What Are Frictionless Architectures and Why Nothing Feels Staged Anymore
Jamie Cohen spent the last two and a half weeks at the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, living on the grounds of the actual palace from The Sound of Music with 50 students from 25 countries. He came back with a keynote talk and a new term he's been building toward for a decade: frictionless architectures.
The short version: the design logic that makes apps and platforms feel effortless, frictionless, seamless, isn't confined to your phone anymore. It has moved into public life. A product launch, a night out, a guy grabbing a microphone at a basketball game, all of it can now be engineered to look spontaneous while serving someone else's agenda. And most of the time, you have no way to tell the difference.
In this episode, Jamie walks Destinee Day through where that idea comes from, the thinkers and history behind it, and a viral clip that turned out to be an ad in disguise. Destinee, who builds branded content for a living, answers from the other side of the business. She's the one designing the moments Jamie is describing, and she connects the whole conversation to a bigger problem: AI is removing friction even faster than the internet did.
What Are Frictionless Architectures?
Frictionless architectures is Jamie Cohen's term for internet design logic, built to remove effort and feel automatic, that has expanded off screens and into physical, public life. Something that looks spontaneous or organic in the real world is increasingly likely to have been staged with a specific outcome in mind.
Jamie built the concept for his Salzburg keynote around one central question: if everything now feels ambient and effortless, how do we push back? His answer starts with reintroducing friction on purpose, instead of letting design keep removing it.
A few things define a frictionless architecture:
- It is not confined to a device or a screen.
- It is built to be captured and shared as content, whether or not the people inside it know that.
- It succeeds by being indistinguishable from something that happened naturally.
What Does Jamie Mean When He Says the Internet Is "Ambient"?
Ambient means the internet's design logic now runs constantly in the background of everyday life, not just when a device is in your hand. Destinee's first instinct was to hear "ambient" as a comment on the cloud, something intangible you only reach through a screen. Jamie's point is bigger than that.
He describes frictionless architectures as an aesthetic logic of capitalism. In practice, that means the habit of thinking in content, shaping a product, a public moment, or even a conversation with an audience in mind, has moved well past marketing departments and into daily behavior. People are producing content whether or not they realize it.
That's the question Jamie says actually matters: how do you counter a commodification of chaos, when the chaos itself might be manufactured?
Where Does the Word "Frictionless" Actually Come From?
The term traces back to Mark Zuckerberg's keynote at Facebook's F8 developer conference in 2011, where he introduced the Timeline feature and described it as delivering "real-time serendipity in a frictionless experience." Timeline was the feature that let you watch a friend's likes, shares, and activity unfold in real time, a feature so normalized now that most people never think about it.
Jamie's issue with the phrase is direct: serendipity, by definition, is not algorithmic. Calling an engineered feed "serendipitous" was smart marketing. It also was not true.
For a sharper definition, Jamie draws on Jacob Kemper's book on frictionlessness, which argues that frictionless design is the aesthetic logic that emerges when platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism work together and disappear from view. That pulls in two more names worth knowing.
What's the Difference Between Platform Capitalism and Surveillance Capitalism?
Platform capitalism, a term from Nick Srnicek's book of the same name, describes how platforms turn our attention, time, and behavior into a commodity to be sold. Surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff's term, describes how ordinary objects, a fridge, a toaster, a smart speaker, quietly capture behavior for the same purpose.
Jamie's framing puts frictionlessness on top of both:
- Platform capitalism commodifies what we do and think on platforms we knowingly use.
- Surveillance capitalism commodifies behavior captured by devices that used to be mute, like appliances and speakers.
- Frictionlessness is what happens when both processes are running and neither one is visible anymore.
What Happened in the Viral Kalshi Knicks Ad?
A video went viral after a Knicks playoff win, showing a fan grabbing a microphone and shouting an exuberant, seemingly off-the-cuff line about the city and the game. It read as pure, unscripted joy. It was a Kalshi ad.
Kalshi had interviewed close to a hundred people in that crowd that night. Widen the shot and you can see the company's small bipedal robot in frame, with the fan holding a microphone cube branded with the Kalshi logo. Jamie gives the fan full credit for the line itself, but the moment was engineered by an advertiser, not caught candidly by a camera.
For Jamie, that's the cleanest example available right now of a frictionless architecture doing its job: a moment built to feel spontaneous, released into public feeds with nothing marking it as paid until someone looks closely enough to notice the robot.
What Are the Three Case Studies Jamie Plans to Cover Next?
