Blog/2026-06-22/Uncool is for me
I recently came upon an article that pretty much argued that Meta Glasses are uncool things made by uncool people. That's a fair complaint about the devices. They're quite clunky and so on. And perhaps it's a fair complaint about the makers, though it seems that Mark Zuckerberg has Gen Z'd his way to coolness among some crowd somewhere.
But the odd thing was reading a bunch of Hacker News commenters who were eagerly talking about this as some act of rebellion. A fairly typical example is this:
I find it to be an acceptable use of mockery, one of the most powerful cultural methods of exposing that the emperor has no clothes
It reminds me of an effort some time during the last US election cycle to label Republican-voters as 'weird'[2]. I remember thinking to myself when that happened that doing this felt like ceding the ground for non-normativity to the other side and frankly, one thing I've noticed about Americans is that they like very much to think that they're strange and unique and interesting and weird. I should know, I do too! So why bother claiming you're the establishment guy? I have a few dozen hypotheses, some of which are:
- fitting in / social censure matters more to the US Left
- these people are successful so this is one way to disparage them that can't be countered
- this technique does work to get people to stop using something[3]
In any case, the whole idea dichotomizes society into the conformist and the outcast, which has the unfortunate effect that it applies to a lot more people than just the clean split of the underlying politics in the first place. Some amount of politics is ridiculing the other side while galvanizing one's own, but if the method of ridicule selects also many people not aligned with the other side, all you're doing is excluding people from the tent - which is fine if your objective is a hardcore cadre, but perhaps less fine if you're trying to win a US election.
Now on to the Meta Glasses themselves. I don't think the AI glasses will hit mainstream any time soon. Julie wore them to the Vancouver Aquarium and they were a blast - you can say "what's that orange fish?" and it can identify it for you - but without long-enough battery life and light-enough weight they become a bit of an appliance you're taking care of and while the Apple Watches have some of that feeling, they're far less delicate, putting them down doesn't result in losing your sight, and you can get into a routine of charging them and wearing them. But there are moments when using them that they shine, like when you have to watch to catch your daughter falling off playground equipment but you still want to record her play, like in this video Julie recorded. So there's something here.
Perhaps the 'uncool' framing will be the death knell of an imperfect product. But I'm a nearly 40 dad. When I talk to my daughter I talk in a high-pitched voice. When I laugh at something I guffaw. My hairline is far past receding and what's left of my curly hair stands on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. I sometimes miss entire sections of my face when I shave.
So when you say something is uncool, realistically you're just saying it's for me.
Notes
[edit | edit source]- ↑ smokedetector1 on Permalink: HN • news.ycombinator.com • 48637080
- ↑ ""Republicans Are Weird"". Know Your Meme (in English). 2024-07-29. Retrieved 2026-06-22.
- ↑ Though people used to be called Bluetooth douches and that didn't stick when the technology went mainstream; and there was a short-lived effort to try to get kids to consider Airpods uncool
