Google retreated to workplaces to habituate employees to Glass before street deployment

Evidence

In July 2017 the redirection phase went public with a blog post introducing a new iteration of Google Glass to the world, now as “Glass Enterprise Edition.” This time there would be no frontal attack on public space. Instead, it was to be a tactical retreat to the workplace—the gold standard of habituation contexts, where invasive technologies are normalized among captive populations of employees. “Workers in many fields, like manufacturing, logistics, field services, and healthcare find it useful to consult a wearable device for information and other resources while their hands are busy,” wrote the project’s leader, and most press accounts lauded the move, citing productivity and efficiency increases in factories that deployed the new Glass. There was little acknowledgment that habituation to Glass at work was most certainly a back door to Glass in our streets or that the intrusive surveillance properties of the device would, with equal certainty, be imposed on the women and men required to use them as a condition of their employment. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 493

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my existing reading on habituation contexts and how invasive technologies are normalized among captive employee populations — the workplace as training ground for tech adoption. — connects to: Google quietly killed then redesigned Glass without acknowledging public criticism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 491
• SEED: Angle: ‘the back door habituation strategy’ — how tech firms deliberately normalize surveillance through workplaces, then port it to the street. Could pair with the glass enterprise edition as a case study.