Jamie previewed three upcoming case studies, each representing a different flavor of frictionless architecture in action: the Sydney Sweeney campaign, Kylie Jenner's Meta Ray-Bans rollout, and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
- The Sydney Sweeney campaign, built specifically to generate rage bait and engagement through outrage rather than approval.
- Kylie Jenner's Meta Ray-Bans rollout, which Jamie sees as normalizing a world where the internet is worn on your face and running constantly, no phone required.
- Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where people can be paid to perform actions or take positions that others then bet on. Jamie calls this the most troubling of the three: a commodification of reality itself, and something he sees as corrosive to how people trust what they see.
Why Doesn't "Just Touch Grass" Work as Media Literacy Advice Anymore?
The classic advice, step away from your screen and reset in the real world, stops working once the real world can itself be staged as marketing. Jamie's own book, Critical Internet Literacies, was built around naming dynamics exactly like this one, but he admits it did not hand readers many tools for what to do next.
The old mental model he used to teach was simple: someone steps outside, escapes the algorithm, and resets, while everyone left online spirals further into extreme, amplified beliefs. That model assumed a clean line between an online world and an offline one. The Kalshi bagel clip is proof that line has blurred. If a public moment at a basketball game can be built as an ad, stepping outside no longer guarantees you have stepped away from anything.
What Is the Escape Room Model of Media Literacy?
Jamie's new metaphor, credited to his wife Nikki, treats media literacy as something you actively use inside an environment, rather than a skill you apply once and set down. Picture an escape room full of lasers you cannot see. Somewhere in the room is a pile of dust. You pick it up, blow it into the air, and the lasers become visible.
The follow-up questions are the whole point:
- Where is the dust in this environment?
- How often do you need to use it?
- Do the lasers move?
- Do you have to pass the dust to someone else in the room with you?
Jamie's read is that media literacy today has to work the same way: active, situational, and ongoing. There is no computer room to walk away from anymore. The internet is not a place you visit. It is everywhere, all at once, immersive by design.
What Is Friction Maxxing?
Friction maxxing is Jamie's name for deliberately choosing inconvenience and slowing down on purpose, inside systems engineered to remove every reason to. If frictionless design is the problem, choosing friction back in, on purpose, is a direct answer to it.
It is less a specific technique than a habit of attention: noticing where something has been made suspiciously easy, and pausing there anyway.
What Is Media Literacy of Persistence?
Media literacy of persistence is Jamie's term for treating media literacy as a long-term, ongoing commitment rather than a one-time skill applied to a single post and then dropped. He points to the show itself as an example: a recurring project, built specifically to keep pulling people back into the habit of thinking critically over time, not a single lesson you complete and move past.
In his framing, the opposite of persistence is frictionlessness. Real media literacy now has to be something you stay with, not something you finish.
How Does Destinee Design Ads People Don't Recognize as Ads?
Destinee builds branded content professionally, and she confirms Jamie's theory from the inside of the industry: the current goal is content that feels organic enough that people never register it as advertising at all. Follower count and going viral matter less than they used to, partly because influencer marketing now legally has to be labeled as an ad.
- The bar for success in her field is content that reads as a real, in-the-moment experience rather than a message.
- She calls this discipline experience design: the structure is fully planned, even when the surface looks completely candid.
- Her read on where advertising is headed: less like a traditional ad, more like an in-person experience, with the design work hidden underneath it.
What Does the Cannes Film Festival Have to Do With Frictionless Architecture?
Destinee points to the Cannes Film Festival as a real-world example of experience design built for the phones of people watching from home, not for the people physically standing in the south of France. She has covered it in person and describes it as a genuinely gorgeous event, engineered specifically to trigger FOMO and built from the ground up for social media consumption.
Her point is that the people actually at Cannes are not really the audience. The people back home, watching through a screen, are the audience. That is the pattern she sees expanding: events built to pull people off their phones that are, underneath, built entirely for the phone. Her own bar for whether something actually works: is it good enough that someone turns to the person next to them and says "this is the coolest thing I've ever seen," instead of reaching for their phone to prove it.
How Is AI Making Frictionless Architecture Worse?
Destinee closes the conversation by connecting it to AI, which she argues is accelerating the frictionless problem rather than slowing it down. She is actively training AI agents to handle her own admin work, removing a point of friction from her own workflow while she describes the trend on the show.
