Meta just released a new ad for its creeper glasses. In the video, Kylie Jenner, the new face of the glasses called Starfire, goes through a day-in-the-life style video from her point of view. Mostly, she’s led around her own house in a haze by various vendors and assistants. Kylie’s character makes half a glass of green smoothie, then we watch her bland interactions with a guy cleaning her pool, a grinning skincare brand employee who gently puts some cream on her hand and whispers “alright, let’s move,” someone bringing her a bouquet from her mom (she replies “thanks…”) and people moving a huge weird sculpture around her cavernous home.
The most emotion she displays in the ad is when she grabs a Persian cat and hoists it in a way I’d stop a toddler from doing. In a jarring transition away from the cat and the movers, we see her start inexplicably grabbing black spray paint from her massive closet (???) and jumping in an unbranded black SUV, then speeding to a billboard of her own face. In another unsettling transition that would work in an Ari Aster horror movie, the perspective is no longer from her own eyes, but from about 30 yards behind the car. We watch as she gets out, saunters to the blank space on the weirdly low-set billboard, and sprays “XO, KYLIE.”
Meta has endured years of brand crises with its smart glasses. In the years since Ray-Ban Meta glasses have been available to the public, we’ve almost exclusively seen them associated with cops, various gestapo-type stooges, unemployed creeps, and that guy at happy hour who wants to show you how the light turns on when it’s recording. During that time, 404 Media has documented all of this, and in the course of that reporting, heard time and time again from Meta that the glasses are NOT that creepy and definitely NOT cop-glasses.
When Jason broke the story about a Customs and Border Control (CBP) agent wearing Ray-Ban Metas to a raid, a Meta spokesperson asked 404 Media a series of questions about the framing of the article, stressing that Meta does not have a contract with CBP. The spokesperson asked why 404 mentioned Meta in this story — again, a story about Meta’s glasses seen on the face of an immigration officer. “I’m curious if you can explain why it is Meta will be mentioned by name in this piece when in previous 404 reporting regarding ICE facial recognition app and follow up reporting the term ‘smartphones’ or ‘phone’ is used despite ICE agents clearly using Apple iPhones and Android devices,” they said. I actually can’t parse this statement to this day. But Meta has seemed pretty stressed about the image of its smart glasses and slick Ray-Ban partnership for a long time. For them to sell to a mass market, the company desperately needed them to stop being associated with loser behavior, fast.
Each of us here have wondered aloud at various points in the last few years about whether Ray-Bans, the once-cool, hipster-coded, mid-luxury sunglasses brand, would keep tolerating this slow image suicide by association with Meta’s depraved quest for a more complete consumerist surveillance state. In October, Emanuel wrote: “I wonder how long Ray-Ban will want to be associated with this product, and if it’s going to tank the reputation of one of the most iconic fashion items in the world before it pulls out.” Ray-Ban hasn’t pulled out from its other offerings, as far as I can tell, and those glasses have reportedly made Meta and Ray-Ban’s parent company a boatload of money. There are many different brands and types of smart glasses being sold by Meta now, with other glasses brands. But it’s noteworthy that for this new It-Girl iteration, Ray-Ban is not along for the ride.
So: Meta’s in a coolness crisis, cops and stalkers are tainting the concept worse than Google Glassholes ever did, they had one chance. In comes Kylie. With the Starfire glasses, we have a few decades-long arcs coming full circle.
Podcast: Why Are DHS Agents Wearing Meta Ray-Bans?
CBP’s use of Meta Ray-Bans; the bargain that voice actors are having to make with AI; and how Flock tech is being essentially hacked into by the DEA.
Meta’s products have been accused and found guilty of damaging young people’s self esteem, especially girls’ confidence and mental health, year after year to the point that it can only be described as a business strategy. Just this week, the company lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 29 attorneys general who claim that “research has shown that children’s use of Facebook and Instagram could lead to depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and self-harm including suicide,” Reuters reported. Meta has built the world’s most profitable and popular panopticon; Smart glasses that turn everyone into an influencer, narc, and walking data collection apparatus are the logical next step. Meta’s original mistake was aiming for middle aged men, the primary market for Ray-Bans. No one thinks that demographic defines coolness; women aged 18-24, however, have been right there all along. They just had to make the glasses slightly less nerdy looking, and put them on the world’s most recognizable, aspirational, brand-safe face.
They had a lot of these to choose from, and I’m not saying other influencers, or the celebrity influencer pool in general, is pure of heart apart from Kylie Jenner and the Kardashian extended universe. And the Kardashian name has its own poisonous brand associations that would rule Kim or Kylie’s other sisters out of the running for Meta’s new glasses product spokesperson. The Kardashians, while controlling and at times subverting the ways reality television and our parasocial culture prey on women’s bodies, could shake hands with Meta’s influence on girls’ body image. They’ve dictated the course of beauty standards unsubtly and effectively for years, to the point of becoming an endless research topic for social scientists, psychologists and anthropologists. Being like Kylie is seen as being cool, effortless, skinny, rich, unopinionated and unproblematic. And lonely.
The lifestyle in Meta’s latest glasses ad portrays an unattainably wealthy and kind of bored existence where Kylie never sees another person who isn’t on her payroll. These Meta glasses are anti-social from the jump. If all we have is this ad to judge the product, they’re not about capturing memories with your friends at the bar or a party. They’re about packaging one’s life and then viewing it as an out-of-body experience, like you’re already dead. As a piece of media, the ad is the inverse of Chris Samra’s “stealth” Waves smart glasses video, which portrayed the social life of a total fuckhead.
Contrast these with projects like Jenny Zhang’s Computer Angel, a hair clip camera prototype that records her life from her point of view. She records nights out, passes it to other people, takes it off and sticks it on railings to record herself dancing. The important part is that it looks like a camera on the wearer’s head, and isn’t trying to disappear. It reminds me of the very early days of lifecasting, the early 2000s genre of online live stream pioneered by Jennifer Ringley’s Jennicam and also countless early webcam models. I won’t romanticize that time, however: Justin Kan’s Justin.tv, a 2007 experiment in livestreaming, famously caught him getting swatted in his San Francisco apartment while on stream and was funded by Y Combinator and sponsored by companies like Zipcar and Bawls energy drinks (RIP). It grew into what we now know as Twitch.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that the Starfire glasses, or the Ray-Ban Metas, are an attempt to hide the camera from the subject. We assume the camera is everywhere now, anyway, and we all act like it. The primary emotions I feel watching the new ad are sadness and a vague, quiet discontentment. Meanwhile, Instagram is already full of young people, primarily women, unboxing, reviewing, and promoting the glasses. With Kylie’s star power behind these glasses, we risk losing our grip on the last shred of privacy, autonomy, and control of our own images online.
