Facing the facts of a book full of faces - A burn letter to after more than a decade with Meta
It’s been in the name the whole time. A company founded by a maladapted Harvard student as a follow up to his non-consensual hot-or-not app. That first try – called Facemash[1] - scraped pictures of young women from Harvard sororities and put two of those faces side-by-side with a simple choice – Which of these two women are hotter? It’s a basic interaction, and the language of which that can be simplified further to the website’s the true question – Who, of the two people pictured, would you[2] rather fuck? Facemash getting memory-holed obscured his intentions for a while, but now that Mark Zuccerberg and his companies are now mask-off in their embrace of authoritarians, it’s evident that the drive behind his companies is exactly the same. Collect your face and then fuck you.
Underpinning the whole interaction with social media (of which Meta companies have a partial monopoly) has been the Faustian bargain that you can use them for free, but you are the product. For almost two decades the assumption underpinning this dynamic was that user-as-product would be for the purpose of advertising – when asked in an infamous 2018 congressional hearing how Facebook companies made any revenue, Zuckerberg replied “Senator, we run ads.”[3] But shareholders demand yearly revenue increases and there are only so many ads you can sell, so how do you make more money from a product you offer for free? Simple, by exploiting a resource you’ve been amassing since the beginning via a culture your products helped cultivate – The profile pic, the selfie, and every derivation thereof that’s been posted to products[4]. It is a book of faces, and with the news of Name Tag, it’s looking to cash in.
In case you missed it, Meta’s aspirations to transplant all social interactions into a universe that could charitably be compared to corporate Memphis if it lacked anything below the waistline[5] failed. Meta, drawing ideas from another company it acquired from another maladapted founder[6], adapted the VR[7] tech of Oculus into AR[8], and partnered with another multi billion-dollar monopoly EssilorLuxottica[9] to make the Ray-Ban & Oakley Meta glasses, released in 2023. They became wildly popular, maybe only exceeded popularity in the wearables category by the Apple Watch. Crucial to their success has been one of their core features – the always ready camera integrated into the front of the frames, allowing for easy recording of what/whoever is in front of the wearer. So then, it was only a matter of time before the company with the huge database of faces merged that asset with a device that has an AI - augmented camera, into the recently unearthed Name Tag.
As reported by the New York Times citing an unreleased Meta memo[10], Name Tag is a planned proposed feature for their Ray-Ban & Oakley collaboration that will allow wearers of these smart glasses to identify people and link to their Meta accounts using facial recognition via the biometric data Meta has already collected. In a planned transparently cynical PR move, Meta planned to announce this feature at a conference for the blind, billing it as an accessibility feature. But in the same way that Facebook was a great way to stay in touch with your high school classmates but became the way your uncle got radicalized by Alex Jones and now only posts screeds about a pizza joint in New Jersey, there’s going to be massive negative consequences of this technology when implemented.
For one, people[11] are already using the Meta Ray-bans glasses to harass and non-consensually record other people[12]. The one concession given to alerting those being recorded by the camera in the glasses – a small LED in the frames that lights up when recording – is easily circumvented[13] and – per the NYT article – may possibly be disabled altogether. Biometrics, including facial recognition, have been used by authoritarian governments for longer than the term has existed. In the olden days all you had to do was conjure up the image of a doctor with a set of calipers taking cranial measurements, nowadays these systems are automated and already in place - The genocide of the Uyghur population of in the Xinjian area of China that is enabled by facial recognition[14], or how about the genocide in Palestine whereby the IDF identified targets and their families via facial recognition.[15] But no need to go as far-of-field as China or Isreal to find fascists using Meta technology – CPB agents have been documented as wearing Meta Ray-Bans during immigration raids[16] and are already using facial recognition systems[17]. And all of that is before one of the largest companies[18] in the world incorporates facial recognition into a product that reportedly has over 7 million active users in the world. Sci-Fi writers and designers love the term speculative worldbuilding, whereby you project a scenario enabled by a new technology out to their logical endpoint. Lets try a bit of it ourselves…
Scenario 1 – A younger woman named Sally is riding a train home late at night. A Creep in the same train car starts staring at Sally. Sally may or may not have noticed the Creep, but in either case The Creep has already recorded Sally without her knowledge because the Creep is wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The Creep now has a photo or video of Sally.
Scenario 1, but with Name Tag as proposed – Instead of simply recording Sally without her consent, The Creep – using Name Tag on his Ray-Ban Meta Glasses – is able to instantly find Sally’s Instagram page because she’d posted a selfie.[19] The Creep then proceeds to scroll through her page and ascertain that:
- Sally’s full name, including all the other information in her bio.
- Sally doesn’t have a boyfriend because she unfollowed the last one she tagged in a picture.
- The approximate location of her apartment because she posted a photo of the view off her balcony.