Her concern is what that removal costs everyone. As AI strips friction out of more of daily work and life, everything moves faster, and the natural pauses where a person would normally stop and question what they are looking at get scarcer. The old tells, an odd camera angle, a stilted line, used to be more obvious. As both the internet and AI get better at disappearing into daily life, choosing to slow down on purpose becomes one of the only defenses left.
Key Takeaways
- Jamie Cohen coined "frictionless architectures" to describe internet design logic that has moved off screens and into physical, offline life.
- The term "frictionless" traces to Mark Zuckerberg's 2011 F8 keynote, where he called the new Facebook Timeline "real-time serendipity in a frictionless experience."
- The idea is older than social media. Mark Weiser's 1991 paper, "The Computer for the 21st Century," predicted that the most powerful technologies would be the ones that disappear into daily life.
- Jamie builds his working definition of "frictionless" from Jacob Kemper, layered on Nick Srnicek's platform capitalism and Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism.
- The viral Knicks "my bagel's Jewish" clip was a Kalshi ad, not a spontaneous fan moment. The company's robot is visible in the wider shot.
- Frictionless architecture shows up in the Sydney Sweeney rage-bait campaign, Kylie Jenner's Meta Ray-Bans rollout, and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
- The classic "touch grass" advice no longer holds up, because the outdoors itself can now be staged as marketing.
- Jamie's replacement model treats media literacy as an escape room: an active, ongoing practice, not a checklist you run once.
- Destinee, who designs branded content professionally, confirms that content audiences don't recognize as an ad is now the industry's top goal.
- Jamie proposes two countermeasures: friction maxing, choosing inconvenience on purpose, and media literacy of persistence, staying with the practice long-term.
- Destinee argues AI is accelerating frictionlessness by removing the natural pause points where people would normally stop and question what they're seeing.
Questions Answered in This Episode
What are frictionless architectures?
Jamie Cohen's term for internet design logic, built to remove effort and feel automatic, that has expanded beyond screens into physical, public life. When something in public looks spontaneous, it may have been staged with a specific outcome in mind.
What does "ambient" mean in this context?
It means the internet's design logic now operates constantly in the background of daily life, not only when someone is holding a device. Jamie calls this an aesthetic logic of capitalism that has spread past marketing and into ordinary behavior.
Where does the term "frictionless" come from?
Mark Zuckerberg used it at Facebook's 2011 F8 developer conference, describing the new Timeline feature as delivering "real-time serendipity in a frictionless experience."
Who came up with the underlying idea before Zuckerberg?
Computer scientist Mark Weiser, in a 1991 paper called "The Computer for the 21st Century," which opens by arguing that the most profound technologies are the ones that disappear into everyday life.
What is the difference between platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism?
Platform capitalism, from Nick Srnicek, describes platforms commodifying our attention and behavior on the platforms we use. Surveillance capitalism, from Shoshana Zuboff, describes ordinary devices quietly capturing behavior for the same purpose. Jamie argues frictionlessness is what you get when both run and neither is visible.
What happened in the viral Knicks bagel ad video?
A fan's exuberant, seemingly spontaneous outburst at a Knicks game went viral, but it was a Kalshi ad. Kalshi had interviewed close to a hundred people that night, and the company's robot and branded microphone are visible in the wider shot.
What other campaigns count as frictionless architecture?
Jamie names the Sydney Sweeney rage-bait campaign, Kylie Jenner's Meta Ray-Bans rollout, and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where people can be paid to perform actions others then bet on.
Why doesn't the old "touch grass" advice work anymore?
Because stepping outside no longer guarantees stepping away from marketing. Public, in-person moments can now be staged as advertising, the same way the Knicks bagel clip was.
What is the escape room model of media literacy?
Jamie's metaphor, credited to a friend named Nikki, for treating media literacy as active and ongoing rather than a one-time skill. You're in a room full of invisible lasers and have to keep finding and using the "dust" that makes them visible.
What is friction maxing?
Jamie's term for deliberately choosing inconvenience and slowing down on purpose, as a direct countermeasure to systems engineered to remove every reason to pause.
What is media literacy of persistence?
Treating media literacy as a long-term, ongoing commitment rather than a skill applied once and set aside. Jamie points to the show itself as an example of a persistent, recurring project.
How does Destinee design ads people don't recognize as ads?
Through what she calls experience design: content built to feel like a real, in-the-moment experience rather than a message, with the marketing structure hidden underneath a candid-looking surface.
How does the Cannes Film Festival relate to frictionless architecture?
