Wearable tech used to be cool, but it is slowly becoming a symbol of surveillance capitalism dreck here's how to save it

Date:
Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Description:
As a wearables editor, I can see the signs of body-worn smart tech becoming uncool.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter 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. Latest Videos From Watch full video here:

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. (Image credit: Meta) 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. You may
like Smartwatches just aren't cool anymore here are 2 reasons why Why wearable AI must reduce cognitive overload Why Fitbit's Whoop-style tracker
is a better fit for the brand than a smartwatch

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. Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up
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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'? (Image credit:
Getty Images / ullstein bild) 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. What to read next Nothing is proving that smartphones can still be chic, and I hope other Android manufacturers are paying attention I love my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses but this summer Im giving up on them 'Self-powering' fabrics could be next the evolution of wearables

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? (Image credit: Future) 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. (Image credit: Future) 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. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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