They live ... in real time

They live ... in real time

They Live, John Carpenter's prescient sci fi movie, now plays in real time thanks to Zuck's desire to watch everybody in real time with AR glasses costing only $299 if you act right now as this price point won't last long.

 

Walk past a certain bus stop near Meta's London headquarters and you see a glossy campaign shot: Kylie Jenner in a pair of the company's smart glasses. Step to the side and the poster becomes a black-and-white X-ray of her face under the words "We're always watching."

The swap is deliberate. As Hyperallergic reported, the piece is a lenticular spoof ad installed by Everyone Hates Elon, a UK activist group that stages public interventions aimed at tech billionaires. The poster is printed so the image you see changes with your viewing angle, which is how one advertisement holds two opposite meanings at once. From straight on, it sells the glasses. From the side, it warns you about them.

The design leans on They Live, John Carpenter's 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that strip advertising down to its real commands and reveal who is actually running things. Reworking Jenner into a skeletal figure is the group's way of saying the sales pitch and the surveillance are the same product. The group did not hedge its language either. A spokesperson told Hyperallergic that Meta spent years tracking people online and now wants to track them in the physical world too, and framed the glasses as a tool that can be used to secretly record women and young people.

The timing lands hard because of what Meta is reportedly building next. Last month the company expanded beyond its Ray-Ban models with a new Meta-branded line developed with EssilorLuxottica. The range starts at $299 and includes a $399 model co-designed with Jenner. Meta's recent camera glasses can record clips of up to three minutes. But according to reporting from the Financial Times, picked up widely across tech press, Meta has also been testing a "super sensing" mode that would continuously capture audio and snap photos every few seconds so an AI could reconstruct your day for you. The detail that turned heads: executives were reportedly debating whether to light the recording LED at all while that mode ran. Nothing final has been announced, but the stakes are clear. For a stranger nearby, that small light may be the only immediate sign the glasses are capturing anything, and the poster's tagline reads very differently once you know it might not switch on.

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with
the user's phone via Bluetooth

They live ...