Tech Won't Save Us - Will AR Glasses Die Like Google Glass? w/ Quinn Myers

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Quinn Myers to discuss the launch of Google Glass, why the product failed so badly, and what lessons we can learn from it as tech companies make another push for AR glasses.Quinn Myers is the author of Google Glass and a freelance writer who used to write for MEL. You can follow him on Twitter at @quinmyers.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Please participate in our listener survey this month to give us a better idea of what you think of the show: https://forms.gle/xayiT7DQJn56p62x7Apple is planning to release a mixed-reality headset, but its AR glasses have reported been delayed due to ongoing technical issues.Mark Zuckerberg said you’ll be able to text people during a meeting on your glasses.Google released a video called “One Day” that vastly overpromised what Glass would deliver.Sergey Brin’s affair with an employee working on Glass was revealed in 2013.After 8 years, the “Twitter tax cut” finally ended in 2019.Residents protested against Google’s use of public bus stops in San Francisco.The PRISM revelations showed the NSA had access to tech company servers.The Daily Show skewered Google Glass in a 2014 segment.Support the show

These aren't altruistic projects like Google profits from more parts of the earth having internet. Google profits from everyone replacing their iPhone with your augmented reality. And I think people realize that as kind of glass melted down. They're like, oh, these aren't like things that need solved. Why don't we tax people and put this money to actual use? years. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. Before we get started, just a final reminder that we are running a podcast listener survey this month. So if you do have about five minutes and want to give us some thoughts on the show, we would certainly appreciate that.

And you can find the link in the show notes. Now, this week, my guest is Quinn Myers. Quinn is the author of Google Glass and a freelance writer who formerly worked at Mel. Now, as you know, a lot of these tech companies have been pushing glasses with cameras or the prospect of AR glasses recently. Snapchat's glasses have been out for a while. Facebook released its Stories glasses with Ray-Ban and says that they're working on more advanced AR glasses that will be coming down the road. And of course, there's constant rumors that Apple is going to be releasing its own AR glasses sometime in the future. You know, we don't know exactly when yet.

And there are some reports that, you know, maybe this isn't going as well as some of the rumors would have us believe, but we'll see what happens there. But in the midst of all of that kind of excitement, which is wrapped up in this broader metaverse hype that has been happening for the past, you know, couple of years now, I guess, and that doesn't seem to be going very well, that it's important to remember that this whole thing kind of happened before, right? Back in the early 2010s, Google tried to push Google Glass, which was something similar. You put these glasses on your face, it has a little computer next to it, you know, you can do various things through this little display if you look up at it while you're wearing these glasses. And as we know, that didn't

work out so well, and people turned against it quite quickly. And so in the midst of pushing a new vision for AR glasses, certainly the technology has probably advanced a bit since then, I think it's important to look back at that history to see what parallels we can see between then and now, what we can maybe learn from it, and whether there are any lessons to take from it as we try to stop this latest effort to put computers and cameras on our faces once again. This is something that Silicon Valley seems to never tire of wanting to do, you know, with all of the tracking that they do with us, with always wanting to put more screens in front of our faces, because of course, the more that we are looking at screens, the more that we're making profits for these major companies. So I was excited to have this chat with Quinn to return to this,

you know, fun piece of history of this product that was put out by a hubristic tech giant and then was destroyed by consumer backlash. I think it's fair to say. But of course, there are some other things that are going on in there, too. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And of course, if you like these conversations, if you want to make sure I can keep doing them, you can join supporters like Kim from Brighton, Rika in Reykjavik, and Ajit from Des Moines in Iowa by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, where you can become a supporter too. And if you support at $5 a month or above, I'll also send you some stickers in the mail.

So with that said, enjoy this week's conversation. Quinn, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, Paris. I love listening to the show. I love doing the dishes while listening and just nodding my head and getting all riled up as I listen every week. I hope you don't like accidentally break your dishes like while you're listening to the show. It's only happened a couple of times, just small chips, chips in the coffee. Good, good. Very happy to have you on the show this week. You wrote this book about Google Glass, which is obviously something that was like very much on everyone's mind, I guess, that everyone was paying attention to for a while that everyone liked to make fun of. And then I feel like has kind of receded from our memory a little bit right at the moment, conveniently, that many of these tech companies are reentering the glasses

space. So I think it's a good moment to kind of resurrect this history, have a discussion about what actually went on and see some of the parallels that I certainly didn't remember as I was reading through the book. And so I want to start here. You know, maybe there are some people who are listening who are like, Google Glass, what is that? Or I don't completely remember what it is. You know, I'm sure there will be other people who are like, oh, my God, Google Glass, what? But in the rare case that there's someone who doesn't remember exactly what it is, what was Google Glass? And more importantly, you know, where did this come from? How did Google decide to pursue this product over the number of other things it could have done? So I guess we'll start with why Google pursued it. And that is because Apple had just blown

the world away with the iPhone. iPhone was new, but everyone was buying. It wasn't as like ubiquitous as it is now, but like it was the new hot thing. They came out of the glass around 2012. They started working on it when they saw the iPhone just blowing people away. Apple was obviously making huge inroads into like what it is now, or like a huge portion of the population uses iPhones. To this day, Google is largely an advertising platform. Like they get most of their revenue from ads served to you from search. And they wanted to get into the hardware game. They said, we need to, like, we could do a cell phone, but the iPhone is dominating. Let's make a big swing at AR. We'll replace phones. Their idea was like a one screen per person thing, you know, like we'll

