You can bring yourself to the dancefloor, just leave the camera at home.
There are still a few places where you can put your phone away, get sweaty and forget about the outside world for a couple of hours. A good dancefloor should be one of them.
BASEMENT, the techno club underneath Knockdown Center in Queens, New York, is taking that idea pretty seriously.
The club has announced a ban on smart glasses, including Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, as part of its existing no-photo and no-video policy.
And it’s not just a case of taking them off before you walk in.
BASEMENT says anyone caught wearing or even carrying smart glasses inside can be asked to leave and could face a lifetime ban.
It might sound like a lot for a pair of glasses, but the issue is pretty simple: they have cameras in them.
Unlike a phone, which is usually pretty obvious when someone is holding it up to record, smart glasses can capture photos and video from the wearer’s point of view.
There’s an indicator light when they’re recording, but from a crowded dancefloor, it’s not necessarily easy to know what someone is doing.
For BASEMENT, that’s enough of a reason to keep them out.
“Our no photo / no video policy exists to protect the privacy, safety and freedom of everyone on our dance floor,” the club said. “Devices that allow discreet recording are incompatible” with that policy.
It makes sense, particularly in a club where the no-phone rule is already part of the experience.
BASEMENT has a reputation for taking its dancefloor seriously, with its approach drawing plenty from the kind of club culture associated with places like Berlin’s Berghain.
The idea isn’t that nobody should ever take a photo again.
It’s more that, for a few hours, you shouldn’t have to wonder if the person dancing next to you is filming.
That’s becoming a bigger question as smart glasses become more common, too.
There have already been plenty of complaints about people using them to record strangers without their knowledge, particularly for social media.
So BASEMENT is the first club to draw a fairly clear boundary. I imagine there’ll be plenty of clubs following suit.
