I Had A Friend-Breakup Over Meta Glasses

Happy Birthday to Youuuu, everyone sang. Alice’s birthday party was in her Williamsburg penthouse and as I looked around at her gorgeous luxury apartment filled with impossibly hot 20-something influencers, I felt like I was in a movie. Just not one a casting director would’ve picked me for.

Alice was a girl I’d met at a sauna event for content creators. I’d gone hoping to make friends, though the bleach blonde, California beauty influencer was one of the last people I’d expected to click with. Alice lived in a corner of the internet I’d only observed anthropologically. She had an unironic twelve-step skincare routine, once waited in line for two hours for a dessert-themed coffee, and confidently informed me she was autistic according to Tiktok (which was why she went nonverbal when “chopped” men approached her).

When she spotted me standing alone at the influencer event, she was the one who walked over, complimented my leopard-print bikini, and asked if I wanted to try one of the event’s sponsored drinks with her.

Over prebiotic sodas, she asked what kind of content I made.

“Satire comedy.”

She tilted her head. “Can you show me?”

I found the whole exercise vaguely cringe, but I pulled up my Instagram anyway. The second she saw my profile, her eyes widened.

“Wait,” she said. “You have like... four times as many followers as me.”

The comment was so immediate and unfiltered that I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Before I could think of something polite to say, she asked her next question.

“So why do you think people follow you?”

I actually had to think about it.

“I think,” I said slowly, “people follow me because I have the vibe of someone who only got cool as an adult.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“It is,” I laughed. “Why were you um... popular in high school?”

She nodded without a second of hesitation: “I think I was the most popular girl at school,” and as though the thought just occurred to her, she continued. “I think that’s why people follow me,” she said. “Watching me makes them feel like if we met, we could be friends.”

I laughed, it was such a shamelessly honest answer that it looped back around to being charming. And honestly, I very quickly saw her point. Being Alice’s friend had the same appeal as following her online. She had a way of making you feel like, if she liked you, maybe you were cool enough to be one of the popular girls after all.

But beyond her terminally-online behavior and weaponized pretty privilege, Alice was a wonderful friend. Even though she was two years younger than I, she had the energy of an older sister. She’d drag me shopping to find clothes that actually “fit my body,” redid my makeup without asking, and had soup delivered to my house after she found out I was sick.

We also shared the same vulgar sense of humor. Which is why months later, as I held her Milk Bar birthday cake and everyone around us sang, I leaned in just enough that the friends filming on their phones couldn’t hear me.

“Blow them,” I whispered. “Like they could give you a promotion.”

She immediately burst into laughter, only composing herself long enough to blow out the candles. It was a game we’d developed together: wait for the sweetest, most wholesome moment imaginable, then say the filthiest thing that came to mind.

Later that night, Alice’s Instagram story made me do a double take. She’d somehow captured the entire interaction, from me walking toward her with the birthday cake to the exact moment I leaned in and made what was otherwise a wholesome birthday tradition into a sexual innuendo.

A few minutes later she DMed me.

Alice: Yo, everyone’s screaming over what you said.

I replied immediately.

Me: Wait... how did you get that footage?

A second later she sent me a selfie wearing a pair of translucent black Meta glasses, grinning ear to ear.

Alice: It’s the Meta glasses. Isn’t the quality amazing?

I watched the story again.

There was something strangely intimate about it. After two years of being an influencer, I had grown so used to seeing myself through a front-facing camera that I’d forgotten what I looked like when I wasn’t performing for one. In the video, I smiled, carried the cake, leaned in to make the joke, and laughed without once acknowledging a witness aside from Alice.

It reminded me of the VHS tapes my parents had of my siblings and me as kids. I’d twirl around the living room in the slightly tattered Cinderella dress I’d gotten for my sixth birthday, making up dances without a trace of self-consciousness because the camera wasn’t an audience, it was just my dad.

Watching Alice’s story, I realized how long it had been since I’d seen my face move through a series of honest, uncurated emotions. I hadn’t paused to check my angles or had any awareness of how I’d look when I replayed it later. It was refreshing.

Can you send me the recording? I messaged, and Alice sent it over almost immediately.

That was the beginning of my relationship with Meta glasses: a small technological surprise wrapped around an unexpectedly precious memory.

The shift in my relationship with them came a few weeks later.

My brother came over for coffee one morning wearing a concerned expression

“Why’d you do an interview with an alt-right influencer?”

I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Without answering, he pulled out his phone and held it up. On the screen was a Reel of me that I’d never seen before.

LIBERAL JEWISH INFLUENCER GETS DESTROYED IN LESS THAN A MINUTE.

It was a conversation I remembered.

About a month earlier, I’d been waiting outside a restaurant for a friend when a man I recognized as a conservative influencer walked over to say hello. Had we met on a debate panel or in a Jubilee-style format, I probably would’ve been guarded from the start. But this wasn’t framed as a debate. He was just another person waiting for a table.

My friend was running a few minutes late, so when he told me he recognized me and asked if I’d ever eaten there before, I answered the way I would’ve answered anyone. We talked about the restaurant, my obsession with their crispy fries and fancy deviled eggs, and whatever other small talk naturally fills five minutes between strangers.

It wasn’t until the conversation was winding down that he asked, almost casually, “Can I ask you something?”

I shrugged.

“What’s your opinion on immigration, given that you film a third of your content with a Muslim immigrant?”

Because we’d already spent several minutes making small talk, I answered honestly. I told him I generally supported immigration, believed the country benefited from it, and that people who came here legally deserved a fair opportunity to build a life.

Then his questions got more specific.