- That she likely doesn’t have a dog, as there are no photos of one.
- And the approximate time she’s at home, because she’s posted veiled messages about working a 9-5 office job, usually with a photo of coffee.
Now, scenario 1 assumes that Sally isn’t an op-sec wonk, but none of that information would be as readily available without Name Tag. Scenario 1 also doesn’t assume any state action is involved, so let’s go a bit bigger…
Scenario 2 – James is a light skinned man that has lived in the US for the past 2 years while his asylum application is processed. James walks past an unmarked car containing an ICE agent. The ICE agent, looking out the car window and seeing a light skinned man that doesn’t match their racist targeting profile[20], ignores the man.
Scenario 2, but with Name Tag as proposed – James walks past the ICE agent’s vehicle and the ICE agent - using Name Tag on his Ray-Ban Meta Glasses – Instantly pulls up James’s IG page and is able to see:
- His full name, including all the other information in his bio.
- That the majority of James’s IG posts are in a foreign language and are of locations in a foreign country.
- The majority of his connections are also speaking a foreign language, a few of which he lives with and have posted recently.
- His WhatsApp profile, which has a phone number associated with it, is an international number.
James now fits the ICE agent’s targeting profile and is subsequently kidnapped off of the street.
And both of these scenarios present a future purely as Name Tag is proposed, not imaging any other integrations into the backend systems of Meta that any authoritarian government could insist on including as part of allowing Meta to operate in their country. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where any face captured by Name Tag is checked against any number of watchlists, like what was recently reported as happening with any photo of a face uploaded to Open AI / Chat GPT since 2023.[21]
And as a cherry on top, the integration of Name Tag into a consumer product sets the precedent for that facial recognition is something useful to the average user, a precedent that is deeply antisocial – Why bother talking to someone when you can see everything you need to know based off of their IG bio? Its use will normalize a technology that has repeatedly been shown to cause harm in almost every application it’s used in, and which the United States congress has largely abdicated its role in regulating in a meaningful way[22]. If Flock cameras normalized Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs, which have their own negative privacy implications[23]), Name Tag will do the same for facial recognition.
Which brings me back to Meta. Their entire project has been a process of normalizing otherwise antisocial behaviors – Stalking peoples profiles, turning individuals into content, and regulating speech in a way that would make their product more palatable to advertisers[24] - Name Tag is just the most recent example of such. Hell, per the NYT article - Meta was planning on building facial recognition into the first versions of the Ray-Bans back in 2021 but cut it due to “practical and ethical concerns”. I wonder what those concerns could have been and what happened between now and then to warrant its reintroduction? No need to guess, they cited it in the internal memo, per the New York Times article:
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”
So they (Meta) know they’re doing is wrong and they’re betting that if they launch while everyone is tied up with the world on fire, they’ll be able to get away with it. They made their book full of faces, and now they want to further fuck over anyone who ever used their platforms. It’s a clear indication of their true internal priorities, which has always been to take the content and time that users sink into their platform and try to milk every last cent out of it, no matter the harm. Hell, there are over 1,600 pending legal cases against Meta alleging that they intentionally made their products addictive and ignored internal research that concluded as much[25]
I, as a user, have had to deal with the decades long enshitification of every meta product. I’ve tried to rationalize the reasons to stay with it, all the benefits of it. But this is it, this is the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. In no particular order:
Fuck Facebook, fuck WhatsApp, fuck Occulus, fuck Instagram, fuck the Ray-Bans / Oakley glasses, and most of all – Fuck Mark Zuckerberg and the horse he rode in on. I’m done. I’m deleting everything I ever contributed to that vampiric company called Meta and I’m not looking back.
I’ve been using Facebook and its subsequent sister products since 2009, and during that time have spent thousands of hours within their products. I remember posting pictures of my outfit for Sophomore prom to my profile[26], and enjoying connecting with friends there. Hell, I even started a political memes page in 2015 that had a few thousand followers at it’s peak – I clowned on the absurd antics of Trump during the 2016 campaign and had a blast doing it. However, the vibe shifted in 2016, and it’s been getting worse and worse ever since.
There have, of course, been many reasons beyond Nametag to stop using Meta products. To name a few[27]:
· Facebook events monopolized party planning, Facebook groups consolidated many interest groups into private groups, Facebook Marketplace consolidated what was left of craigslist, all of which could only be interacted with if had a Facebook account.
· Purchasing Oculus, giving Palmer Luckey a billion dollars to go found a company to make tools to kill people.
· Subsequently, taking Oculus and buying every VR forward game studio could find to consolidate the market around their product. And then when it turned out that VR wasn’t going to be as big of a product as they’d hoped, unceremoniously killing almost every one of those studios, including the ones that still had actively engaged user bases like Supernatural.