replace TVs and laptops and phones and everyone will just use this AR because like, this is what we've seen in science fiction. And we think this is what people want. So they, you know, started the project in a top secret lab and kind of just went from there. The end result was a clunky, heavy, augmented reality glasses that, I mean, worked and like was kind of cool just in a vacuum where you could, it had a little display on the upper right-hand corner. You could read texts, you could see emails, you could get notifications. You could be talking to people face-to-face, but just texting with people, it would outlay directions, you know, basically everything that people talk about with augmented reality today. The problem was it was a

beta product. They sold it or pitched it to the public as a finished product. It was not. And the marketing was, you know, awful. The rollout was terrible. It was a huge meltdown, just wildly like in public tech meltdown for the ages. And it was back, I guess, in the Twitter and media heyday when, you know, Gawker was still around and Twitter was like fun, I guess. Everyone is dunking on it and it was great. And then it went away, except for enterprise. Google transitioned Glass to being an enterprise version to stick on poor workers. I think that's a good summation. And I think that we'll get to a lot of those points, you know, through the course of the conversation to kind of flesh them out a little bit more. Right. You know, when you're talking about one of the sales pitches being that like you'll be able to text people like from your glasses while you're talking to like someone across from you. I remember like it brings to mind when Mark Zuckerberg said something similar like a couple of years ago and everyone was like, why? Like, why would you text someone when you're talking to them? Like, that would be so rude. Right. And so it's just funny to see how these

kind of narratives repeat and come back and how they don't seem to want to learn anything from previous experiences. I want to get a bit more kind of background information before we dig into it. You know, you were talking about how Google created this kind of, you know, research division in order to put this together. Do you want to tell us a bit more about Google X, how this was created and what kind of the incentives behind it were from, you know, the co-founders like Sergey Brin and Larry Page? Right. So at the time, I think people who follow the industry will be very knowledgeable about Google and their moonshots, this Google X, this top secret, like crazy agency where they're just taking their moonshots, which they branded them, which was just like throwing a ton of money at

big projects that like they think the world needed solving, which is like huge internet balloons to go to like parts of the world that didn't have the internet. It's like, oh, great. We'll give them the internet. But why, you know, and driverless cars was one. I mean, there's a whole laundry list of these moonshots that they went out on and said, like, the angle that it was, was like, we're doing this because we have the money and we have the smartest people on the earth. And these are the problems that society needs solved. And we're going to go out and do it. And people were like, yeah, good job, Google. We love you. This is great. Yeah. This is the tech industry, like changing the world for the better. Right. It's kind of how we imagine them and how the

media was presenting the tech companies to us, especially a company like Google. Oh yeah. Yeah. So they formed, they formed Google X. One of the people I talked to in the book was Sebastian Thrun. He was kind of like the founder of it. They kind of went after all these huge projects. A lot of them failed. I mean, I would say probably all of them failed in some capacity. I mean, the takeaway from the book and just like in general is like, these aren't altruistic projects. Like Google profits from more parts of the earth having internet. Google profits from everyone replacing their iPhone with your augmented reality. And I think people realize that as kind of glass melted down.

They're like, oh, these aren't like things that need solved. Why don't we tax people and put this money to actual use? Yeah, sticking more of these Google projects out into the world. Like if we were all driving around in Google autonomous vehicles, and then they were showing ads to us, you know, during the whole journey, right, and also getting this data on where we're going, so that they can better target their ads to us. There are many ways that these projects are designed to benefit Google to benefit the company, even though they're being framed as, you know, this is all for you, this is for the public, this is going to make the world a better place, you know, we're serving the global south with internet, you know, Elon Musk is using the same narratives now at Starlink, you know, this is all for you. This is for the public. This is going to make the world a better place. You know, we're serving the global south with internet. You know, Elon Musk is using the

same narratives now at Starlink. You know, we're putting all these satellites in space. Sure, it might create a whole load of risks and cause us to see satellites all the time when they're going up there to, you know, distract from our view of the night sky. But we're going to give internet to the global south and that's going to create a whole load of opportunities and blah, blah, blah. Like this is the narrative as old as the internet itself right here's another piece that i wanted to ask you about one of the things that came up in the book was how there's what glass actually was and then there's the idea of what it could have been right and these two narratives seem to get in conflict with one another because, you know, some of the people on the project, as you were saying, want it to be like an AR headset and do all these other grand things.

But then when they're actually making it, they run into the challenges of reality and what they can actually deliver on. Tell us about that divide between, you know, the hope and the reality. Right. So one of like my favorite things Sebastian Thrun told me was like, if he could do it all again, he would only make it and market it as sunglasses because that way you like couldn't wear them and creep people out at a romantic dinner. You could only wear them outside. It would be seen like as a GoPro, like a camera that you wear as a GoPro. But at the time, Google, specifically Sergey Brin, who was very hands on this project, wanted it to be something people wore all day. They wanted to

market it as like a piece of high fashion where, you know, they put it on models and huge like fashion shows on the runway. The models didn't know why they were wearing them or what the thing did. But they're like, this is I guess what we're trying to tell people is like the next big thing in fashion. They try to get celebrities to wear it so that people would be like, whoa, celebrities wear this. This is cool. I need to get it. And then the big flashpoint for, for glass was they came out with this video, which is called one day. And it, and that was like the big viral hits. Like they put this video out that showed like a person getting up in their apartment, putting their glass on,

like a little dropdown said like, here's an email from so-and-so. And then it's like, oh, Joe wants to meet you at the coffee shop. Here are directions how to get there. And then like they walk out of the subway and then into the coffee shop. And then it's like, there's Joe. And people are like, whoa, this is so cool. Like, oh my God, this is the future. This is here. Like we're living in the future. It's here. And then a couple of the glass engineers were like, that's like quite literally where we lost the thread because like in reality, glass couldn't do any of that. When it finally came out, the batteries didn't last long. The batteries got hot. Sometimes they could record maybe 10 seconds at a time. They were clunky, slow.

