GoKawiilMeta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.
“Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover says. “We couldn’t disagree more.”
Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.
“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the voiceover says. “The future is for everyone.”
That’s a nice sentiment — pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song “Five Years.”
If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about.
“I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth,” he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass extinction event in five years.
Image Credits:Texts from my brother, a consenting participant in this literary experiment
If you’re not familiar with Bowie’s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word “people” over and over again, and without the context of the song, it’s not clear what it’s about.
But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:
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