"We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,"

This is a quote from an internal Meta memo about how they would plan the launch of these creepy glasses. There are too many crises that seem more pressing to a lot of people.

I think there are many reasons some but not all imo:

- The price difference. Calling a person who dropped $1,500 on a "tech glasses" in 2013 a glasshole made sense. It felt like someone with more money than sense. Meta glasses are $299 today that's just small gadget money so there is no "too much money, little sense" aspect

- Tech went 100% mainstream. It wasn't exactly an exclusively nerdy or geeky thing in 2013 anymore like the 90s or early 2000s, but there was still certain "Too much tech means you are a socially incompetent neckbeard". Today the biggest socialites online often do a tech haul style videos about the latest tech gadgets they got.

- Cameras exploded everywhere. Everyone has watched footage from Ring, GoPro, traffic lights, security cams, court cams, dashcams, police body cams, etc. Plenty of regular people got home cameras too and find it very useful to keep an eye on pets, backyards, etc. Plenty of very regular people have stories about how their cameras saved their ass in one occasion or another. There has been plenty of high-profile news stories about how a Tesla or a Ring camera helped solve a crime or catch a horrific murder or criminal.

- The proliferation of prank YouTubers in the 2010s. Even though most of them were paid actors, going out and acting as a douch and recording it became a mainstream. Kids love it, and despite the "backlash" they were getting millions regardless

- It doesn't matter how you feel about meta glasses or google glasses, you will have reports online of people who tell you how those products changed their life for the better because it helped them overcome some adversity, or protected them in a victim situation or literally saved their life in some situation

With the rise of cellphone video posted online I don't think it has the same visceral reaction it once did around the Google Glass era.

There is already a big backlash with these glasses, they've become colloquially known as "perv glasses" and it's been proposed to make them illegal to use in some places!

Because the frog as been continuously boiling for a while now, so even if it generates a negative reaction it will be smaller than before.

For some reason in the last ten years, people have gone from being critical of corporations to favoring them. I think these companies have become so huge, and they have gotten away with so much, that people have resigned themselves to being at their mercy.

At the time there were two camps: tech-optimists who saw the value in a device that brought the power of the internet on top of your view of the world, and the other camp who worried about privacy or the "creep factor" and believed that outweighed any potential benefit.

When Google Glass came out that latter group had more sway culturally and more political power to ban such things. They don't have that as much anymore but that could swing back in their favor again

It is a generational thing. Gen Z grew up with an internet where it was normalized to share your complete life online, create posts under your real identity, and so on. Give it 1 - 2 generations, and perv glasses will be seen as not intrusive.