Destinee uses Cannes as an example of an event engineered for the phones of people watching remotely, not for the people physically there. The experience is built for FOMO and built to be shared.
How is AI making frictionless architecture worse?
By removing friction from daily workflows and life, AI speeds everything up, which leaves fewer natural moments where people would normally stop and question what they're seeing.
## Episode Chapters
00:04 — Back from Salzburg
Jamie recaps two and a half weeks at the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, living on the grounds of the palace from The Sound of Music alongside 50 students from 25 countries.
00:59 — Naming frictionless architectures
Jamie introduces the term for how internet design logic is starting to shape offline reality in ways we can't fully see yet.
02:14 — Why the internet is "ambient" now
Destinee asks what "ambient" means, and Jamie explains frictionless design as an aesthetic logic of capitalism no longer tied to a screen.
04:03 — Defining "frictionless" through three thinkers
Jamie builds his definition from Jacob Kemper, layered on Nick Srnicek's platform capitalism and Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism.
05:50 — Silicon Valley meets Washington
Destinee points to tech leaders standing behind Trump at his inauguration as evidence this environment is built "by design."
07:11 — Where "frictionless" actually comes from
Jamie traces the word to Zuckerberg's 2011 F8 keynote and the launch of the Facebook Timeline.
09:02 — Mark Weiser's 1991 warning
Twenty years before Zuckerberg, researcher Mark Weiser predicted the most profound technologies would be the ones that disappear into daily life.
10:48 — The Knicks fan and the Kalshi ad
Jamie breaks down the viral "my mayor's Muslim, my bagel's Jewish" moment and reveals the robot hiding in the wider shot.
12:03 — Three frictionless case studies
Jamie previews the Sydney Sweeney campaign, Kylie Jenner's Meta Ray-Bans rollout, and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
13:26 — Why "touch grass" media literacy is obsolete
The old advice to step outside stops working once going outside might itself be the marketing.
14:14 — The escape room model of media literacy
Jamie's new metaphor, credited to his friend Nikki, treats media literacy as an active, ongoing skill rather than a one-time checklist.
16:23 — Destinee's side of the trade
Destinee explains that her job is designing content people don't realize is an ad, and why that's become the industry's top goal.
17:38 — The Cannes Film Festival example
Destinee describes Cannes as an event engineered for FOMO, built for the phones of people who aren't even there.
19:11 — AI is about to make this worse
Destinee connects the conversation to AI removing friction from daily workflows, which she argues removes our natural reasons to slow down.
20:45 — Next week's episode
Jamie and Destinee preview revisiting the Sydney Sweeney and Kylie Jenner campaigns specifically through the frictionless-architecture lens.
Network Issues is an independent podcast hosted by Jamie Cohen and Destinee Day. It is not affiliated with or produced by any university.
Sources and Further Reading
- Jacob Kemper, on the aesthetic logic of frictionlessness in Silicon Valley design
- Nick Srnicek, on platform capitalism
- Shoshana Zuboff, on surveillance capitalism
- Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the 21st Century" (1991)
- Mark Zuckerberg's 2011 F8 keynote, introducing the Facebook Timeline
- Jamie Cohen, "Critical Internet Literacies"
Continue the Conversation
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About the Hosts
Jamie Cohen
Jamie Cohen is a media scholar, professor, writer, and expert on internet culture, online extremism, memes, media literacy, and the manosphere.
Website: jamesncohen.com
Substack: New Media Homework
Destinee Day
Destinee Day is a marketing strategist and founder of Rudy & Company. Her work focuses on branding, digital strategy, communications, online influence, and responsible marketing.
Website: rudyandcompany.com
Continue the Conversation
When does healthy self-improvement become compulsive optimization? Should brands and journalists use terms such as looksmaxxing casually—or does that help fringe ideologies enter mainstream culture?
Follow Network Issues for more conversations about internet culture, the manosphere, media literacy, social platforms, masculinity, advertising, and the systems shaping how people see themselves.
