A Letter from the Editor

Thursday, 10 September, 2026.

Dear Reader,

Over the past weeks and months, the news has been littered with articles regarding the use of Meta Glasses in our cities. From Brisbane to Birmingham, concerns are growing about being filmed in public against our will and the footage later posted on social media. The assertion is that in public space we no longer have any privacy. Journalists address this as a new phenomenon, but in many respects it is but a contemporary mutation of our ongoing voyeuristic fascination with urban crowds. Think, for instance, Man with a Movie Camera, the 1929 silent documentary which used seemingly hidden cameras to capture various aspects of Soviet city life, and it is clear that the urge to record unposed, candid human life in public space has been with us as long as the film camera itself.

I began to wonder if the current Meta Glasses craze was in some way related to the pre-camera practice of flânerie, but with updated hardware. Social media ‘vultures’ have been criticised for ruthlessly exploiting the homeless, filming and posting footage of them in pursuit of views on platforms such as TikTok. It made me think of Baudelaire’s flâneur, who took the image of the nineteenth-century ragpicker without consent and turned it into poetry. How dissimilar was he to the smart glasses wearer? Both treat the crowd as raw stock for their own use. Both convert the act of walking into a form of extraction. Both might argue that they are in solidarity with their subject, claiming to raise awareness of their plight, rather than exploit it.

Yet, I would argue that the smart glasses wearer is not the flâneur’s twenty-first-century heir. The poet metabolises what they take from the city. A passerby is broken down, composed into an image, a line of words that rarely points directly back to its source. The glasses interpose nothing: the footage isn’t an artist’s rendering of the subject; it is the subject. Where the flâneur produces art from appropriation, the glasses wearer commits cannibalism as a matter of convenience, by consuming a passerby whole, unchanged, for self-gain alone.

The flâneur poet individuates and interprets in an attempt to read the city and its populace, to assign meaning rather than simply record presence. What results is repaid to the culture it was drawn from: a poem, a way of seeing or understanding the city that outlives the encounter. A smart glasses wearer who turns strangers into unpaid, unconsenting material for an anonymous audience isn’t documenting the city. They’re feeding upon it. Needless to say, I despise the way these glasses are currently being used; not to see the city, but to exploit it.

StepAway, as always, gathers writers who still practise the older discipline — looking, closely and honestly, at the city and the lives passing through. There is some great work in this issue. Enjoy it.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor[at]stepawaymagazine.com