I'm not sure what tipped me off first, but as someone who writes about wearable technology for a living, I can definitely see the signs. Wearables are, frankly, uncool, and manufacturers have to work to make them cool again by earning back their customers' trust and embracing the sense of fun we used to have.
Maybe it was the celebrities that clued me in — millennials, Gen Z and Gen X alike — when they were sparking trends for wired headphones and digital Casio watches, a conscious symbol of Big Tech rejection that's carried over from the resurgence of vinyl and cassettes. I'm now seeing plenty of people around my local town opting for wired headphones over earbuds and AirPods. While there are still plenty of smartwatches on wrists every day, I'm noticing stylish people are returning to rotary, analog, and digital.
Perhaps it was the backlash to the Diary of a CEO podcast host Steven Bartlett, when a clip resurfaced in May, that he could tell how a couple of glasses of wine "ruined three days of his life" by relying on the information collected by his Whoop band. While giving up alcohol is universally considered an admirable thing to do, he was also resoundingly mocked online for his slavish adherence to hustle culture, sparking further questions and a wider conversation about whether we're over-optimizing with biohacking technology.
Discourse online is shifting away from gamifying health and fitness and prioritizing higher physical statistics, and returning to the now-nostalgic idea of living in the moment — of dancing the night away at a wedding without worrying about the impact on your sleep score.
Maybe it was the one-two punch to Meta recently. First came the announcements that some features of its AI glasses will be locked behind a soft paywall, joining Whoop, Garmin, Oura, and almost every other wearable introducing subscription-based features over owning and accessing your data. While I understand data centers need to cover running costs in perpetuity, subscriptions aren't cool. Not owning your own data isn't cool, which is again partly why physical media is enjoying a welcome resurgence — and why companies ranging from Spotify to Sony are determined to stamp it out. And Meta, after all its privacy controversies, definitely isn't cool.
These problems join the growing backlash to Meta's AI-powered specs being used to covertly film people — especially women — in public and private spaces alike, with the recording notification LED easily covered, drilled out or disabled. Being considered a creep is definitely not cool, even though plenty of people wear Meta glasses for a whole vista of non-creepy reasons.
The Meta Glasses controversies above coincided with the Kylie Jenner-designed debut of the Meta Starfire model, a collaboration with EssilorLuxottica attempting to make the Metas cool by association. She's even the voice of the onboard AI.
Kylie Jenner was, of course, declared the youngest-ever 'self-made' billionaire in 2019, who got there by standing on the shoulders of a family of multi-millionaires and being heir to another fortune. While Jenner is undoubtedly an ultra-famous influencer, this collaboration between two billionaires — Jenner and Zuckerberg — isn't going to be the move that makes the smart glasses format finally cool.
So what is 'cool'?
Coolness and counterculture have always run concurrent to each other. The Conquest of Cool, a book by cultural critic Thomas Frank about how youth culture in the 1960s was co-opted by capitalism to sell more stuff, argues that "hip and square are now permanently locked together", each dependent on the other for meaning, culture, and profit. This revolution, Frank argues, turned coolness into a product you can buy to separate yourself from the herd and express individuality. Now, cool is defined by products that are new and shiny, something everyone desires, but not everyone has.
Of course, once enough people have it, the counterculture that made it cool becomes the mainstream culture, and a different counterculture evolves in its place. 15 years ago, the original Fitbit, a digital pedometer, was a novel idea to help tech geeks get active, using the newfound power of Bluetooth and the internet. By contrast, the Google Fitbit Air is now a screenless Whoop clone made by data-hungry Google, in which all community features have been axed and the device is beholden to an AI chatbot requiring a monthly subscription. It's eminently more useful, but definitely not cool.
I believe this is why we're starting to reject the culture of endless subscriptions, the rise of AI, and the expectation to contribute to surveillance capitalism, and are expressing a nostalgic wish to return to a more analog era. Wearable tech, while very useful for athletes and those who need to monitor their health, isn't cool anymore because of its widespread adoption, its associations with dreary, dull, optimization-led behaviors, and its implied contribution of your data to ultra-capitalist Big Tech, which dominates every facet of our lives.
The prospect of Apple putting cameras in AirPods, or Samsung adding a premium subscription element to its watches, is now profoundly uncool. Digital watches and wired headphones show that the wearer is choosing not to participate in surveillance capitalism (up to a point — we've all got smartphones) and being a rebel has always been cool.
How can wearables become cool again?
Wearables will always have a place in health, wellness, and athletic situations, and people are now more conscious of their health and wellness than ever. The best smartwatches and their ilk aren't going away any time soon: they're useful devices for monitoring all sorts of athletic and recovery metrics. I'll still be seeing smart devices in the gym, on the start line, and on the wrists of everyday people for a long time yet. But they'll no longer be considered neat, fun gadgets.
My main thesis on 'how to make wearables cool again' is twofold. One is to dial back on the monetization of health, earning user trust by prioritizing privacy and user ownership, and reducing the need for subscription models where possible. We should own a product once we buy it.
The other is to make devices fun and joyful to wear, rather than functional. Forget Kylie Jenner pouting into the camera lens while wearing spyware specs: instead, let's embrace the dorkiness of strapping an advanced calculator watch to your wrist and get back to hacking our way to health.
My Garmin watch is incredibly useful. It helps me track my runs, gym sessions, and recovery. However, the most fun I had with it in years was when I downloaded the Walk With Frodo app and got to see the milestones from my favorite book linked to my step count. Walk With Frodo was created by RoboleoApps, which appears to be a single-person team that released it for free on the ConnectIQ store. While it's incredibly nerdy, when showing a couple of my (equally nerdy) friends, they both squealed, 'That's really cool!' To quote Marie Kondo, it sparked joy.
The upcoming Pebble Core 2 and Time 2 smartwatches share similarities with these DIY apps — Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has made the watch and app's operating systems completely open-source, allowing users to create widgets themselves using the source code and share them freely online. They're sporting digital watch-style MIP screens, so they look delightfully retro, and you can tell where any information they collect is going by virtue of the source code being freely available. It's antithetical to Big Tech's approach by design, but still fundamentally a useful smartwatch.
The internet used to be a place of infinite possibilities, where people shared ideas, code, widgets, and worked together to create cool stuff. If 'cool' is about both having what others don't and bucking trends, making fun, lower-tech, consumer-friendly wearables that lean into this customizable approach might be the way to harness this countercultural movement.
Existing app stores from Apple and Google are great places to start looking beyond the big brands for widgets and apps made by enthusiasts, but that DIY ethos should extend to hardware too.
Wearable tech needs to change if it wants to avoid being seen as square, rather than hip. Boutique watch straps and designer smart glasses won't make tech cool if the principles the devices are rooted in don't prioritize the user, rather than the producer. Let's get back to the consumer-first, joy-first, DIY approach of early wearables, turn our backs on anti-consumer practices, and embrace the build-it-yourself geek chic of it all.
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