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Jamie Cohen (00:05) So you remember our talk or our discussion about the meta-ray bands, Snapchat spectacles, and the POV surveillance glasses? Taylor Lorenz, the internet culture journalist and tech journalist, had an interesting take very similar to ours. And she entered in interviewed Amy Odell, the fashion Jamie Cohen (00:23) Writer. Destinee (00:24) Love Amy Odob. Jamie Cohen (00:25) Amy Odell's great. Yes. Even I I read Amy Odell's work. yeah. Yep, sure. Destinee (00:28) I also love C Little Lorenz. I love them both. But yes. Jamie Cohen (00:31) Yeah. and she wrote she put this video out and during her interview with Amy Odell called Why Smart Glasses Feel Different This Time. And her take was a bit different than our take. Her take was a bit about how this summer, the introduction of Kylie Jenner to be it wearing the meta ray bands, Jamie Cohen (00:53) basically makes her this new what what mark Zuckerberg calls Kylie Jenner a fashion icon in order to represent these these glasses because they will bring in a new generation new set of consumers who will wear them more proudly whereas I was under the assumption or at least under the belief that like these glasses are just a no go. They're not gonna they're not gonna work out. Even though they do look cool as we talked about, but I do not see Jamie Cohen (01:21) These glasses, any surveillance type of POV lens as being like a thing. But it seems like specifically New York, City, or even Los Angeles, like these places in particular are like more fashion friendly towards these things. And I just I I just would love to ask you a question about I I don't know enough about Kylie Jenner or even the I would not personally call her a fashion icon, but Mark Zuckerberg did. Jamie Cohen (01:48) And so there was a per it was a specific choice to choose Kylie Jenner. And I would like to understand why Kylie Jenner represents the right brand sponsor for this. Destinee (01:57) She's 100% the right brand sponsor for this, right? So Kylie Jenner is a fashion icon. So I don't know how much you know about the Kardashians as a whole, right? But the reason why I'm saying that, I'm not saying that from like a fashion POV. I'm saying that from a marketing stance. Kylie Jenner is the right person to hawk these terrible glasses. Jamie Cohen (02:26) See, I okay, you could you're gonna have to explain that to me because I do, of course, I know the Kardashians. I used to work in reality TV, but I know the Kardashians are like Pokemon cards. I just missed it. Like this just a part of culture that isn't really my focus, even though they are like the substrate that makes up culture itself. As as you and I both know, the term influencer in terms of platform style was first used on the Kardashians after it was used on animals. This is written in Taylor Lorenz's book, Extremely Online. Jamie Cohen (02:56) So the Kardashians do represent like the basic framework of what we, you and I, and my students study in terms of like internet culture itself. But I don't know the siblings. I know I'm not clear what each brand they represent or what they do, but I know they're very, very wealthy as a result of it. But that's that's my knowledge. Destinee (03:15) Okay, it's actually wild that you study this and you missed this Kardashian vote, but like buckle up because here we go. Jamie Cohen (03:22) Yeah. Destinee (03:24) So the TLDR of the whole situation, the Kardashians invented reality TV as we know it today, right? It was something very different. It was more survivor, you know, fear factor yeah, show Jamie Cohen (03:37) Mm-hmm. Game shelly. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Destinee (03:40) before. And then you had things like Big Brother, right? The the whole thing. Jamie Cohen (03:44) Which is still a game show. Yeah. Yeah. Destinee (03:45) Crazy. Destinee (03:47) Survivor's still on too. Why? Jamie Cohen (03:49) Yeah. Destinee (03:52) but then Ryan Seacrest came along, met Chris Jenner, keeping up the Kardashian started. That's the whole thing, right? They're famous for being famous. There's not actually a real reason you could get into the Kim Kardashian sex tape situation. I would argue that's not actually really it though. Destinee (04:11) And their cultural impact has been extreme because yes, they invented reality TV and being famous for being famous, but because of that, they also invented the modern day influencer as we know it, right? So they were the ones that showed influencer marketing and brand partnerships on the social media level could be successful if you had the fame for it and people just wanted to look like you. Now there's good and bad to that, I will say, right? Destinee (04:40) When Kim Kardashian came along, it wasn't really cool for millennial women to have curves. And Kim Kardashian came along. She is that, she idealized that. So to a very, very thin baseline level, that started to change. It's also terrible. They hawked terrible things for money. They have zero backbone. They will take money wherever they can get money. bad, right? Destinee (05:09) The best example of this is Kylie Jenner. If you look at her as a kid, there's nothing wrong with her as a kid. She was beautiful, she was gorgeous, she should be herself. But why she's successful and arguably more