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Earlier this summer, socialite Kylie Jenner appeared in a series of ads promoting Meta’s controversial smart glasses.
The camera-adorned and AI-enabled spectacles, a collaboration with global eyewear juggernaut Ray-Ban, have been at the center of a discussion over personal privacy and surveillance so heated that many owners are now too afraid to be seen in public while wearing them.
Critics say they’re far too easily abused to prey on unsuspecting victims, even garnering them the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses.” Wired also found in June that Meta silently added a facial recognition system to its glasses’ software — yet another privacy nightmare in the making — but hadn’t activated it.
Now, an inventive group of activists calling themselves Everyone Hates Elon took matters into their own hands by transforming a Meta AI glasses ad featuring Jenner into a cleverly subversive statement. Specifically, they seem to have added a lenticular overlay on top of a London bus stop ad that transforms her visage into a terrifying bug-eyed monster — but only when seen from a specific angle.
As a video that’s making its rounds on social media demonstrates, standing right in front of the ad shows Jenner’s face as the black-and-white demon, with a bold type caption that reads: “We’re always watching.”
Users were quick to point out that the addition was referencing John Carpenter’s 1988 dystopian sci-fi epic “They Live,” in which the protagonist finds a pair of sunglasses that reveal subliminal messages hidden all over the world, in billboards and other media. They also expose a race of bug-eyed aliens that masquerade as humans, much like Jenner in the tampered-with Meta ad.
“Meta has spent years tracking us online,” an Everyone Hates Elon spokesperson told online arts magazine Hyperallergic. “Now it wants to track us in the real world too.”
As its name suggests, Everyone Hates Elon was formed last year to voice opposition to Elon Musk for his disastrous attempts to gut US government budgets, as well as spouting far-right talking points and racist rhetoric. It has run guerrilla poster campaigns that call Musk a “bellend,” and parody Tesla’s latest vehicle as “the Swasticar,” which can go “from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds.”
The group has also taken aim at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and president Donald Trump’s extensive relationship with deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
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