Demand for wearable tech is close to zero, but the industry’s ambition to wire us all up never seems to wear thin, writes Jason Walsh
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Image: Meta
MWC, previously an initialism for Mobile World Congress but now a meaningless collection of letters, this week revealed the true grit of the consumer technology market: faced with utter failure, the industry just won’t back down. Visitors to wintry Barcelona probably didn’t bask in the sun, but they certainly had the opportunity to absorb the desperate energy being given off by consumer electronics manufacturers.
Alongside the usual gamut of phones no-one will ever buy, however, one other product category on display hit the headlines, often met with amusement rather than awe.
The product category in question is, of course, wearable connected computation devices. Or, if you want to be clear-eyed: phone things that don’t have screens. For instance, Qualcomm is pitching pendants, pins, glasses and discrete body-worn devices as the post-smartphone wave. Motorola’s Maxwell, meanwhile, appears to be a lump you are supposed to stick yourself and ask questions to.
The frenzy is not just visible in Barcelona, though. Amazon, for its part, says Bee, which it has purchased, will soon be an important part of Alexa. For those not in the know, Bee is a ‘voice-recording bracelet”, which sounds like a non-sequitur as absurd as ‘robot breakfast cereals’ or ‘chicken teapot’.
Humane, founded by former Apple executives, already tried this and had to sell parts of its business to HP after its AI ‘pin’ flopped. Before that, Google’s face-mounted surveillance tool, Glass, got such a slap in both the market and the wider culture that the company had to, bury it by moonlight. Still, reverse ferreting is not unknown to Google. And then there’s Apple, whose weird head-mounted thing… well, when was the last time anyone even thought about that? I can barely even bring myself to write a sentence about it.
Meta’s AI glasses are having a bad week, too. The company is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising related to its specs, following reports about the company’s use of human contractors to review footage captured from users’ glasses. The glasses that were supposed to feel unobtrusive are being watched by people in low-wage jobs, which is grim stuff whichever end of the lens you are looking through.
In addition, a leaked internal memo found that the company wanted to bury some news amid the ongoing political tensions in the US. According to a report in the New York Times, Meta planned to launch face-recognition technology while no-one was looking. “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the memo said.
This is, quite frankly, toxic stuff. I, for instance, am a longtime wearer of Clubmaster glasses, the half-framed version of the famous Wayfarers, but, following its involvement with Meta will never again so much as touch any pair of Ray-Ban glasses, or any I know to be made by its parent company Luxottica Group.
Because we can
The broader point is worth considering, though. We often say that just because a technology can be created does not mean that it should be, and this is a useful corrective to technological determinism, commercial boosterism and wonky teleological thinking. The reality is, however, that in most cases we do create the technology even when we can hear the warning bells ringing. The rise of AI-powered disinformation and the technology’s adoption in the cultural sphere is only the latest example of this contradiction.
And yet, perhaps we finally have a counterexample to hand: wearable devices have found several profitable niches, from fitness tracking to police body cams, but the wider cyborg vision of people kitted out like extras in a low-budget cyberpunk film just refuses to come into focus.
Even without the terrifying vista of turning every interaction into a panopticon, it really does seem that most people simply don’t want to stick computers to their body. Like that other perennial technology that will change everything real-soon-now, virtual reality, perhaps the actual reality is: we just don’t want it.
Smartwatches are popular, and evidently so (even if they seem like a hideous error to me), but they, along with wireless earphones, are wearable devices that have real utility in part because they are adjuncts to phones but mostly because they perform tasks that humanity is actually interested in, such as telling the time, measuring distance and… hearing things.
As for the rest? Industrial applications will persist but don’t expect to see anyone replacing their laptop with a nexus of Wi-Fi enabled plastic tat. Whether technology firms and electronics manufacturers realise it or not, no is a complete sentence.