successful than any of her siblings to date is that it's like if you asked AI to create a photo of Kim Kardashian and it AI'd itself, and that is Kylie Jenner, right? Jamie Cohen (05:39) No, Jamie Cohen (05:39) huh okay. Destinee (05:40) His Destinee (05:41) literally almost a perfect version of Kim without any of Kim's identifying features. Is that thing where AI does where it like changes everybody's nose and face structure? Jamie Cohen (05:50) Yeah, softens it down, gasifies it. Yeah. Interesting. Destinee (05:55) That's how she became one of the richest ones of her sibling. I'm she was the the billionaire before any of the other ones were. And she made that off of lip kits that she hawked. Destinee (06:09) To the youth saying that she did not have plastic surgery. She was just overlining her lips. Well, guess what? She had plastic surgery. She had lip filler. Jamie Cohen (06:18) Yeah. Destinee (06:19) Turns out the whole thing was a lie. That did not stop her from being incredibly successful. So now she has her fashion brand, Kai, which is not for everybody if you're into wearing a PVC dress that shows your cleavage and you say that's how you pick your kids up from school. Jamie Cohen (06:37) Is that what it looks like? Jamie Cohen (06:40) Okay. Destinee (06:40) Yes. Destinee (06:43) and then she just announced a partnership with her brand Kai with Frankie's bikinis. you know, like all the celebs are doing right now with lingerie lines and and swimsuit lines and stuff like that. So she created a fake version of herself and then made money off of it, which is you know, Chris Jinner playbook 101. Destinee (07:07) And arguably the current day Kardashians show is just a massive media platform for Christian or to showcase all of the brand partnerships that her children participate in, which makes it incredibly powerful. But then each one of them is segmented to a different audience, right? So you follow Kylie if you're a younger teenager to mid-20s, Jamie Cohen (07:35) they've been documented on TV since they were like little kids, right? So they're Destinee (07:38) Mm-hmm. Jamie Cohen (07:39) like, okay, so they they basically their audience grew up with them in many ways. Okay, so that's where Destinee (07:43) Mm-hmm. So Harry Potter. Jamie Cohen (07:47) yeah, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, what an interesting way to look at it. It's like they're the it's almost like the Potter series, but like like they're still Destinee (07:54) Never ended. Jamie Cohen (07:56) alive and they're not fictional, or or I guess arguably not fictional. Jamie Cohen (08:02) So then why? So then so the choice of Mark Zuckerberg when he's using these glasses that are like, as we talked about, highly problematic, particularly dangerous to young women, like particularly dangerous to like anybody who might be in a public space where somebody might be taking advantage of them for their own social media needs. Jamie Cohen (08:22) They were really aware that the Kardashians would represent the idea of influence. But why Kylie for these glasses, that is problematic to people in her age group? Like, why is that the thing? Why is she an icon according to Mark Zuckerberg? Destinee (08:38) Welcome to my thoughts. Okay, so I have a few takes on this. Destinee (08:43) one, they're it's very clear they're targeting younger generations based on the sister they picked. End. Two, if you look at the younger generations, this is a problem for me, a marketing person. Meta's targeting ability, phenomenal. We've talked about this. Jamie Cohen (09:04) Yes, yep. Destinee (09:06) Younger generations are moving away from these platforms. They're not on Facebook and they are slowly moving off of Instagram. Jamie Cohen (09:14) Yeah. Destinee (09:15) They are going to places like TikTok and Snapchat. Guess where you know they're trying to take these very, very fashionable, hawked by the youngest Kardashian thing, and reel these younger generations back into these platforms so that they can target them in their data. Destinee (09:35) Because if you miss the boat on it, look at Twitter. Look at what happened to it when Elon bought it. It Jamie Cohen (09:42) yeah. Destinee (09:42) is not something people use anymore. It's not something, it's not a platform that people view with a lot of legitimacy. So Jamie Cohen (09:50) Mm-hmm. Destinee (09:50) they're using or they're losing all of these younger generations and they're losing money on it. The company's gonna become less profitable over time. So that's why they would choose the biggest icon for young women. Destinee (10:05) who do want to become influencers, arguably more than men, right? But it is you can also view it with a lens of it's kind of like your own personal body cam. Destinee (10:19) So if yeah, it's a massive data privacy Destinee (10:24) situation, but then also if I'm a young woman and I'm going out at night, there is a lens that I can view this as well, yeah, I can show you my POV. I have it from my glasses. Jamie Cohen (10:39) So, yeah, it's Jamie Cohen (10:40) a really good point, right? So this is kind of like the aestheticization for women off of POV experiences, right? So like men, Taylor makes a point in her video to basically say like the idea of POV as an aesthetic in terms of like portability comes from GoPro. And it was like a