Lorde denounces AI glasses at Mad Cool Festival
Business Insider reports on stage remark in Madrid, wearable push meets live-music backlash
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Singer Lorde used a festival stage in Madrid to pick a fight with a consumer gadget. During her set at Mad Cool Festival, she denounced AI-enabled smart glasses with a blunt instruction to the crowd: “Fuck the glasses,” according to Business Insider.
The remark lands in the middle of a consumer-tech push to make cameras and always-on microphones feel like ordinary accessories. Smart glasses are sold as frictionless: hands-free photos, instant translation, a voice assistant that can see what you see. For performers, the same features look like a rolling expansion of the audience’s ability to record, identify, and repackage a show in real time, with fewer social cues that filming is happening at all. The shift is not only about piracy or etiquette; it changes the economics of attention around live events, where artists and promoters try to turn scarcity—one night, one crowd—into pricing power.
It also exposes a mismatch in who carries the downside. A festivalgoer who buys a new wearable gets the novelty and the content, while the costs of constant capture—misuse, harassment, doxxing, or deepfaked attribution—tend to land on the people who are most visible on stage and in the crowd. Venues can post “no filming” signs, but enforcement is mostly theater when recording is a default capability and devices are harder to spot than a raised phone. Meanwhile, manufacturers have an incentive to normalize the behavior quickly: the more the glasses look like just another pair of frames, the less likely anyone is to object, and the more data and usage patterns flow back into product development.
Lorde’s outburst is not a policy proposal, but it is a rare moment of cultural resistance expressed in the same blunt language that sells tickets. A single line from a headliner travels faster than any festival code of conduct, and it does so without the liability of having to implement rules.
At Mad Cool, the protest was just four words long. The glasses, unlike the set, do not end when the lights go down.