Why Smart Glasses Are Being Rather Firmly Asked to Stay Home rather than attend Lodge Meetings?

Well, it turns out that giving everyone a tiny spy camera disguised as eyewear was perhaps not the civilisational masterstroke the tech boffins imagined.

Who could have predicted that the moment you make surveillance invisible, people would start surveilling things they oughtn’t? The courts got there first, naturally. New York and various other jurisdictions decided that courtroom proceedings probably shouldn’t be livestreamed to TikTok without anyone noticing, which seems reasonable enough. Royal Caribbean and the casinos have similarly cottoned on to the notion that guests in spas and locker rooms might prefer not to become unwilling stars of someone’s “hilarious” social media compilation and that punters gambling the week’s rent on number 13 might not want to be part of next week’s rap video. It also turns out that in many cases, the ability to stream the camera feed onto head-up display in exactly the same place in your vision, meant that it was possible to watch young ladies walk down the street in lingerie or in a birthday suit. OK, it was also wierd watching dogs lose their hair in certain glitches, but the hacks occurred within hours.

It’s that familiar tech industry oversight: “We invented covert filming hardware” followed swiftly by “Why is everyone secretly filming?”

Then there’s the driving question. Illinois bureaucrats, among others, quickly found out what 12 year olds already knew, that drivers wearing glasses that can ping them notifications, summon AI assistants, and generally provide multiple distractions of legal or less legal matter, tended to have a slight problem with a significant increase in what the Yanks call “fender bending”. Who could have guessed?

Shockingly this required legislation.

Meanwhile, exam invigilators discovered that a gadget with internet access and an AI brain strapped to your face is rather effective for cheating requiring every swot (and every cool dude) to be subjected to am intensive examination of their glasses and/or shades.

So yes, smart glasses are being banned because it turns out that whilst governments respecting democracy authorises= secret surveillance as standard, they don’t like it when the same secret surveillance capability drops down to the public, particularly when its police forces get shown up regularly for utter incompetence, completely inadequate training or sheer racism (or in the UK, some utterly nutty decision driven by indoctrination with woke critical race theory).

UGLE are undoubtedly right to ban smart glasses generally as these are remarkably sophisticated, and can quickly and effortlessly relay copies of footage and photographs to an external location and without the others present (and in some cases the less smart user) knowing this is happening.

The official position of Metropolitan Grand Lodge is that:
All Smart Glasses have no place in a Lodge or Chapter meeting, even if the device is turned off. In the same way, Grand Lodge in 2014 issued an edict that all mobile telephones must be switched off in open Lodge and Chapter. UGLE states “There is a privacy objection to smart glasses which, by their nature, are recording devices which are unobtrusive. It will not be immediately obvious to all others present that they are being worn and if so whether they are recording or not. Any form of photography, or transmission of images, during a meeting is strictly prohibited. Breach renders the member liable to disciplinary proceedings, whether or not a breach of Rule 177 of the Book of Constitutions has been committed.
The same applies to taking or transmitting audio recordings. All mobile telephones must be switched off in open Lodge and Chapter, in accordance with the Grand Lodge Edict as long ago as 2014.

The Masonic Conundrum of Looking Frightfully Intelligent
So too the society that definitely, absolutely isn’t a secret society, has developed what one might charitably describe as a “concern” about smart glasses, those rather marvellous devices that combine cameras, microphones, and the aesthetic of someone who has discovered the future at a technology conference and decided to wear it to their own funeral.

Smart Glasses provide the appearance that the user is smart because they provide a ‘heads-up display’ so that, for example, a pre-loaded ritual can be read by the wearer, which scrolls the text automatically as the device listens to the ritual – now personally, if the glasses are simply listening and not recording, there is no privacy problem and this is just the same as someone holding a ritual book, albeit some would argue that the glow in the lens is a big giveaway whereas the holding of the book hidden in one’s crotch is less obvious (albeit causing other concerns about the fiddling of fingers down there as you surreptitiously turn pages)

We can see the problem that suddenly the most intellectually challenged member of the Lodge comes onto par with the most intellectually fluent and ritually brilliant members of Lodge (assuming you have one of those in your lodge) and how can anyone know if you’ve spent hours learning the rituals or simply that you’re wearing glasses.

Now, one must be scrupulously fair to the wearers. Smart glasses do provide what the manufacturers call a “heads-up display”—a term that perfectly encapsulates the embarrassing irony, as the wearer invariably appears to be anything but smart, merely constipated and distracted. These devices can helpfully scroll ritual text automatically whilst listening to the officiating officer, which one supposes is roughly equivalent to holding a book, but I can see the problem that you could also be looking at invisible text whilst your glasses surreptitiously transmit haute-definition footage of everyone fully robed to a chap in Guildford who provides it onto the internet, duly removing the robes and clothes using AI.

The United Grand Lodge has therefore, and quite undoubtedly, been absolutely correct to issue their ban, but according to Elon Musk, he is working on contact lenses with the same capability of head up display, but fortunately no camera or microphone or smellivision (until Elon works out the logistics of that nasal gadget). Thus UGLE have prevented the sort of spying with silent efficiency that would make Cold War spymasters weep with envy, but soon with headup technology in contact lenses, the matter will have to be re-visited.

The official Metropolitan Grand Lodge position is delightfully categorical:
1. All smart glasses are banned, even when switched off.*
2. Mobile Phones are also banned in lodge. (2014 Edict).
3. Laptops are not banned in lodge.
*—rather like banning one’s uncle from Christmas dinner even when he’s asleep in the corner.
Hopefully, they will soon issue a co-ordinated Smart Device update to deal with the use of ipads to hold digital copies of ritual books and to cover the next generation of entirely head-up only stupid-glasses, which don’t even listen but are scrolled from a gadget held in the hand (or the preferred location of the groin if certain lodges are to be believed.