He started asking about asylum law, visa categories, deportation policy, and the practical consequences of different immigration proposals. The more he asked, the more I realized something uncomfortable: I had broad moral convictions, but I wasn’t nearly informed enough about the legal system to defend them in detail.

Finally, I smiled and held up my hands.

“I think this is where I tap out,” I said. “I’d want to do a lot more research before pretending I know enough to have this conversation.”

We shook hands, wished each other a good dinner, and I walked inside thinking it had been a surprisingly pleasant interaction.

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that, like Alice, he’d been wearing Meta glasses.

Watching the video, I recognized the same home video-like quality I’d loved in Alice’s birthday recording. But this time, my lack of self-consciousness had been folded into a narrative. The authenticity of the interaction wasn’t created to share a human moment, it’d been created to turn one person’s honest uncertainty into evidence against an entire political movement. The worst part was that, out of all the videos on his page, ours was the highest performing. It only took a cursory glance to understand why. Compared to the rest of his content, where people were clearly aware they were being filmed, our conversation came across as unusually real because I wasn’t performing for a camera. I didn’t know one was there.

I sent him a direct message.

Hey, while I enjoyed meeting you, I didn’t consent to having our conversation recorded. I’d be happy to have a planned, on-camera conversation with you in the future, but I’m going to kindly ask that you take this video down.

To his credit, he did, but the clip had already racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Even so, he took it down without question.

My issue with the video was twofold.

The first was practical. As a liberal Jewish creator whose best friend is a Muslim immigrant, our content gets stitched, reposted, and repurposed by the conservative media ecosystem all the time. I’ll spend hours writing the perfect hook for a video only to watch someone else scrape it, slap their own political framing on top of it, and build an audience—and a business—from my work. It frustrates me, but it’s also part of the bargain you make when you post publicly online.

The second issue bothered me far more, which was the particular slice of the interaction he’d chosen to publish.

Part of my platform has always been my relationship with my conservative mother because I truly believe it’s important not to cut people out of your life simply because they hold different political beliefs. If this creator had posted our entire interaction, viewers would’ve seen exactly that: two people who knew they disagreed politically having a respectful conversation out of genuine curiosity.

But that’s not the kind of story the algorithm rewards. Nuance doesn’t outperform conflict, and a respectful conversation between two people who disagreed was never going to go viral. So instead of posting the full exchange, he carved out the forty-five seconds that made me look like shit. What had been, in real life, a humbling moment of intellectual honesty became a tidy little political touchdown.

My interaction with the conservative influencer inevitably colored the way I watched Alice’s content evolve around the same technology.

Shortly after her birthday, she built an entirely new content strategy around the Meta glasses’ recording feature. She’d walk the streets of New York flirting with strangers, capturing their reactions from her point of view. It was an enormous success. Her first video got nearly twenty million views and brought in tens of thousands of new followers.

I understood the appeal immediately–a beautiful blonde woman approaching unsuspecting men was already a compelling premise, but the Meta glasses gave the videos something far more valuable than novelty: candor. The men weren’t performing for a camera because, as far as they knew, there wasn’t one. Every awkward laugh and flustered smile or polite rejection was done as if only performed to one person, and that was exactly what gave me pause.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the men on the other side of the glasses. Had they known millions of people would watch them awkwardly deflect attention or explain they had a girlfriend, would they have still agreed to be filmed?

I planned to ask Alice about the glasses when we met up at a Lower East Side cocktail bar. The bar had dark walnut walls, low amber lighting, and music just loud enough that everyone leaned in to talk while bartenders in black T-shirts moved quickly between rows of coupe glasses and oversized ice cubes. One of them was a hot bartender named Danny that I’d developed a crush on.

When Alice walked in wearing a tiny black mini skirt, a crop top, and her transparent Meta glasses, my heart sank a little.

“Would you mind not recording tonight?” I asked.

She looked horrified.

“Oh my God, no,” she laughed. “I have so much shit to talk, I wouldn’t dare.”

And for the next twenty minutes we gossiped uninterrupted, right up until Danny wandered over to ask what we wanted to drink.

“Hey, ladies,” he said as he walked over. “What can I get you?”

Alice smiled. “Well, I drink and Tova doesn’t, so I’ll take the cocktail menu, and Tova will get–” She gestured toward me, as if to say I’ll let her speak for herself.

I smiled at Danny. He smiled back. We’d flirted a handful of times before, and this night picked up exactly where the others had left off.

“I can get you anything, my dear,” he said. “Just say the word.”

“Just an island off the Amalfi Coast.”

He didn’t miss a beat.

“You’re too easy,” he said. “it’s on the house.”

I put a hand to my chest in mock offense.

“Me? Easy?”

He grinned.

“No... you’re right. That’s me.”

He winked before turning to Alice.

“And for you?”

“A lychee martini.”

As Danny reached up to the back bar for a bottle of vodka, Alice leaned toward me.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “He’s so cute. You two have such good banter.”

She reached for her phone and To my discomfort, I realized she’d recorded my entire interaction with Danny on her Meta glasses.

I felt my eyes widen. “Alice, what the fuck?” I said. “You told me you weren’t recording.”

She looked genuinely confused. “I said I wasn’t recording us talking shit about our friends,” she said. “That was just a cute interaction.” She held the phone out for me to watch it again but I gently pushed it away.

Alice frowned. “I didn’t really want to say this...”

What you get behind the paywall:

• Alice’s case about why I should be using meta glasses too.

• How I snapped and ultimately kinda lost my shit ranting about the ethics of wearable cameras and surveillance culture. (which I, in a lot of way regret)

• The point at which our friendship ultimately unraveled.

• My complicated reflections on losing Alice as a friend

*paid subscribers also get access to the audio version of this article which is my most recommended way of consuming it.