The human hand has 29 bones and 29 major joints. It contains over 100 ligaments, connected to 34 muscles in the palm alone, each one responsible for the minute negotiations that allow us to tie our shoes, thread a needle, lift a glass, or juggle. Thirty arteries pump blood alongside them. Forty-eight nerves — running from the spine under the clavicle, through the armpit and down the length of the arm — conduct the electrical signals that let us turn a wrist, crook a finger, or make a fist. A quarter of the brain’s motor cortex is devoted to our hands.
On a rainy February Friday in Manhattan, a woman briskly worked a glove over my right hand and fastened a plastic ring onto my index finger. I sat on a stool in a windowless room, facing a rig studded with motion capture cameras angled inquisitively toward me. A large screen commanded my attention. When the light turns green, it read, use your wrist to control the cursor on the screen. Find the yellow circle and tap the ring on your index finger with your thumb to capture it!
The light turned green and the game began. A yellow circle appeared on the screen and I gave chase, flexing my wrist to send the cursor scurrying after it. Once I was hovering over the circle, I gave the ring a tap with my thumb. Each time I successfully clicked a circle, it produced a satisfying ka-ching! The circles became smaller as the game went on, and I found it harder and harder to accurately control the cursor. Dripping from my arm was a messy network of wires plugged into a large computer. All the while, as I hovered and tapped, a series of devices was steadily siphoning off my biometrics.
One bracelet around my forearm measured my skin temperature and heartbeat. Another bulkier one took more obscure readings: the movement of my thenar muscles as I brought my thumb down onto the ring, the lumbricals tensing each time I made a fist, the adductor and abductor muscles swinging from left to right as I bent my wrist. I was selling this information — unconsciously performed, useless to me — to Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram.
Everyone else seemed to be like me: people with four hours to spare on a weekday afternoon.
I’d found this gig on Craigslist, where at least three times a day a chipper listing — “Come test wearable tech in Midtown!” — advertised the opportunity. I was broke, so I signed up. That day about 40 of us showed up at the Farley Building on Ninth Avenue, the multiblock former post office where Meta leases about 700,000 square feet of office space. Inside a drab lobby, we handed over our IDs and were issued visitor passes. Attendants arranged us in groups of 10 before herding us into the elevators. On the second floor, we were led quickly through an airy common space filled with overgrown monstera plants. Everyone else seemed to be like me: people with four hours to spare on a weekday afternoon. They were mostly young, in their 20s and 30s, speaking Hindi, Spanish, Haitian Creole. Three siblings sat next to me wearing big coats and flip-flops. I asked them if they did this kind of thing often. First time, they said, and pointed out that this study only recruited first-timers. Your body’s data was only valuable once.
We were in a small classroom. “Today is a great day to collect data!” someone had written on the whiteboard in front of us. One by one, we were called up to have our wrists measured. Measuring tape was wrapped around my forearm and a sliding gauge was delicately placed over my radius and ulna, the slender bones in the wrist. A smiling man named Calvin entered the measurements on an iPad. “Maximilien,” he said, pausing over my name. “That’s a great name. That’s a name that, like, makes me wanna go into battle.”
Next we were shown a video introducing the project. Meta was grateful for our participation. Meta appreciated our contribution. By joining this study, we were advancing the future of wearable tech. Little was said about what that future might look like, but the video included a couple of shots of a woman sitting on a wraparound couch, serenely stroking a ring to navigate the Netflix site. Wearable tech promised total integration: sleek, friendly, unobtrusive devices that slip onto a finger or over a wrist, folding the virtual world directly into your field of vision. You put on your Ray-Ban Meta Glasses in the morning and your emails slide across the lens; you flick your wrist — encircled by a Neural Band — to open and answer them. Very soon, the video seemed to promise, you could sit at home wearing your Meta Glasses and your little bracelet, and all your content — your Instagram Reels and Threads, your Facebook feed, your endless scroll — would float before you, right up against your retinas.
* * *
Meta has been chasing this vision of total tech immersion since 2014, when it bought Oculus VR, a company that makes bulbous, face-hugging virtual reality headsets. Gamers liked Oculus’ gear, but the general public was less entranced. They were expensive — early models started at $599 each — and clunky, and the experience of 360-degree immersion in “Roblox” or “The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners” brought on motion sickness in many users. The r/oculus subreddit is dominated by discussion of nausea: how to mitigate it (“legal herbal remedies depending on what state you live in :)”), how to avoid it altogether (“small amounts of alcohol also help”), and in some cases, how to purposefully induce it (“Cooking simulator is super fun but man i be throwing up all over your sautéed mushrooms”).
