The Camera Wasn’t On. I Still Felt Watched.

I was back in Boston recently and met an early-stage founder at Durty Nelly’s, my all-time favorite bar.

I do this pretty often. A friend makes an introduction, a founder wants advice, or occasionally thinks I actually have money to invest. I usually take the meeting because it keeps me fresh with tech and lets me live vicariously through a past life. Most are virtual coffees, but I happened to be home, so a beer felt more appropriate.

It was sunny May Day, and we were both wearing sunglasses by the window. His just happened to be Meta Ray-Bans.

I’d seen them plenty of times before, but this was the first time I’d had an extended one-on-one conversation with someone wearing them.

At first, no big deal. He was super cool and asked if I minded, which I appreciated. The recording light wasn’t on, and I trusted that he wasn’t recording me. Besides, if someone really wanted to secretly record a conversation, there are approximately 47 easier ways to do it with the phone already sitting in their pocket.

Still, about 10 minutes in, it started to feel weird.

Every time I looked at him, part of my brain was looking at a camera.

I knew I probably wasn’t being recorded, but I noticed myself thinking about it anyway. More interestingly, it started subtly changing how I spoke. What I said, how I said it, whether I wanted to tell a story or make some offhand comment I normally wouldn’t think twice about.

Eventually, I asked if he minded taking them off because I found them distracting. He was completely cool about it, and it actually led us into a great tangent about surveillance technology and why he was building his company to combat some of it.

As I think about it, maybe that was part of his pitch all along.

What stuck with me was how quickly the glasses changed the interaction even though they weren’t actually doing anything.

We usually talk about wearable technology in terms of what it can do. Take photos. Play music. Translate languages. Recognize what you’re looking at. Increasingly, whisper useful information into your ear about whatever is happening around you.

What we talk about less is what those devices do to everyone else in the room.

Human conversation depends on a surprisingly fragile assumption that, for a little while, what is happening between us is just happening between us. The technology doesn’t even have to violate that assumption. Sometimes just introducing the possibility is enough to change the interaction.

And that’s the strange part for me.

I’ve basically accepted that my data is floating around databases somewhere, being traded by brokers I’ve never heard of. My phone knows where I am. Apps know what I buy. Some server somewhere probably knows more about my habits than I do.

Most of that happens invisibly in the background, and apparently I’ve made my peace with it.

But put the camera directly in front of my face during a beer with another human being and suddenly it feels completely different.

Maybe that’s the line I hadn’t thought about before.

I’m surprisingly comfortable being tracked.

I’m much less comfortable feeling watched.

Roll credits.