., but he should have talked with his friends and therapist about it rather than publishing vengeful issues of his newsletter. Finally, RFK, Jr. had no business hooking up (either virtually or IRL) with a woman 39 years younger than him, and certainly should never have written poetry about it, let alone pornographic poetry. However, wouldn’t the world be a much better place if screwing around with a journalist was the worst thing Kennedy had done since becoming the Health Secretary?

• Brian Phillips’ essay about this in The Ringer is laugh out loud funny—so funny that I immediately bought his book of essays. I will report back.

• Reading Jacob Bernstein’s unironic, hagiographic profile of Nuzzi in NYT ($) immediately after reading Phillips’ piece is like having a gulp of coffee right after brushing your teeth.

• I had to look up felching. Yuck. Don’t click unless you have a strong stomach.

  ---

Who cares about Netflix buying Warner Bros and HBO? This is the fourth time WB has changed hands since 2001, when it became AOL Time Warner. It probably won’t be the last. Plus, pundits claiming that Netflix has won the streaming wars by acquiring WB ignore the fact that YouTube is much, much bigger than Netflix. Hollywood folks should be more worried about how little conventional television Gen Z and Gen Alpha watch, preferring things like Hot Ones on YouTube, Dropout TV, and the Creator Economy in general. Folks of all ages are watching more video than ever: they’re just watching what they want to watch rather than what multinational conglomerates tell them they want to watch.

Here’s how I think about this:

Uber and Lyft > Taxis

Podcasts > Radio

Self-Published books > Conventional books

YouTube > Every other streamer

---

News about the News roundup:

• Don’t miss this New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, Why is Leaving MAGA so Difficult? David Remnick interviews Rich Logis, founder of the nonprofit, “Leaving MAGA.” (H/T Mom.)

• From The Verge ($) comes this terrifying piece: College students are choosing TikTok and Instagram over newspapers and magazines, even though they know a lot of it is misinformation.

• Axios’ Sara Fisher broke the story about Meta licensing content from News publishers for its AI. One alarming thing is that the publishers include highly biased sources like The Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller (per Ad Fontes’ Media Bias Chart, and note that I’m a proud investor/advisor for Ad Fontes). Another alarming thing is that Meta’s algorithm optimizes for engagement above everything else, including reliability. I have no reason to believe that Meta will work to inform its users rather than to enrage them.

  ---

Strong Floor, No Ceiling is a catchphrase that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been using lately. It comes, per The Washington Post ($), from a book by Oliver Libby of the same name. I ordered it and will report back.

---

Four stories about aging:

• Michelle Cottle writes about the health care crisis around caring for elderly parents (NYT $), including her own. It’s trenchant and often darkly funny. (H/T Lana McGilvray.)

• Speaking of darkly funny stories about elderly parents, Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant is a masterpiece in this genre. (H/T Juliet Brumlik.)

• LATE dementia, a newer diagnosis, is helping scientists better understand cognitive decline (NYT $)

• High quality sleep today can help reduce the likelihood of dementia later (NYT $).

  ---

Book Club? I’m planning to read Tim Wu’s new book, The Age of Extraction, and it would be fun to discuss it in a live session on a Sunday afternoon. Please let me know what you think of this idea:

On the lighter side...

• My friend Terry Kawaja’s latest video parody combines Xmas music and the high cost of AI.

• It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday! (NYT $)

• Speaking of birthdays: guess who just turned 40? Elmo! (Washington Post, $)

• A woman donated a kidney... to her ex-husband’s second wife. (Washington Post, $)

• This Star Trek themed, AI-generated parody video by Neural Derp combines The Original Series (TOS) with a Vietnam War combat setting and a metal soundtrack. It’s filled with Easter Egg references and is sexist the way the TV show was sexist, but it’s fascinating. It’s also a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of AI-generated art. The artist describes the tech he used in the notes, which shows that it is the artist’s creativity driving the project. On the other hand, it’s a parody video using established IP rather than something truly original.

• Thank you to my cousins, David and Meredith Berens, for hosting a wonderful Thanksgiving. Here’s a picture of me and Dave:

  

  He’s holding a little something I brought him from London, and you can see the top of my father’s head over Dave’s shoulder.

---

If you like what you’re reading, please forward to a friend. Sign up is here.

---

Practical Matters:

• Sponsor this newsletter! Let other Dispatch readers know what your business does and why they should work with you. (Reach out here or just hit reply.)

• Hire me to speak at your event! Get a sample of what I’m like onstage here.

• The idea and opinions that I express here in The Dispatch are solely my own: they do not reflect the views of my employer, my consulting clients, or any of the organizations I advise.

• Please follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads (but not X) for between-issue insights and updates.

On to our main story…

I created this image using Google Gemini / Nano Banana.*

Face: The Final Frontier

Although we’ve all had our individual journeys with the internet, the journey of the internet itself has been one of increasing intimacy. At first, we had to go somewhere else to get online: to a lab somewhere at a business or university. Then home dial-up arrived. For many, we still had to go somewhere: the disused guest room or home office near a phone outlet where the computer was. Then came home broadband and wireless, at which point we had laptops that could be online anywhere in the house. Then mobile internet access allowed us to bring the internet with us just about everywhere. Then smartwatches established a beachhead on our wrists and earbuds did the same on our heads.