head-mounted device, right? But Amy Odell makes a really good point where she says, but GoPro is always represented or at least marketed as gear. Jamie Cohen (11:07) It was always like something that wasn't really aesthetically thing. It was like something you bring when you're camping. You bring the gear with you. So it's always there. Whereas glasses are much more invasive because they're stylish. They fit on your face. they're frictionless. They don't have they're they're the meta idea of you don't have to think about them. But the funniest part of it, like the thing that always like shocked me with it, is like how crazy. Jamie Cohen (11:32) Hyper individualized it is. Like when Kylie Jenner, does her video on her little debut thing on the Instagram carousel she builds, there's no one around her. It's just by herself. She's doing a fit check in a mirror. here's my thought on it. And like this is just what it is. But like I feel like when you're using a phone and you're doing a fit check, or you're like setting it up on the street where you're like standing there and you set it up and you do your fit check, there's still the insinuation of somebody else. Jamie Cohen (11:58) Like there's a world inside this phone, but there's also like the idea where you're it's not a mirror, you're in public, you're with the public here. And when you put the glasses on, it takes the public away and just makes it you. It's just you by yourself. So the aestheticization of solo or individualism is like seems too apparent for me. But then when you to when you frame it like that, where it's like, but you get this opportunity to have your own you, it doesn't need the contrast of. Jamie Cohen (12:28) I'm alone because you're not alone. You're just remove the friction of the phone, and now you have the face. I it's just such a weird thing I keep going back to the idea of like these glasses are invasive, like, and especially to young women. But I I want to hear your thoughts on like, but if marketed to women, is this a trick? Is this like, I mean, all Destinee (12:49) Yeah. Jamie Cohen (12:49) marketing is, but I mean, is this like, are they is this is this bad? Destinee (12:57) Yes. Yeah. Jamie Cohen (12:58) Ha ha. Destinee (13:00) It is terrible. It is not something that is. I don't know. I don't feel great about it. When I see people out in public with them, I don't feel safe is the wrong word, but I don't feel like my privacy is protected, right? There are there are things that I do to make I never post in real time, right? I I don't like that. That makes Destinee (13:27) it very easy for people to figure out where you are at any time. And as someone that has, you know, stopped using certain dog technologies because they live track a walk, and then people have come and found me to meet Rudy, I refuse to use that. That's not safe for him or for me. So it's not safe from a location, like personal safety perspective. It's not safe. Destinee (13:55) From a privacy perspective, it's this is a bad thing. And I can't find the good in it enough to say, well, here's its redeeming qualities. it's just a piece of technology for a massive platform to track you and learn more at the detriment of you and everyone. Jamie Cohen (14:20) I'm quoted in this article by Steffi Sau, great internet culture journalist. She works her slate now in the the the dating area. and it's called Meta's meta, meta AI smart glasses are wreaking havoc in schools across the country. It's only going to get worse. And this is an anecdotal essay about me and my student, Gwyneth, and how we noticed young men in particular were wearing them. Jamie Cohen (14:45) And first off, our big point we were making was like what are they what life are they leading that they need to wear them? But second, it was about how uncomfortable it made people on campus and made people like feel like it's different. The question that Steffi asked several times was like, is this going to change cheating? And I said, at this time, no, but yes, it will. Because to your question, I do know the answer to what benefit they have. Because people have started to jailbreak these glasses and not just turn off the like circle that requires. Jamie Cohen (15:14) Chords, but also incorp incorporate agenc parts into it. It already does some AI, AI for seeing impaired people, or AI for like learning. But basically you can, we I think we've talked about this, but you could turn off your mind and let the glasses see your world and then give you an agentic summary later. So there is use cases for it, but in this case, that use case requires gobbling up data, just gobbling data everywhere. And it's like that's the thing that you and I always talk about, which is like what data doesn't. Jamie Cohen (15:43) Mark Zuckerberg have. And what he doesn't have, just like with the metaverse and the goggles, we talked about this when we were a decade ago, is he doesn't have your height. He doesn't have where your eyes actually look. He doesn't have head motion because two dimensions don't give enough data, but the body gives more data. So agentic or not, it's capturing three dimensional reality to reproduce it in an AI space. And I think we all know by now what it does to women. Jamie Cohen (16:12) You know, so it's just to me, it's just one of those things where it's like, I know you say