They broke down. So there's a real divide on what Glass could actually do and what Google was trying to pitch it as like being capable of doing or how Glass was going to transform, you know, the Earth into this utopia that everyone is wearing glass and everyone can find their friends in the coffee shop without, you know, looking at their dang phone all day. Yeah, because, you know, they didn't want you looking at your iPhone. They wanted to replace the mobile phone. And so you're just wearing your set of glasses. That was one of the funniest things to me when I was reading the book was like, you know, this is like 2012 to 14 is kind of like the sort of timeline you're talking about. So it's only been around

for, you know, what, five, six, seven years. And already they're like, you know, this is so terrible. Like we need to replace this. And the way that we're going to replace it is by like sticking a camera and a computer on your face. And that's going to be so much better. My favorite thing is they had, and I don't know if it was internal or not. It's like the image of like the monkey turning into a caveman, you know, where he's like crawling and then he's like a little upright and then it's man walking. And then after the guy walking, it was like a person standing, looking at their phone. And then after that, it was a person walking upright again with glass on. It's like, oh, they think they're like

transforming the human race. Like they think this is going to like literally be an evolution for the human race. Just wild. Yeah, like as you wrote about, Sergey Brin did that talk where he talked about using your phone and having to look down at your phone as being like emasculating, right?

And then everyone kind of picking up on that. Unbelievable, like emasculating right and then everyone kind of picking up on that unbelievable like emasculating what is he talking about it's i when i saw that i was like i can't believe this is what he said but like and and we'll probably get into this soon but it was so there's so many like seeds of things that are happening now which is which is like tech trying to like sort of wedge in their tech as like a culture like war kind of thing. Like culture wars, like language that we use now, but like, you know, there was like rich versus poor in Glass

and haves and have nots. And this was like him trying to be like, phones are emasculating because you have to like look down, I guess. I don't, or just like scroll. I don't know what like his logic was, but it was him trying to like kind of cause that rift. So people would be like, I don't want to do this emasculating thing.

I'm going to buy this $1,500 piece of tech that doesn't really work and heat stuff on my head. Is his vision like women use mobile phones and men use like Google Glass? You know, that's how it comes across, right? It's kind of ridiculous. What a twisted, sick mind has to kind of like just diseased way of thinking. It almost feels, you know, it feels like maybe projection in a way. But then at the same time, like what it brings to mind to me is Bryn seems to be really involved with a lot of these projects in that moment. Right. Because as I wrote about in my book around 2012, he's also going out and pitching the self-driving car moment, how these projects from Google X are going

to like completely revolutionize society, make things better for everyone. And Bryn seems really central to a lot of those kind of ideas and pushing those sorts of ideas for what Google and what these technologies are going to do. How does Bryn come to be so involved in Google X in this moment? Like what was he doing before it? And why does he feel so drawn to these like moonshot projects? So he was a founder of Google and they had grown so big and powerful that they, I think were like, we need to restructure how the power works in this company because like the two bros who found it are just like they don't really know what to do or how to run a company and it's getting kind of toxic so they're like kind of blanking on on uh the other two larry page eric schmidt larry page and eric

schmidt yes so they kind of divided power one of them is going to oversee search One of them is going to be like the seat, like kind of oversee everything. And then they're like, Sergey, you can kind of just you can go off and do this moonshot thing because you seem really into it. And we'll just give you a ton of money. And you can do just do kind of whatever you want. Just have free reign of all Google's money and resources to kind of like do these stupid projects that you think are going to save the world. That's just kind of how it went. And, you know, afterwards, after all this like public failure, he's fine. Like he didn't get fired. He didn't lose. He like, I think he

kind of stepped aside, but he's definitely less public, but he's still like, you know, he didn't like lose his job or lose like credibility in the field at all. Yeah, you know, he's a Google co-founder. He's still with Page controlling share of the company, I believe, because of, you know, the way that the stocks are distributed and there's two types of stock and whatever. And, you know, I believe he ends up kind of bowing out eventually because reporting comes to light about his affairs or something like that. It's not because everything is kind of falling down around him and all of his big projects that he pitched as the future are falling apart and not actually delivering what he promised. So you talked about Sebastian Thrun comes in to run this Google X team. Obviously, Bryn is very involved as well. They hire a guy named Babak Parviz, who is really central to working on the Glass project

in particular. And they have a team that is kind of working, putting this together, prototyping particular things, trying to see what they can put together in terms of a Glass's product. And then they actually get to 2012, where they announce this thing. And so you're saying that they set up this particular narrative of what it's going to be. But when it comes to putting the product out there, what do they actually announce? Like, what do they actually have to show off when it comes to presenting this to the public?