Meta executives nevertheless seemed certain that this pricey, vomitous novelty promised something much bigger. In 2020, Oculus was folded into a larger division called Facebook Reality Labs, tasked with developing what Mark Zuckerberg would soon begin calling the Metaverse. The project was long in the making: In a statement released shortly after his company purchased Oculus, Zuckerberg had hailed his latest acquisition as “a new communication platform.” “By feeling truly present,” he went on, “you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life.”
As of last month, Reality Labs’ losses since 2020 totaled more than $80 billion.
“Presence” is a favorite word of Zuckerberg’s. The feeling of presence, he explained in a promotional video in 2021, would be “the defining quality of the Metaverse.” The video cuts to a scene of Zuck’s cartoonish Metaverse avatar playing poker with a giant robot in a space station. No one could mistake that for presence. Variously mocked and ignored, the Metaverse withered. As of last month, Reality Labs’ losses since 2020 totaled more than $80 billion.
Faced with an overwhelming lack of public interest in bumbling around poorly rendered virtual worlds, Meta decided to pursue a subtler strategy: Rather than replace reality, it would attempt to augment it. In 2023, the company partnered with Ray-Ban to release Meta Glasses, chunky-framed eyeglasses equipped with tiny cameras and a voice-controlled AI chatbot. Initially the glasses seemed like a gimmick — a stocking stuffer for techie teens, something Q might slip 007 in one of the cheesier Bond films — but they became a surprise success. Seven million pairs were sold in 2025.
The Ray-Ban Metas owe much of their success to the popularity of short-form video. When you’re wearing your glasses, the whole world — restaurants, laundromats, nightclubs, funerals — becomes grist for your content mill. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’re sure to come across at least three videos pulled straight off someone’s Metas: white boys stunning restaurant workers with their fluent Mandarin; “awkward rizz” at the frat function; tours of luxury apartments. Being “truly present,” Meta realized, didn’t require abandoning the real world. It simply required filming it all the time.
Early iterations of the Ray-Ban Metas were essentially just hidden cameras, but last September, Meta added an in-lens display to its third-generation model. The translucent screen sits slightly off-center in the lens, invisible to the people around you. Meanwhile, a Neural Band, wrapped tightly around your wrist, controls the display by reading electrical signals generated by your muscle movements; your neural system becomes the input.
* * *
At the Farley Building, video played on the projector screen in front of us. A handsome man rotated his wrist and pinched his fingers together to zoom in on a family photo, all while walking his golden lab down the block. As the video played, attendants quietly stacked prototype Neural Bands on a table nearby. We would be testing these.
The video ended and we were called out to different testing rooms. In my room, the motion-capture cameras once again glowered. At first, the games were amusing. I felt like a dog chasing virtual balls around the screen. Ka-ching! But it quickly became boring. I stopped caring whether or not I found my target and let the cursor hang there listlessly. I imagined my data points, flowing into the wires trailing from my arm, becoming confused and erratic. Somewhere, I thought, was a researcher, or perhaps an AI agent, who would translate these infinitesimal adjustments of my muscles and ligaments into trackable, monetizable patterns. There was something unsettling about the precision of these readings. Having long since absorbed my attention span and digital habits into its global archive of human behavior, Meta was now determined to collect these last, individual, trifling details: the flick of my finger, the turn of my wrist, the places my eyes lingered on the screen. I let my hand drop. I stopped chasing the ball. I hoped they would conclude that the appeal of wearable tech declines dramatically after the first half hour of use.
I felt like a dog, chasing virtual balls around the screen.
More instructions. Swing your arm from side to side to move the cursor. Make a fist. Tap the ring on your index finger gently. To my right, a woman was going through the same motions. She was focused, making effortful swipes of her wrist, but the Neural Band was becoming less responsive. The cursor lagged, or refused to move at all. I’d noticed the same thing happening to me. The signals from my muscles were becoming harder for the band to read. Ideally, the band would translate these minute electrical impulses into rapid, precise movement. The ambition was frictionlessness: no mouse, no keyboard, no thumb swipe on a greasy screen. Just your hand at your side, swiveling almost imperceptibly. More than that, the system sought to close the gap between intention and action, between thinking you wanted something and doing it. Watch a reel, send a text, take a photo: As soon as you knew what you wanted, it would be happening.
