Google Glass

Google Glass, the wearable computing device that promised to merge the digital and physical worlds at the level of the human face, was discontinued from public sale on 15 January 2015, having survived less than two years in the hands of ordinary consumers. It was born in April 2013, when Google’s secretive X laboratory offered it to selected developers and early adopters — christened, with the unfortunate enthusiasm of the age, “Glass Explorers” — at a price of fifteen hundred dollars. In the brief season of its visibility, it attracted more commentary than any device since the mobile telephone, nearly all of it concerned not with what it could do but with what it implied about those who wore it.

The product did not fail quietly. It generated a word — “Glasshole” — that entered common usage before the device itself had reached a fraction of the population, a rare distinction in the history of consumer technology. Establishments posted signs forbidding its use; legislators proposed restrictions before any law had yet been broken. What Google had imagined as liberation — hands-free navigation, photographs taken in the blink of an eye, the sum of human knowledge hovering at the edge of vision — the public received as surveillance wearing a friendly face. It was retired to the enterprise market, where it has since performed modestly and without controversy, doing useful work in conditions where no one asks what it means to be looked at by a machine.