So they clearly want to be Apple and Steve Jobs at this point. So they talked to San Francisco, like they changed the law so that they can fly a blimp over like the urban area of San Francisco so that someone can jump out of a blimp wearing Google Glass and live stream his jump onto the Moscone Center, where he will then hand Glass over to a BMX rider and he'll live stream his little like trek across the roof. And then people will like, like jump down the side of the building and then BMX ride back into stage where Sergey Brin is waiting. This was at Google's big tech conference, basically like the Apple's conference where they announce all their new projects and stuff. And they do it as a surprise. You know, Sergey Brin comes out.

He's like, oh, let me interrupt you for a second. We have a little announcement. And Glass comes up and everyone's like, oh, yes. Oh, my God. This is incredible. Glass and like being able to take pictures of her baby from her perspective and like real touching things about how Glass is going to change the future. And then they're like, so if you want a pair of these, just the sign up kiosks are right outside. And, you know, a bunch of these are all like Google developers and software developers. So they all jumped at the opportunity. Then it doesn't come out for like a year and they kept pushing the deadline on when it's going to come out.

Finally, they announced that they're going to release more. I think totaling about 8,000. But in order to get a pair of glass, you have to do a hashtag saying like, what you would do if you had glass. Hashtag if I had glass. So a bunch of people on Twitter, it goes viral. Everyone wants, you know, teachers are being like, I would live stream my classes for students.

Doctors are like, I could live stream my surgeries. And it's just like, you know, celebrity Neil Patrick Harris is like, I would go on The Tonight Show wearing it and stuff. And of course, Google like kind of picks and chooses. They, you know, somehow it falls in the hands of a lot of celebrities and like, you know, highly touted tech journalists and stuff. There's just so many little like stupid mishaps along the way. But one thing is like early, but before they kind of vetted them, they were giving glass

to people who would be like hashtagging, like I would wear glass to like throw it off a cliff and stuff. And they'd be like, you wouldn't. Cool. So everyone's excited about that. It's finally coming out i think it takes another like year maybe eight to ten months for to actually come out after this hashtag and when it does first of all if you won the contest you didn't actually get a pair of glass you had to pay

fifteen hundred dollars for the opportunity to have glass and then you had to play for plane tickets out to new york or la where they could teach you how to play for plane tickets out to New York or LA where they could teach you how to use it. And like you do a little class on how it works and stuff. So eventually it comes out, people pay 1500 bucks for this groundbreaking piece of technology. That's like going to change the world. And everyone's very excited. And then they put it on and it doesn't do anything that they promised at all. So it's, you know, Google tries to say, well, it's a beta product. We're trying to do this. Like we do our software, you know, we're, you're a unique set of beta testers. You guys just use it. And then you tell us like what's

wrong and how to fix it stuff. But like, that's also not how Google marketed it. They marketed it as a thing that models and celebrities wear and a finished product that's going to navigate you to your friends and stuff. But it doesn't do that. People get pissed because they paid $1,500 for like an unfinished, uncooked product. And that's where Google continues to kind of lose the reins a little more because there's a lot of, as opposed to today, the media ecosystem was a little, I guess, healthier and people were more willing to say like, no, this is dumb and Google screwed up and you shouldn't buy these and no one wants these and they don't really fix any problems. The narrative kind of turned against Google a little bit. So that's kind of how they came out. It was a bumpy road to say the least.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you described this, right? Because Google is a company that I think many people would recognize people who use their products regularly, or who have kept up with them who do these kind of public betas, right? They'll release these products, like Gmail was in beta for years, apparently, right? And so they're happy to have you kind of test these products. And they'll say, you know, they're not 100% yet, but you're using them. And Sergey Brin decides that this is how we should handle the hardware product as well, right? It's not 100% yet, but you're using them. And Sergey Brin decides that this is how we should handle the hardware product as well. It's not 100% ready. It doesn't have all the features that we kind of promised in the one-day video, and we might never be able to deliver all those anyway.

But we'll put it out there, and we'll get people to use it so that we can get data, we can hear from them, and then we can kind of iterate and make it better. And it seems like that wasn't communicated as much as they kind of, I don't know, maybe thought internally or maybe they imagined to the people who were going to end up using it. They had a very different idea of what they were getting their hands on. And as you say, there's also the price here, right? This is not like a few hundred dollar product. This is not like a five or six hundred dollar iPhone. This is a fifteen hundred dollar set of glasses. And that also plays into a particular idea around who should be able to use it, who should own it, how it fits into the tech ecosystem. I wonder if you can talk to us a bit about that part, because at the same moment as Google is pushing this as kind of a luxury product, basically, there's also a growing class divide playing out in San Francisco as these tech companies are making a lot of money

and leaving behind a lot of the people who lived in the city before all the tech workers kind of flooded in. What is going on there and how does that play into these existing tensions? So this is a great point and very important to what happened with Google Glass and this kind of moment in time. Like you said, Google was busing people out to their campus in Mountain View. People who lived in San Francisco their entire lives were getting pushed out by Silicon Valley, something that is just like well known as a thing that is like impossibly high rent in San Francisco.

This is when people were first starting to get pushed out. They were getting mad. Also, Google was like just busing people to their campus without even thinking about improving like the structure or the transit, you know, putting money into trains or something. They're just like, we're going to like stick people on buses and traffic is going to suck because we're bringing all our people here and we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to leave that to the city to figure out. Like, it's not our problem.

We're a private company. We can do whatever we want. Yeah. And they were even paying the city to use the public bus stops. Right. And so people would be waiting for their buses. And then these like Google and Apple buses would pull up to get these tech employees and whisk them off to their campuses. Yes.

