Immersive Wearables: Their Political and Social Effects and What Both Mean for Western Liberal Democracy

This article examines how some of the social and political implications to immersive wearables, particularly in their capacity as surveillance technology, threaten to transform if not undermine the fundamental values behind the western liberal democracy. Precisely because immersive wearables will, in many cases, prove invaluable easy will it probably be for their associated social and political risks to be lost among the excitement, at least early on. Before, that is, such risks become hard realities and woven into the fabric of civilization. For this reason, this article looks to serve as a modest premortem on the social and political implications to immersive wearables, whereby encouraging the practice of anticipating and proactively interrogating what it means to essentially transform the bodily act of apprehending both the physical world and the digital one––heretofore mostly disjointed experiences, united only by the faculties used––into one primarily mediated by networked computer interfaces based on immersion.