Origins in Rejection
Over twenty years ago, a college sophomore sat in a dorm room, stewing after rejection, and built a crude website called FaceMash, where students could rate women like trading cards. Prank as power grab. Voyeurism coded as innovation.
We like to file that under “youthful mistake.” It wasn’t. The logic metastasized. The same impulse that turns women into scores now turns all of us into streams of data—watchable, rankable, profitable—making “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” uncomfortably literal.
It wasn’t an anomaly. At MSDN, a colleague kept an Excel sheet ranking the women he dated as “marriageable,” complete with weighted criteria. He bragged about the sophisticated math behind the indexing. Our (female) GM, shocked at first, eventually rolled her eyes, suggesting “Boys will be boys.” That’s how a private calculus becomes a public norm: a spreadsheet becomes a social script; executives become complicit; the institution shrugs—governance by eye roll.
FaceMash wasn’t just a stunt. It was part of a cultural lineage where women’s experiences were flattened or erased to serve male stories—humiliation was re-engineered into control. A prototype of a logic that reduces people, especially women, into scores, streams, and profiles. When adolescent grievance meets technical power, it hardens from a coping mechanism into an ideology: reducing people (especially women) to scores, streams, and profiles.
As the series Adolescence reminds us, formative habits don’t stay in the dorm room—or the classroom. Watching replaces relating. Judgment replaces connection. Those habits ossify into systems. Incel forums are just the grotesque extreme—rejection → resentment → worldview → weapon.
And now? That worldview has hardware.
Seven Days to a New Normal
Fast forward two decades. The adolescent gaze now comes in hardware.
This time next week, every pair of glasses could be a smartphone. Controlled by tiny, secret finger movements. Not just watching you, streaming you live. Translating your words and profiling your every move.
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses launch September 30: a see-through display for apps, maps, alerts, analytics, and live translation synced to a neural wristband that reads tiny finger movements as silent commands. The Meta Connect 2025 demo glitched (AI assistant; display + wristband), but those were demo failures, not product denials. The devices exist; the rollout clock is ticking—and the price will continue to drop.
Translation: No more phone. Secret controls. Your next interface is your nervous system.
Your Policy Window is Narrowing.
For CEOs, policymakers, and school leaders, this isn’t “wait and see.” These glasses take prescription lenses and can be worn all day—into bathrooms, boardrooms, and classrooms. In seven days, you’ll either ban at the door or rewrite privacy policies overnight. If history is any guide, most will wait for a lawsuit to write their first policies.
Meta pitches this as playful, frictionless, cool—innovation that disappears into everyday life. However, invisible surveillance has always been sold as an innovative solution. As Sarah Eaton asks, What disappears with it? Women’s privacy in bathrooms. Teachers’ ability to protect students in classrooms. Workers’ rights to not be surveilled during lunch breaks.
John Hughes and the Cultural Script
Pop culture set the grammar long before FaceMash. John Hughes filmed adolescent longing in neon, but girls were often the prize, the prop, the B-plot. As Molly Ringwald reflected on GenX’s teen comedies, they were “written by men for boys,” and Hughes, for all his sensitivity, carried a “glaring blind spot.” Yet the films endure because they were some of the first that took teen feelings seriously (especially from a female perspective): “The conversations about them will change, and they should.” That’s the hinge: empathy and oversight, side by side.
Why it matters now: when that adolescent gaze—male pain as plot, female story as backdrop—we ship products that:
privilege ranking over opting in,
watching over consent,
capture over care,
and “cool factor” over safety as the floor.
Hughes helped the world take teenagers seriously. He also normalized a lens where boys’ urges and longing drive the plot, and girls absorb the consequences and cost. Ringwald’s retrospective makes the contradiction plain by providing genuine empathy alongside real blind spots, highlighting jokes that read as ambient harm, and sharing scenes that age into lessons about consent. The point isn’t to cancel the films; it’s to recognize the script we’ve been conditioned to accept by default. That script—male grievance-centered, female dignity incidental—became the cultural soil from which FaceMash grew and from which today’s “playful” surveillance products still emerge.
It wasn’t just onscreen; it was ambient life. The same era turned the Clinton-Lewinsky affair into late-night fodder while minimizing a stark power imbalance; treating a young woman as a punch line and a president as complicated. That “boys will be boys” posture taught institutions how to metabolize harm: normalize it, joke it away, call it messy instead of naming it. When that’s the water, of course, a site that ranks women doesn’t look extraordinary. It seems like product-market fit. Only now do we ask: How did the twenty-four-year-old with the least power pay the highest price?
Set the Defaults, Where Allies Step In
Technology ships the culture of its makers. When rejection calcifies into control and desire into domination, we get systems that watch instead of connect and score instead of care. That adolescent gaze becomes a design default. The same gaze runs through today’s product design.
Adolescence gives the rule: harms don’t need villains; they require unquestioned defaults. In a system where attention is rewarded, safety drifts into “feature,” not floor—and families, schools, and workers sit on the wrong side of the information asymmetry. In that world, relying on corporate virtue is malpractice.
Allyship means flipping defaults from cool to consent. If no one in the room names this trade-off, the decision is already made—by omission.
Visibility over secrecy: What is the visible signal for recording/translation? If none, it’s a veto.
Boundaries with owners: Exactly where are glasses prohibited—and who enforces by name (not “the team”)?
Opt-in over auto-capture: In shared spaces, what’s the default” OFF, unless explicitly permitted?
Care before control: When footage leaks, how do you support the targeted person first, then contain and remediate?
Closing the Dorm Room
The adolescent gaze has grown up, put on Ray-Bans, and walked into your workplace. We’re back to John Hughes’s script—women as props, not protagonists—but now the camera is wearable and ships worldwide.
The dorm room is still open.
Decide now:
Ban at the door or rewrite policy this week.
Name no-glasses zones.
Require a visible signal for any recording or translation.
Set default = off in shared spaces.
Assign owners by name.
When footage leaks, prioritize protecting the person, then contain and remediate the incident.
If you don’t set the defaults, someone else will govern your rooms.
Close the door.
Strategic Pause: What Leaders Must Ask Themselves
If you run a company, a school, or a hospital (in any sector), you don’t have the luxury of waiting. In seven days, you must decide whether to ban these glasses or regulate them inside your doors.
Ask yourself:
Safety barriers: How are labs, conference rooms, restrooms, and private offices protected?
Employee rights: Will you tell staff when to remove their glasses? How will you enforce it?
Compliance: How are you prepared for the legal minefield of labor laws, privacy, and recording consent?
Education: What happens when a classroom is filled with kids wearing silent cameras?
Liability: Can an employee wear them while driving your company vehicle?
Governance is no longer abstract. It’s as concrete as your door policy.