Like crazy. So then, you know, the tensions come to a boil. People are protesting the buses. You know, it makes national news, but it's very much kind of a local story for the most part. In the meantime, Google was coming out with Glass, which is like a 50, like we've talked about a $1,500 piece of technology. I think at this point, people were breaking the tech down and saying like, well, it shouldn't really cost this much. There's no reason it should cost this much. We think it would cost around probably $800, $900, like the same as an iPhone for Google to make profit. And this is something like Google people told me for the book was like, they priced it high because they wanted it to seem like a luxury product that only like the rich and powerful would wear so that people would be like, oh, wow, like I need this to appear rich and powerful. So then ultimately what happens is like rich white tech bros are the ones who are going all in on Google Glass and wearing it all around.

They're, you know, boasting that they're wearing this like cutting edge piece of technology. They're the ones on the cutting edge. You know, they're the ones who can afford this. Like they know what they're doing. So suddenly it becomes a symbol of the very people who are pushing people out of San Francisco. Not to mention that there's a camera on it that's freaking people out. Like they don't know if they're being recorded in public. So suddenly, if you couldn't tell them from like their North Face, you know, quarter zips and book bags walking around San Francisco,

suddenly they're wearing this big, stupid pair of augmented reality glasses that people know don't really do anything and are overpriced, but they're wearing them around. And that's when people start to be like, demanding that they take glass off or just like, it really pushes this over into physical altercations because people are so justifiably angry at this exact type of dude who's like pushing people out of their homes. Yeah, it's almost like a symbol of like the hubris of Silicon Valley and like the people who are benefiting from all of this wealth, while a lot of other people are still pretty hard up because of course, you know, 2012-13 is still the aftermath of the recession. There's still a lot of people who are struggling as a result of that. The effects of that moment are still being really felt by a lot of people around the United States and the world more broadly beyond that.

I think at the same time, Twitter was threatening to move from San Francisco, but the mayor gave them a huge tax cut to stay. We're like, oh no, we want you guys to stay. Here's a massive tax cut. So like just another, just like thumb in the eye of we're not paying our dues to stay here. Yeah. They're making all this money. People are struggling. And now you're getting a massive tax cut on top of it. Like, this is not right. And of course, this is who are wearing it. What's the divide here? Because, you know, as the product is announced, as this kind of beta, you know, 8,000 or 10,000 pairs of glasses have become available, there's this group of enthusiasts that get really excited

about it, right? That are like, you know, I'm moving into the future. I am getting these glasses from Google. You can tell I'm like an early adopter, blah, blah, blah. But then on the other hand, there are people who are concerned about privacy. There are people who are concerned about the other implications of this. How quickly does this divide between, say, the enthusiasts and the critics or the people who are concerned? How quickly does that emerge after the product is announced and put out there? So when it first comes out, there's a little window of time where I talk to a lot of glass explorers to be known as glass holes, the infamous glass holes. They're the ones who got glass and were wearing it around. They tell me there was like a week, maybe a couple of weeks of time where they're wearing it around the city and people would be like, oh, my gosh, is that glass?

That's so cool. Like, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you like scan my face? Like just walking up and wanting to try. I'm being very curious and excited about it. But then the tide turns, I think specifically when people start to realize that it can't do what it's supposed to do with the tensions boiling in San Francisco. And then with the Prism scandal, which was when it came out that Google and like all these huge tech companies were funneling private data to the government. And it was a big scandal. And suddenly glass is like another symbol of just you siphoning data of your life to who knows, you know, the backdoor to whoever wants to like see, you know, where you've been walking around, who you've been talking to, maybe what you've been saying, who you've been seeing. So people are really freaked

out about it. And then there's the camera where people think they're being recorded in public space, very isolating to like the public sphere. It's the camera that really freaks people out. They don't want to be recorded in public. They don't want to be out to eat and not know if this guy sitting at the table across from them is like recording them and everything they're saying. That's when people really start to turn against these glass explorers who are wearing them. At this point, some glass explorers are like, yeah, this is weird. I paid too much for it. It doesn't really work. I'm also being like tasked with supplying Google with like bug reports on a weekly basis. I'm like doing work

for them that they should just be doing. So they just put their glass in a box, never look at it again. The rest of the people though, circle the wagons. They're like, we are being discriminated against. This is discrimination. Like you telling me to take my augmented reality glasses off in a restaurant is a violation of my civil rights. And they use the language of like civil rights movements to say like, I'm being discriminated against. Like, how dare you? Restaurants, when they ban people from wearing Google Glass, they get flooded with Google reviews of people being like, this restaurant is discriminatory. How dare they not allow people to wear like, it's their right to wear this tech. And this specific woman, Sarah Solomon, someone pulls her glass off her face in a bar.

And then she just goes on all the talk shows and says like how she's being discriminated against, how this is like this is like the poors being jealous and not understanding that this is the future. And really just like cutting that divide and just putting a wedge there. And suddenly they are the talking point. They're like the main media story of defining what Google Glass is and not Google. Like Google has just completely lost any control of the narrative at that point. And it's just all these like stuck up people who feel they should have the right to wear these glasses anywhere. You know, you shouldn't be able to put any restrictions on them. I believe you say in the book that Sarah says that being targeted for wearing glasses, a hate crime is one of the kind of crazy things that that is said there. So as you're saying, you know, there's these people who are really pushing it,

who are meeting resistance. There are companies, there are public spaces, there are airlines who quickly come in and start saying, like, you can't wear this product in these spaces because, you know, it makes other people uncomfortable. You might be recording people. You know, it's just not appropriate. How does the plan for Google Glass come apart? So they're still trying to push it as this next big thing that, like, cool people wear and this is going to help your life. But at this point, people are like, what problems does this actually solve? And the people who are wearing this are people we hate. So, you know, at the time, they just like they try to come against us.