But the technology just wasn’t there yet. In the tests, the Neural Band was slow and inexact; worse, the whole idea seemed dorky. Meta’s promotional materials showcase attractive young professionals discreetly dashing off texts or asking the glasses’ built-in AI for pico de gallo recipes. Their hands remain mostly concealed, fingers tapping away at an invisible keyboard, before they return to the party. “It’s designed for short interactions that you’re always in control of,” a Meta company blog post promises. In practice, the technology creates a new kind of full-body distraction. If you watch videos of people testing out the Meta Glasses in conjunction with the Neural Bands, they appear lost in a light trance: cross-eyed, gazing slackly at a point just above the tip of their nose, twitching their wrists in cryptic movements. The effect is unnerving. In one video, a tester’s body crumples every time she summons the glasses’ in-lens display. She holds her hand out rigidly, contorting it as she manipulates the tiny screen. Her colleague looks on, bemused. “He could tell I was not fully present and looking at a display,” she tells the camera afterward. “So we’ll see what that does to society.”
Watching my neighbor fumble with her own Neural Band, it was hard to believe that anyone was especially keen to embed Meta’s systems even deeper in their lives. So far, attempts to stuff AI chatbots into physical devices have been commercial disasters. Humane, a company founded in 2018 by two former Apple employees, began shipping its AI “pin” — a small, discreet block of metal and glass that you can affix to your shirt — to customers in 2024. The gadget was voice-controlled, and like most AI companions, it could take photos, add events to a calendar, play music and even project images onto a flat surface. Upon release, the pin failed miserably. It was slow and unhelpful, and it frequently overheated. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission deemed its charging case a fire hazard and had it recalled. In 2025, HP bought Humane for just $116 million — peanuts, in Silicon Valley terms. The purchase did not include the AI pin, which was unceremoniously dumped.
Silicon Valley seems determined that we accept this future.
Similar problems plagued the rollout of Friend, a small, round silver pendant with a built-in chatbot that listens to you and responds with quippy texts sent to your phone. The device’s inventor, Avi Schiffmann, spent over $1 million to plaster ads for Friend throughout the New York subway. “[Friend] noun: someone who listens, responds, and supports you,” the copy read, next to a picture of the smooth, faintly glowing orb. The campaign inadvertently demonstrated exactly how people felt about AI’s creeping intrusion into daily life. Last summer, most of the Friend ads on my train had been defaced. “AI will never be your friend,” someone had scrawled across one. “We do not have to accept this future,” read another.
Silicon Valley seems determined that we accept this future. Later this year, OpenAI is expected to release its own AI device, produced in collaboration with Jony Ive, designer of the original iPhone. If the images leaked online are accurate, the product will take the form of a white, oblong, palm-sized speaker, like Amazon’s Alexa, that will recognize your voice and respond in the fulsome tones of ChatGPT. At first glance, it’s a far cry from the iPhone, a revolution in product design that reoriented everyday life.
And that, ultimately, has been the problem. Silicon Valley’s dogged efforts to take AI off our phones and put it into our hands — or on our bodies, or in our eyes — have struggled to answer a simple question: Why? If we’re expected to buy such gizmos, they should at least solve a problem, satisfy a demand. As it stands, the problem they most convincingly address is Silicon Valley’s own urgent need to turn AI — currently a trillion-dollar money suck with few clear paths to profitability — into something a lot of people will pay for. So far, the pins, glasses and pendants launched at us have been unwieldy, redundant and irredeemably unsexy. Contrary to their apparent purpose, they’ve also failed to lessen our dependence on our phones. Instead, they tend to trap users in an uneasy ménage à trois: our smartphones, our new gadgets and ourselves, caught in the middle.
* * *
Still, my neighbor and I in the Farley Building were making the tech better, in our small way. The mo-cap cameras were drinking in all of our frustration and boredom, our hesitations and mistakes. All that friction would be studied, reduced and engineered away.
When it was over, the attendant returned to strip off the glove and take my Neural Band. She sent me back into the other room, where a dozen other testers were waiting. Later I would read that some 200,000 consenting research subjects took part in the tests used to develop Neural Bands. Forty of us were here today, with scuffed shoes and hair still damp from the rain. As we waited to be dismissed, everyone was quiet, except for one older man. “So when are we getting paid?” he asked an attendant. In one to two business days she told him as she left the room.
The man turned back to look at the rest of us, dismayed. “I thought it was a cash payment.”
“Nah, man,” someone else spoke up. “It’s a gift card.”
They lined us up in a hallway and sorted us again into groups of 10. We walked past the fake tree that hung from invisible wires in the office’s enormous atrium and filed into the elevators. Once out on the street, everyone scattered. I stood there on Ninth Avenue, my muscles and ligaments settling back into their private arrangements.
A few days later, I got my $150 Visa gift card. For a little while, it helped close the gap between wanting something and having it. I bought groceries with it.
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