· It made Peter Theil fabulously rich.
· Bought out the fledgling app Instagram for a billion dollars, explicitly to kill competition with Facebook.
· Bought WhatsApp, allowing Meta to harvest more data off of user interactions outside of Facebook and IG.
· Meta rushed an integration of all of its messaging apps into a single unified system to do an end-run around a possible anti-trust crackdown – IE, making it much harder for Instagram and WhatsApp to possibly be split off from Facebook.
· Pouring fuel onto the fire wherein how something photographs becomes a key indicator of how valuable a work of art is – Instagram art aesthetics as a thing, like the “painting reveal video.”
· Being one of the key platforms in the rise of influencer culture. I do not want to know a single thing about any Kardashian.
· Cambridge Analytica.
· As already mentioned, ignoring clear internal research that indicated that their products were actively harmful to their users, particularly young women. This data only came to light because a whistleblower – Francis Haugen – was so alarmed by this that she disclosed it to the SEC and Wall Street Journal.
· Automatically switching user feeds from chronological to algorithmic.
· Facilitating and then implicitly encouraging the takeover of said feeds with engagement bait AI slop – Shrimp Jesus.
· Mark Zuckerberg choosing to commission Daniel Arshram, a choice almost as aesthetically bankrupt as the graphic tees he’s chosen to wear in his MMA phase.
· While we’re on Zuck – pulling the classic supervillain move of buying his own island and then building a compound on it, which is a move you definitely do when you are doing purely legal things on said island.
And many more, these are just the ones that I can name off the top of my head.
But I think that’s all I’ve got for now. If you’re a person that followed me on Instagram, I’m sorry it’ll be more difficult to see what I’m up to, but I promise it’ll be better this way. I have an email newsletter (not a Substack, sign up link below) where I write about what I’ve been up to and am considering booting up a tumbler for when I just want to post a pretty picture I took. Will update this post with that.
And again, Fuck Meta.
- Mac Pierce
[1] The Harvard Crimson - https://web.archive.org/web/20091204153115/https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/4/hot-or-not-website-briefly-judges/
[2] The assumed prestigious young men attending Harvard in the early 00’s
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTWUOxkfGQ
[4] The fact that “selfie picture for the algorithm” is a recurring motif in IG stories makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
[5] Meta’s product Horizon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgj50IxRrKQ
[6] Palmer Luckey - https://youtube.com/shorts/bNrRPquePOY
[7] Virtual Reality
[8] Augmented Reality
[9] Why your glasses are expensive - https://www.reuters.com/article/business/luxottica-and-essilor-in-46-billion-euro-merger-to-create-eyewear-giant-idUSKBN14Z10Z/
[10] NYT - https://archive.is/9tHvo
[11] Read: douchebags, most visibly influencers (synonyms) - another term spawned from the long legacy of Instagram.
[12] Mashable - https://web.archive.org/web/20260122125334/https://mashable.com/article/meta-ray-ban-glasses-are-making-it-easier-to-film-strangers-for-content
[13] 404 Media - https://web.archive.org/web/20251023131321/https://www.404media.co/how-to-disable-meta-rayban-led-light/
[14] The Bulletin of Automic Scientists - https://web.archive.org/web/20250726140841/https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/chinas-high-tech-surveillance-drives-oppression-of-uyghurs/
[15] The Guardian - https://web.archive.org/web/20260209235055/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/idf-facial-recognition-surveillance-palestinians
[16] 404 Media - https://web.archive.org/web/20260212135530/https://www.404media.co/a-cbp-agent-wore-meta-smart-glasses-to-an-immigration-raid-in-los-angeles/
[17] The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/27/ice-facial-recognition-minnesota
[18] The founder of which has donated money to Trump’s inauguration and ballroom project.
[19] Theoretically even the selfie was posted to her Facebook page a decade ago, as it’s all tied to a Meta account, not just Instagram page, and Meta has no language about how long they hold onto biometrics information or photos that could contain biometrics.
[20] Family Guy put it best - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2626870/mediaviewer/rm3592634368/
[21] https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona
[22] As a spot of some hope, Illinois is one of a handful of US states that has any sort of Biometric privacy law on the books - https://law.justia.com/codes/illinois/chapter-740/act-740-ilcs-14/ - These systems are not absolute nor are they inevitable
[23] ACLU - https://web.archive.org/web/20260218151313/https://www.aclu.org/web/20260218151313/https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[24] Unalived, gxnocide, g@za – to name a few.
[25] LA Times - https://web.archive.org/web/20260218210926/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-18/mark-zuckerberg-tesimony-la-social-media-trial
[26] With an obscene scene-swish hairdo dyed platinum, black, & red.
[27] I am an artist, and many of the reasons I’m going to list here are particular to the arts.