They try to come out with like etiquette guides for their for people who wear glass saying like, don't record people. If people ask you what they do, don't say they like can scan faces. If people ask you to take them off, just take them off, you know? And, and it's, but it's very like snarky and kind of aimed at people who have concerns about glass instead of, it's kind of like making fun of people. It'll be like, well, we all know that Google glass has a red beeping light when it's recording and it can only record for so long.

But, you know, for some people who like mistakenly believe that it can record at all times, like explain that it can't. And it's just like, it's kind of punching down at people who have concerns instead of addressing those concerns, like head on and saying like, this is what it can do. Listen, we're sorry. Like, it's not great. And we hear your concerns are like, no, these people are idiots. But in the meantime, like here's an etiquette guide to like on how to like wear glass in the real world. And the media gawker especially gets a hold of that. And it's just it's a heyday. Everything that they try to do just loops back and is like reason to just punch, punch at Google, like just hit them.

I wanted to ask you about that point as well, though, right? Because, you know, in this moment, I think we recognize that tech media or a lot of tech media has been very kind of positive and helpful toward these companies and pushing out the visions that they have. You know, there's been a bit more criticism in recent years after a period where there wasn't a whole lot of that. What do you make of the way that tech media responded to Google Glass in this period, you know, 2012 to 2014? Was it generally like, you know, was there a divide between some where some were quite critical and others were just like kind of boosting it? This is incredible, you know, kind of repeating the company line. How did you see that play out in the media, in the the coverage of it so it's it's very interesting it's interesting to compare to how or just kind of think about how this would all play

out now but at the time there were i would say the lion's share of media was all in from day one they're like oh my god this is so cool time named it like invention of the year, Wired. And they were all over it because there were like leaks coming out and this is very exciting. And like, here's what it could maybe do. And this is the thing that's gonna replace phones. Just kind of very excitedly and talking about it

without really any sort of critical eye towards like, what could this do to like, what does this mean for like surveillance and like privacy terms? But, you know, they were all very like, this is so cool. There are even articles being like, Google is marketing this in like the smartest way possible and saying like, how much it could benefit society as without really kind of addressing the concerns. I should say that Gawker specifically, and I keep bringing them up, they were very consistently against this. And I think at the time to Google, you know, they're a huge monolithic

company, but people kind of generally viewed them positively. They're like, no, look, they're doing these moonshots because they care about society. They want to like address, they're going to use their money and power for good. It was still the don't be evil era, right? Yeah, the don't be evil era. And people, you know, lapped that up. Gawker was critical of it the whole time. And they were very critical about Google. They were right on. Google was like changing how they treat your data at the time, too.

They're right on top of that. They connected the dots between that and what Glass could do or how Glass could leak data or what kind of stuff they could do. It wasn't until people kind of saw that Glass wasn't living up to its potential and that people were kind of cracking jokes about it on the internet. There had been a Tumblr started calling white men wearing Google Glass. It just brought all the narratives together into like, oh, this is what this is like. This is just rich white guys wearing Google Glass, this thing that doesn't work and is super expensive. That's when other like legacy media companies started to be like, maybe this sucks and is bad.

And here's how and like here's some critical things about it. But it kind of wasn't until the tide turned that they stopped kind of parodying the company lines. And at what point does this like really all fall apart? Does it become clear that Google Glass is really not going anywhere? And this product is kind of being put back into the hidden part of Google X and it will only be seen in kind of corporate applications,

but not something that is in the real world. For me, in my reading of it all, the final nail in the coffin was when it was featured on The Daily Show because The Daily Show just had massive reach. It reached people who weren't paying attention to the daily stumbles and meltdowns of Google and Google Glass PR. Especially in that moment, The Daily Show was huge. Oh yeah,ive. They did a whole segment on it. They trotted out the, like Sarah and the other glass holes who were in front of camera wearing their glass saying like, I'm being discriminated. This is, it's a hate crime to ask me to take my glass off because

this is, I don't know, this is part of who I am and this is the future. And everybody got on board because we're right and you're wrong. And that's when everyone's like, oh, fuck this and fuck these people. And that's, I think that's when the public on top of the media, just everything turned and Google tried to do some last gasps. They, they try to do one ad and they try to partner with Luxottica and say like, oh, like, listen, we're, we're going to make them really cool. And, and-Ban, like now has an augmented reality tech, but you know, they're like, we're gonna make it nice and cool. And the hardware is gonna be better and you're going to like it. But it was too late. Like I think the tide had turned on Glass and it was a few months later that they kind of folded it into an enterprise product

quietly, just like never really said, like they would tease a public release and some outlets would be like, oh, Google says they're going to come out with it like in a year, we'll see. And then just kind of fizzled out and no updates and nothing. And they quietly just like folded it away. It also coincided, I should say, with I think at the same time, investors in Google were being like, why are we spending all this money on this thing that everybody hates? Like, this is dumb. Why are we buying more companies like Nest, which is like immediately making money for us, the smart thermostats? And we're just like throwing money at these moonshots and no one's really like watching over them or critical of the choices they make or the things they do.

