Kylie Jenner’s Meta collab puts a fashionable face on surveillance

A new advertisement for Kylie Jenner’s special edition Meta Glasses is a stylized, first-person view of a morning in her life. Through Jenner’s $399 lenses, we watch as she murmurs directions to her staff: placement for a large “Beetlejuice”-esque statue, whether she likes the feeling of a moisturizer sample. We watch as she applies cuticle oil to her manicured set overlooking a pool being skimmed by a smiling older man, leafs through clothing hanging in her closet and through a pile of fan letters, makes a green smoothie.

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The glasses, called Meta Starfire Kylie edition, are part of Meta’s first line of in-house, celebrity-branded smart glasses. Jenner told Elle Magazine that she was involved in “everything” from campaign to design. She even lent her voice to the artificial intelligence for the product. “You ask. Kylie answers,” Meta’s website promises.

Jenner and her Starfires (which are priced at $100 more than most of Meta’s models) are a boon for Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta Glasses have long been marred by controversy and consumer criticism. Jenner provides a powerful combination of extremely lucrative marketing techniques: Instagrammable aspiration and pseudo-accessibility. More crucially, though, as one of the most familiar faces on the internet, she normalizes the product. Jenner is not merely making Meta Glasses more palatable but surveillance technology writ large.

Released in 2021 via a partnership with Ray-Ban, Meta Glasses debuted as a competitor to Google Glass. Wearables of this ilk have long been a preoccupation of Silicon Valley and of Zuckerberg.

“I don’t think phones are going to go away completely, but I do think that glasses will be the next major computing device.  Today, when I’m sitting at my desk with a computer in front of me, I still reach for my phone to do a lot of things.  […] So, I think eventually the question might be: “Why should I lug around my phone, when I have my glasses?” Zuckerberg recently said for a feature in the enterprise newsletter “Feed Me” from Emily Sundberg.

Meta Glasses have been inundated with complaints and lawsuits since their launch. They have been reportedly used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on duty. They have also been used by predatory manosphere influencers recording women without consent. Two Swedish newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, reported that subcontractors based in Nairobi, Kenya, who were hired to monitor content to help train AI, have access to highly sensitive footage. One person interviewed in the report said, “In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. […] I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.”

Meta has long understood that technology, even highly controversial technology like, say, a website used for rating the appearance of college-aged women, can only flourish and integrate with cultural endorsement. While Jenner and Zuckerberg profit, the rest of us are left with fewer rights and eroded consent that is only getting more normalized. We are watching, from behind the slim oval frames Jenner sold us as our privacy becomes commodified.

Indeed, Jenner is not the first or only celebrity to lend her voice to a Meta product. John Cena, Keegan Michael Key, Awkwafina, Kristen Bell, and, I am sad to say, Dame Judy Dench, have all voiced Meta AI assistant. Jenner’s positioning feels different, given that her brand was built on selling access and capitalizing on parasocial dynamics.

Hannah Holland

Hannah Holland is a producer for MS NOW’s “Velshi” and editor for the “Velshi Banned Book Club.” She writes for MS NOW.