Sometimes it feels like we’ve been sinking deeper and deeper into the internet, like a mammoth’s slow decline into a tar pit, with our faces looking up with desperate expressions as the tar covers our eyes at the last.

Our eyes are the penultimate stop of the internet’s journey into our lives and onto our bodies. The last stop will be when we plug our brains directly online, which sounds scary but is already happening with Neuralink and other Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), but those won’t be common for a while.

For the last decade or so, smart glasses have either been too expensive, too limited, or too dorky for most people either to have any experience with them or to consider buying them. The Apple Vision Pros, for example, are $3,500.00. Back in 2014, Google Glass was $1,500 and folks would call you a “glasshole” for wearing them.

Two recent stories suggest that this is changing.

1. Alibab’s Quark AI Glasses

John Tomase, an editor at LinkedIn, posted an intriguing roundup story about a new Heads-Up Display (HUD) or smart glasses device coming out of China:

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba launched its line of AI-powered smart glasses on Thursday, introducing an affordable rival to Meta in the burgeoning market for wearable tech. The Quark AI Glasses will debut in China and cost between $268 and $536, making them cheaper than Meta’s latest Ray-Bans, which start at $799. They include integration with Alibaba’s Qwen AI chatbot and Taobao shopping app. The market for AI glasses is expanding, with shipments expected to double next year to 10 million.

In the roundup, Karina Taveras noted that a more interesting point of comparison than with Meta’s Ray-Bans is with the Vision Pro glasses that cost $3,500. Taveras further observed that the implications of this are:

• AR/AI wearables could finally hit mainstream adoption

• Chinese tech companies are leading in affordable innovation

• The “luxury tech” model might not be the winning strategy

This reminds me of how smartphones evolved—the real winners weren’t the most expensive devices, but the ones that made powerful technology accessible to everyone.

Taveras’ “luxury tech” approach is how Tesla approached Electric Vehicles, starting with the $200,000 roadster and gradually introducing cheaper and cheaper models, although the company has not gotten close to its long-promised affordable-to-the-middle-class EV.

Apple follows Tesla’s luxury tech approach with the Vision Pro.

Alibaba is going for scale: growing its visual ecosystem as fast as it can.

The Alibaba story is about how smart glasses might become easily affordable and then jump to mass scale. The next story is about how smart glasses can change everyday interactions.

2. The Dutch “Candid Camera” exercise

Even though the video came out a year ago, a clip of Dutch entrepreneur and journalist Alexander Klöpping talking with people while wearing smart glasses that identified them without using proprietary data has become a minor news story in Europe.

Klöpping’s two-minute video on X is worth watching: he asks people for directions, giving the glasses enough time to surface their names, jobs, and LinkedIn profiles. When he then shares that he knows their names, their reactions range from pleased and curious (”have we met?”) to mildly alarmed. Then he shares that he got their names from his smart glasses, which people find interesting (”holy shit!”) or disturbing. “Gathering information about people that way, that doesn’t feel okay to me yet,” says a lawyer.

From the comments surrounding different versions of the video, it isn’t clear whether the combo-platter of existing facial recognition technology and smart glasses is real or a stunt, but the reactions of the people with whom Klöpping chats are genuine.

(By the way, if you haven’t ever heard of the old TV show “Candid Camera,” it has a fascinating history.)

Information asymmetry implications, plus...

It’s already scary enough dealing with organizations ranging from governments to the tech giants to the local supermarket that have more information about us than we do about them, but with smart glasses we will increasingly need to be skeptical about individual people standing in front of us. Does this person really know me? Did I really have dinner with this person at that conference that time? Does this attractive person of the desired gender really want to have a drink with me, or am I about to become an unwilling organ donor?

This sort of skepticism is just not how humans are wired. If somebody seems to like us, most of us believe it. Cults have weaponized this for years (I wrote about cults and persuasion here).

Two other unsettling implications.

First, and this is a theme I’ve explored a lot, smart glasses will contribute to the erosion of shared reality because with different amounts of information and different levels of filtering, we’ll no longer be able to trust that two people are looking at the same thing when they seem to be doing so.

Second, a ubiquitous internet environment is also a ubiquitous advertising environment. Unless we are paying for a service (and sometimes even when we are), we cannot presume that service is working for us. It isn’t. It’s usually working for advertisers. The nightmare scenario is that ad-supported smart glasses technology might mean that we can’t trust that the images we see through our screens are real or created by ads.**

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with advertising, nor is there anything wrong with advertising-supported services and media. There are, however, differences between advertising and reality; what frightens me is the possibility that with smart glasses those differences will be harder to see—literally.

Today, many people won’t leave the house without their smartphones. As smart glasses become cheaper and more widespread, will we be willing to take them off to see what’s really there?

---

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.

---

* Image Prompt: “Please create a photorealistic image. We are looking through a pair of stylish smart glasses at another person: a white guy in his mid 30s. Information about the man surrounds him, all pulled onto the smart glasses display. His name is Jacob. He is 6’ 1”. His eyes are blue. He is unmarried, Heterosexual. Has a dog named Butch. He is a registered Democrat. He has an iPhone. He is a media executive currently searching for a new job.”

** I explored this theme in a microfiction: “Leaving the Emerald City“ and its followup analysis, “The End of Filter Failure.”