And that's when shortly after Glass's like very public failure, they reorganized under Alphabet, totally restructured the company, shuttered a ton of the moonshots. And we're like, we're going to refocus how we spend our money because the investors are mad and the markets are responding. So that's money talks, I guess. Totally. It's something that we're seeing now again. And of course, another reason that that probably happened as well is 2014 is also when the story about Sergey Brin cheating on his wife came out and he kind of stepped back from a lot of this stuff shortly after.

The person he cheated with was also someone from Google Glass, of course. Yeah, that was, I mean, speaking of media, that was something gross I kind of saw, which was like, you know, people would analyze, well, you know, why did Google Glass fail like in the wake of it? And they like blamed the affair, specifically the woman who he had an affair with and like, you know, gave it the same weight as awful marketing and just making a product that people didn't need or want. They gave that equal weight as like just the general product failures of Google. And I was like, I don't think that's right. And it's shitty basically for like, it has nothing to do with why Google Glass failed. Google Glass failed because Google just like was overconfident in what they

could make people do. What it sounds like to me is almost like searching for a reason to say, you know, it wasn't the tech, right? It wasn't the vision. It was this kind of interpersonal relationship that did in this visionary product. And now we don't have it because, you know, these two people couldn't like keep it in their pants or whatever, right? When it's like, yeah, I think the problem goes much, much deeper than that. I don't think that's what killed Google Glass in the end. Right. That end, like, it was simply ahead of its time. This is an inevitability, but it's not Google's failure. It's not because the public just doesn't want this. It's like they were just so smart that they were ahead. They were smart. They're ahead of the public on this one. think that's a good segue to talk about, you know, what we can learn from this experience and how Google Glass can inform some of the things that are going on now. And I'm sure some of these tech companies have learned from it. You know, you talked about the larger wearable space and

how that becomes something post Google Glass as these companies get into smartwatches. And now we're seeing more of them like experiment with glasses. We had Snapchat with its sunglasses with a little camera in them. Of course, Facebook is trying to move into glasses now as well. It has that partnership with Ray-Ban. So what do you see as kind of the legacy of Google Glass and how kind of inspires or inform some of the things that the tech companies are doing now as they try to revive this vision of putting a computer on your face? I think that in a lot of ways, they just haven't learned. They just totally haven't learned their lessons at all to the broader point that like they

tried to sell this like vision of a world where everyone's wearing augmented reality and people wholly rejected that. They just don't believe that's true. And they're going to continue on headstrong because they still believe that this is like the next big thing. I will say that I think the marketing on Glass was just awful, just generally head scratching at points. But I do think that they learned a few crafty lessons in how Google was pitched and how like it was marketed, how it was sold. The AR Ray-Bans came out very quietly. They were like, these are sunglasses. You know, you can, you can post to social media. You can post your little videos, compare that to how glass came out.

Crickets, way quieter. You know, I think you've talked about on the show too, how tech companies will pick something like climate change and say, this is like, we need to make this because it solves climate change. You'll see this in Apple's AR, which they were coming out. It was like, they led the story with like, you can wear these and go to another country and it'll translate right in front of you. And people are like, oh, cool. That's awesome.

Glass didn't have anything. They just came out and was like, this is great. You're going to love it. Trust us. And, you know, it didn't have anything. They just came out and was like, this is great. You're going to love it. Trust us. And, you know, it didn't work. So I think they've gotten craftier about like tethering a like thing that people care about to the product that they're making. The other thing too, is I think just kind of like weathering the storm. You know, one thing I kept thinking of when I was writing this was like Google Home. Like if you remember when it first came out, people were like, oh no, I'm not going to put this in my home.

They're going to record everything I say. But after that initial pushback, tons of people have Google Home. You don't you don't hear any like privacy concerns. They just kind of weathered the storm, didn't give it any oxygen and just like assumed like we could just continue pushing this and pushing this and pushing this until people just like like fine. I'll buy an Alexa. My remote has voice control. I've never used it once. I don't know who uses it. But like they are constantly got pops ups like, tell Alexa to like, play Netflix. I'd rather just use buttons. But you know, they've gotten crafter and just kind of like more adept at getting these products into like further kind of like infiltrating people's private lives without causing a lot of public attention, basically.

Which is scary. Absolutely. I feel like, you know, obviously we're not long after Christmas and stuff. I feel like one of the things that they've really taken advantage of is having some of those products be pretty cheap. Like, you know, the sticks that you stick into your TV or speakers as well, like the ones that you talk to. I don't like calling them smart speakers. You know, I hate that terminology, but like, you know, make them cheap. And then I don't know what to get this person for a gift. You know, I'll just get them one of these because everyone has them now. And so, you know, you slowly kind of perpetuate it in that way or, you know, you get

them free or discounted in some kind of promotion or something like that. So, oh, why not pick up this new product? I hate that kind of stuff. But I do think it's interesting to see how they continue to have these partnerships with like luxury brands like, you know, Apple Watch when it originally came out. Johnny Ive really wanted it to be a fashion product, right? In the way that Sergey Brin wanted Google Glass not to be for like weird dorks, but to be for affluent people, to be for cool people, right? And you can see that same kind of desire in Apple Watch when it is coming out. And they have like, they're showing it to Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld, and they're bringing it to the runways, and it's featured in Vogue and like all these sorts of things, right? They have a particular audience that they want to sell it to, that they want to associate it with. And then after that, it becomes more of like a health fitness kind of product because they find that there's a lot much

