The Dorm Room Is Still Open

Your policy window is narrowing.

FaceMash wasn’t a prank; it was a prototype—rating women like trading cards. I even watched an MSDN colleague rank dates in an Excel “marriageable” index at work; the eye-roll response from executives was governance by shrug.

1) The Crisis of Ambient Capture

This isn’t a gadget drop. It’s a context shift. Smart glasses with a see-through display and a neural wristband bring silent micro-gestures into bathrooms, boardrooms, and classrooms. They take prescription lenses. They live on faces. They walk through your doors.

Phones in a bin, lesson underway—three cameras still in the room because they’re on faces.

What this trains us to accept
→ Watch first, ask consent later
→ Hide capture behind “cool”
→ Package surveillance as innovation
→ Treat safety like a setting, not the floor

2) The Script We Don’t See

We taught ourselves a grammar: male pain as plot, female dignity as incidental. From FaceMash to spreadsheets and office jokes, the behavior wasn’t anomalous; it was ambient. John Hughes’s films took teen feeling seriously and normalized that lens—exactly the contradiction Molly Ringwald names: real empathy with real blind spots.

Adolescence frames the platform logic with a “doorless train” shot—unbroken flow; safety is an interrupt. The same era turned the Clinton-Lewinsky affair into late-night fodder; treating a young woman as a punch line and a president as complicated. 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?

Design ships culture; policy sets defaults. If you don’t set them, growth teams will.

3) The Decision We Can’t Outsource

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.

Male allies in product/UX/leadership: your job is flipping defaults from cool to consent—and saying it in the room.

Choose one
→ Ban at the door, or
→ Permit with strict defaults

Copy/paste door policy (edit names):
“Effective immediately, recording/translation on wearable glasses is prohibited in restrooms, locker rooms, HR/legal offices, R&D floors, classrooms, and exam rooms. In shared spaces, default = off unless the meeting owner explicitly opts in and a visible signal is present. Security (Maria Chen) and HR Compliance (Ravi Patel) enforce. Drivers/operators/clinicians/teachers: glasses off on duty. If footage leaks, we support the targeted person first, then takedown and remediation within 24 hours.”

This week (3 moves):

• Post no-glasses zones at entrances.

• Publish the visible-signal standard (or veto).

• Name enforcement owners (by name) and announce it.

If you don’t set the defaults, someone else will govern your rooms.
Close the door.

Summary

→ Smart glasses normalize ambient capture; your window is days, not quarters.
→ Culture taught the script; when that gaze becomes design default, consent erodes.
→ Harms follow defaults, not intentions; safety must be the floor.
→ Decide now: ban or strict defaults—and publish a door policy people can follow.

Published on LinkedIn