that Kylie doesn't have any or the j Kardashians maybe generally don't have that many scruples to the brands that they choose, but this seems like it's something that like feels a little unhealthy in terms of like what Jamie Cohen (16:32) young people would be interested in, you know. Destinee (16:35) Well, that's their key demographic. The Takardashians hawk the unhealthy thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they don't have any Jamie Cohen (16:43) And then we learn. Destinee (16:46) scruples, so yeah, they're the perfect people Jamie Cohen (16:48) years ago, Kendall was hired to by Pepsi to do a a a tone-deaf ad during a protest. And this seems fairly tone-deaf by Kylie, the younger, but not as a as offensive, I guess is the way to put it, because it's more fashionable, if that makes sense. Okay. So Destinee (17:07) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Jamie Cohen (17:09) if it's in other words, Jamie Cohen (17:11) It fits the brand, even if the brand is harmful. Destinee (17:15) Kardashians as a brand withstood the Pepsi controversy and came out relatively unscathed. The power of that brand is so insanely strong that it can withstand Jamie Cohen (17:28) Yeah. Destinee (17:29) something like that where if it was anybody else, they never would have been able to come back up. Jamie Cohen (17:33) So there's an another layer to this, which is that Kylie is the prime device and the metaglasses are secondary. Destinee (17:43) Mm-hmm. Destinee (17:46) I have a side quest question for Jamie Cohen (17:49) Yeah. Destinee (17:49) you. Are you concerned at all being a professor and the appearance of these glasses showing up on college campuses? I know when I went to school, it was a big deal when they allowed like, you know, laptops in because they could record, right? There were a few classes that wouldn't allow laptops because they didn't want to be recorded. Destinee (18:14) Are you worried about that at all or do you have any concerns about that from students wearing glasses? Jamie Cohen (18:19) Yes. Very Jamie Cohen (18:20) much. I mean I have tenure now, I'm very fortunate, but Jamie Cohen (18:25) I, if you can't tell, I can't look I teach a class that's 60 people and I can't see some of the people in the back row. And for all I know, they are recording me and broadcasting that out almost clipped wise right to their Instagram right afterward. I s I teach and I speak pretty off the cuff. I'm an extemporaneous professor. If you saw how many tabs, I think I have 45 tabs over right now. So I'm a tabs professor. I tab across, I open up tabs as we go. Jamie Cohen (18:50) I've never said something cancelable, except once I said I insulted Mr. Beast during the height of Mr. Beast and I was almost canceled then. But aside from that, it depends on the student. Anyway, but you never know what is the thing in which I speak about something that I get clipped out of context in the clipping space and go viral for that because the glasses record it from a perspective. Jamie Cohen (19:15) That I can't actually see in terms of like surveillance because it becomes so subtly surveilled that I can no longer tell what is or isn't being recorded. We have hardcore, almost all schools do, have very hardcore Destinee (19:29) Yeah. Jamie Cohen (19:31) sort recording rules. But when you have a class of 60 students sitting in a big arc, it could be any one of them in the back, you know? So yeah, I'm I'm consistently nervous about surveillance at all times. I'm also concerned about what I Jamie Cohen (19:43) Talk to Steffi about, which is that their agent is in their head and they're not paying attention and they're just letting the agent record their day and give them summaries of what I said. So it's like, what's the point of them of attending? Why don't they just leave their glasses on the desk? You know, at that point, the body is unnecessary. And that's again when I think the end point of Kylie standing in that mirror by herself, looking at herself and no one around, is only a step away from no Kylie and just glasses, you know? So it's it worries me. Destinee (20:14) Well, I think we're very quickly my like, you know, I don't know. I think we're evolving into a society that is either full of wally humans, where they're all just floating around in the VR thing, super overweight and being fed junk food and the robots do all the work. or we're gonna end up, you know, doomsday prepping in the wilderness. and there's gonna be no in between. Jamie Cohen (20:42) You know what? You might be both right. Destinee (20:44) Yeah. Jamie Cohen (20:47) Here's hoping for a better future. Be be Destinee (20:47) Whoa. Jamie Cohen (20:49) re keep our skepticism up. All right. Well, thanks for explaining that to me, Destiny. I have no idea. Destinee (20:52) Well Jamie Cohen (20:55) That's like like a missed it missed thing. I I'll pay attention to it now, so thank you. Destinee (21:00) Well, I mean, I don't think I did a a benefit to your life at all. I just gave you some more useless information, but Jamie Cohen (21:05) Yeah, Jamie Cohen (21:06) just more stuff to feel grim about, but that's how we do. Destinee (21:08) Hopeless about. Yeah. All Destinee (21:12) right. Like, share, subscribe, do all the things with network issues. We'll be back next week to discuss brand new dystopian topics.