larger market there. And then of course, we see Facebook working with Ray-Ban in order to put its stories glasses out there. So yeah, I find that really interesting to just see those sorts of parallels as these wearables become more common. And we just see kind of repetition of some of the things that Glass tried and maybe failed at, but these other companies are working on and trying to use in their own kind of pitches to get us to adopt these products. Yeah, the wearables kind of moving into health is like another fascinating thing to me because like people, I think they really caught on when people were like, oh, I can track my heart rate or I can track my sleep using this. It's not about just like having the

next Apple thing. I just constantly wonder about this with VR and AR. They just, they cannot find a use case that people really care about. You know, with VR, Meta met with Microsoft and were like, you know, we don't have to do Zoom meetings. You can feel like you're in, you can do a meeting in the metaverse and it feels like you're there. And it's like, well, you probably just came up with it like two months ago and people started like complaining about being in Zoom meetings all day and because of the pandemic. And I think that's just a huge hurdle for these companies. It's like, it doesn't do anything better than your phone does and doesn't do anything new. And it doesn't like help you, I don't know, track your personal health at all. So what does it do? It's just a question that they still struggle to solve. I don't think there is an answer,

but I don't think they care because they think it's like, I think the like potential payload on cracking the code to augmented reality or virtual reality, or they call it extended XR, extended reality is like untold profits if they can get people to buy in. Yeah, they just need to make it work, right? They just need to figure it out. I do think though, that even in this moment where they're like trying again, we're still at a point where I think it can be stopped. I think that, you know, in seeing the reaction to the metaverse and what Facebook or meta is trying to push on us has been really instructive in seeing that people just think it's a total joke. People don't take it seriously. People are like, yeah, I'm not going to live my

life in the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg. I don't know what you're getting on with. And I feel like looking back to Google Glass as something that really kind of tanked because people really turned against it because people using it were considered glass holes, all these sorts of things, right? The media finally kind of wisened up and started repeating that this was like an utter joke that had a lot of problems. But why would you even wear it in the first place? And I feel like we also saw that recently with like

cryptocurrencies and Web3, the metaverse, where there was kind of a criticism from the get-go. And even though the media was kind of open to the idea that this could be the future initially, it very quickly turned when it seemed like the public had turned against it as well. And so I wonder what you think we learned from that especially as we look to what the companies are doing and trying to sell us now when it comes to ar and these headsets like apple is apparently going to put one out at some point too and it looks like you know i don't know if you saw the recent reports but it looks like they're planning to release a really expensive one and aren't sure when like a consumer oriented one a less expensive one will ever be released like apparently that got pushed

and they're not sure on a release date now then of course these are all rumors but what do you make of all that and what we can learn from the google glass period you know i you had rose evaleth on recently and i you know she was talking about like like when it comes to tech and quote unquote progress you feel bad saying no you feel bad, no, I'm not going to do this. I feel like often find myself couching myself and being like, listen, I'm not a Luddite. Like, I'm not a person who's like these little black squares, you know, they might as well be our coffins, you know, type of guy. But there is like hope and agency to be found in saying like, I'm going to like say no to this.

I don't want this. That should be looked at as a positive thing. And then, and that was kind of my end point with glass. You know, you should go back and read a few articles because it's kind of, it's instructive and interesting to see that this multi-billion dollar product from the world's most powerful company was stopped because people

like made fun of it enough. I think that's very hopeful today when it comes to crypto and the metaverse and stuff. I don't know if I'm, you know, cynical just in how kind of the media ecosystem has kind of been like hollowed out. It's like not as like strong. People are, tech has positioned itself

where the media is like almost reliant on it, probably reliant on it to survive. Twitter isn't what it used to be, obviously. And social media is just kind of in a weird fractured place too. So I just don't know. There's been a lot of people making fun of the metaverse and their lack of legs and their big rollouts and stuff. And there's a lot of jokes to be had. And, you know, maybe it's just because billionaires are a little more, you know, megalomaniac than they used to be, but they are just like not stopping. And I don't know if it's like they like tank the company to try to do it.

And then that tanks the entire economy or, or what, but like we're in a different space now than we were back then. But I think that like, kind of taking in the story of glass, like made me realize that like, yeah, we can, it's possible to kind of step in and say like, this kind of like empirical march into our private lives is like, we can stop that. Like I can go outside, I can put, I can leave my phone and computer and go outside and like, Tim Cook doesn't know where I'm at. And like, I can look at trees and like my, my eyes aren't being tracked and like where I'm, what I'm looking at and how many ads I'm seeing. So I think if we, if we can really protect that, even though it's kind of personal

privacy versus public privacy, I think if we can really bunker down and just be like, no, like I, I don't want that. I think that's, really bunker down and just be like, no, I don't want that, I think that's something to hold on to, basically. Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, that doesn't mean it's not a difficult thing to do. That doesn't mean that the billionaires aren't working overtime to ensure that their vision of the world is the one that gets implemented and that we all just kind of like accept and have to conform to. But I think that there's also opportunities if we're able to seize them to push back on them to challenge their ideas of what our future should be. And we shouldn't forget that. And the story of Google Glass is certainly one

that shows us how we can defeat bad ideas if we really try. Quinn, it's been great to talk to you. Thanks for writing this book. I think it was great to kind of go back to this period and reflect on it, especially with the moment that we're in now. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me. Thank you. This was great. I love it. Thanks, Paris.

Quinn Myers is a freelance writer and the author of Google Glass. You can follow him on Twitter at Quinn Myers. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.