I saw my first pair of Meta’s “pervert” glasses in the wild the other day and suffered flashbacks to the days of Google Glass.

Clearly, Meta learned nothing from the “glassholes” that came before, but it’s not the astounding lack of self-awareness or the company leadership’s complete inability to grasp the zeitgeist; it’s the apparent legions of bootlickers defending them, that shocks me.

I know that a large percentage of those defenders don’t even own the product. They’re “tech bros,” and anything that seeps from the anus of Zuckerberg, Musk, and their coterie is to be savoured to the last drop. This type of sycophantic person has always existed. You know them, you despise them, and you hate it when they start talking at you in the office.

I despise them too (could you tell?), though I try not to waste too much mental energy on them, but something about their arguments has gotten under my skin, and I want to rant about it.

Their argument is simple. The fact that these glasses can be transformative to people with disabilities such as visual impairment is an apparent justification for their neckbeard-sporting, 400lb arses to wear them while they make their monthly hunting excursions to McDonald’s or wherever they source their cave-dwelling supplies before retreating to the safety of mommy’s basement, complete with illicitly obtained footage of people they consider desirable.

It makes my skin crawl, not just for the justification, but as I mentioned before, this isn’t our first rodeo with similar technology.

Before my blood pressure finally manages to succeed where the world has failed, let me offer a little marketing tip to Meta, and a sharp rebuttal to basement-dwellers and wannabe influencers as they furiously edit the footage of their last jaunt away from the saftey of their mother:

Make Meta AI Glasses only available to people who have actual disabilities that could benefit from them.

Not self-diagnosed “disabilities” like IBS, RBF or self-entitlement, where you try to bring your emotional support chicken on flights as it sports its dashing Amazon knock-off emotional support tactical harness, but real ones actually diagnosed by medical professionals.

When you have the appropriate paperwork from your friendly neighbourhood physician, you can get yourself a pair. Anyone else can skip happily off of a tall cliff.

Better yet, Meta is apparently donating 15,000 pairs of these AI glasses to visually impaired people in Ireland; it’s not like they couldn’t afford to do this as a tax write-off for a failed product humanitarian gesture to every visually impaired person on the planet.

Imagine the goodwill they would garner. Simultaneously keeping these glasses out of the hands of people who would sell their own grandmother for an illicit glimpse of side-boob, while actually improving the lives of a multitude of people.

For a company that has basically zero trust in the world today, except with the exceptionally naive and the tech bros we’ve been discussing, this might start to claw back just a little bit of capital.