Inside the Sydney Sweeney Ad: What "Great Jeans" Reveals About Frictionless Media
Jamie Cohen and Destinee Day trace the American Eagle "great jeans" ad back to Brooke Shields, racehorse theory, and the birth of motion pictures.
Why Did Jamie Move Away from His "Doom Is Coming" Talks?
Jamie shifted his approach after watching it fail his own students. He'd built a reputation on describing, in detail, "what the thumping beat of fascism sounds like in the distance." It works in a classroom. It works right up until the room needs to know what comes next, and by the end of last semester several of his students left in tears with nothing to do about what they'd just learned.
"Friction maxing" is his answer to that gap. It's the same underlying analysis, but built around a second question after the diagnosis: now that you see it, what do you actually do? Jamie is taking the talk on the road specifically because he thinks it's time to start handing people tools, not just dread.
What's the Difference Between Old Media Literacy and the New Kind?
Traditional media literacy is transactional: a checklist you run against a piece of information from the outside. Is the source reputable. Is the author credentialed. Is this a newscast or an opinion show. Destinee describes this as exactly what she was taught in journalism school, an if-this-then-that decision tree you could apply to evaluate whatever you were looking at.
Jamie's point is that the tree stops working once the internet becomes ambient, meaning it's no longer something you visit or transact with. You're nested inside it. This podcast episode, published on the internet, discussed on the internet, is itself part of the same media apparatus it's trying to describe. There's no outside position left to evaluate from, which is exactly what the old checklist assumed existed.
What Is the Escape Room Model of Media Literacy?
The escape room model treats media literacy as something you use continuously inside an environment, not a skill you apply once from outside it. Jamie revisits the metaphor from the previous episode, credited to his wife Nikki: you're in a room full of lasers you can't see. Somewhere is a pile of dust. You throw it into the air, and the lasers become visible.
The real value of the metaphor is in the follow-up questions it forces: where is the dust in this environment, how often do you have to use it, do the lasers move, and do you have to hand the dust to someone else in the room with you. That's the shape of the new media literacy Jamie is building this whole talk around.
What Are "the Borderlands," and Why Does Jamie Say They've Dissolved?
The borderlands are a term from Jamie's talks going back to 2015 through 2017, describing the space between online and offline life where a lot of extremism used to take hold. His argument now is that the borderlands haven't just widened. They've disappeared entirely.
There's no longer a line between the internet and offline reality to stand near. The internet shapes offline reality directly now, and offline events get built, from the start, to become internet content. That collapse is the setup for the entire Sydney Sweeney case study that follows.
What Is the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle "Great Jeans" Campaign?
In September 2025, American Eagle released a campaign tagged "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," starring the Euphoria actress in multiple ad cuts. One version is straightforward: Sweeney talks through the quality of the denim in front of a mirror. It's the version American Eagle still runs.
The other version is the one the brand has since pulled. In it, Sweeney lies back on a pillow as the camera moves up her body while she talks about what "genes," the biological term, do for you. Jamie's read is that Sweeney herself had been a fairly politically ambiguous celebrity before this campaign. Her job, up to that point, was selling Sydney Sweeney. This ad is what changed that.
Why Does the Ad Echo Brooke Shields' 1980s Calvin Klein Campaign?
The pulled cut of the Sweeney ad deliberately mirrors Brooke Shields' Calvin Klein campaign from the 1980s, in which Shields, then fifteen or sixteen, appeared in a similarly suggestive pose that was controversial at the time. Sweeney reclining on the pillow as the camera pans up her body is the same visual structure, restaged for 2025.
Jamie's point isn't that the reference is accidental. It's that the ad is built, shot by shot, to invoke a specific reaction, and the Shields echo is one more layer of that design.
What Did Trump Say About "Good Genes," and Why Does It Matter Here?
The ad dropped while Donald Trump was making "good genes" remarks at campaign rallies, including one in Bemidji, Minnesota, that Jamie reads directly on the episode. Jamie is careful to define the term for anyone unfamiliar with it: eugenics is selective breeding aimed at producing a "superior" version of a species, a concept the Nazis weaponized in the 1940s in the pursuit of a supposed Aryan master race.
"You have good genes, you know that, right? … the racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota."
Donald Trump, campaign rally · Bemidji, Minnesota
The ad's tagline plays on the double meaning of "genes" against that exact political backdrop. Jamie's framing throughout is descriptive, not accusatory: he's naming a documented lineage between a marketing campaign, a specific rally quote, and a term with a specific and ugly history, and asking what it means that all three showed up in public at the same time.
What Does Racehorse Theory Have to Do With the Invention of Motion Pictures?
Racehorse theory traces back to Leland Stanford, who wanted to breed racehorses selectively to shorten the years it took to raise a horse profitable enough to race. To settle a bet about whether a running horse ever has all four hooves off the ground at once, Stanford funded photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who in the 1880s built a rig of roughly twelve to twenty-four cameras along a track, triggered in sequence as a horse ran past.
That sequence of still photographs, looped, became the first motion picture. It's also the reason film runs at 24 frames per second, doubled from Muybridge's original count. Muybridge later demonstrated the work to Thomas Edison, who developed it into what we now know as motion pictures. Jamie's point is that the technical foundation of film has a eugenics project sitting directly underneath it, from the very first loop of a running horse.
How Does This History Connect to the US Department of Labor and Department of Defense?
Roughly 150 years after Muybridge, Jamie points to the US Department of Labor posting AI-generated imagery to its official account: blonde-haired, blue-eyed men styled in a way Jamie says visually echoes Nazi propaganda from the 1940s. He pairs that with a post from the Department of Defense, under Secretary Pete Hegseth's office, captioned "SecDef has great genes," and a widely circulated moment of Trump on the White House roof captioned with a reference back to the Sweeney ad itself.
Jamie's read is that these posts openly assume the audience's job is to react. The ad, the rally quote, and the government social posts are all functioning inside the same design logic: identity and biology as content built to provoke a response.
Who Made the Sydney Sweeney Ad, and What's the Media-Literacy Angle?
The creative leadership behind the campaign has direct ties to Abercrombie & Fitch. American Eagle's current CFO previously held the same role at Abercrombie, the company profiled in the documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, about longtime CEO Mike Jeffries and the brand's exclusionary marketing under his leadership. Jamie also credits researcher Jenny Chang for surfacing an interview in which an American Eagle executive asked Sweeney how far she wanted to take the ad's suggestiveness.
"Take it as far as you want."
Sydney Sweeney, reportedly, when asked how far to take the ad
Jamie calls this layer, tracing who made the ad and why, the easy part. It's the traditional media-literacy checklist doing exactly what it's built to do. The harder problem is what comes next: the ad is designed so that every available response, outrage, mockery, defense, sharing, still counts as engagement, and engagement is what feeds the system that targets you with more of the same.
What Is the "30 Seconds of Silence" Exercise, and Why Does It Matter?
The exercise is exactly what it sounds like: Jamie has Destinee, and by extension the audience, sit in complete silence and non-reaction for thirty seconds, live on the recording. It's the same exercise he runs with his students, and he describes it as deliberately uncomfortable.
His point is that refusing to react is itself the countermeasure. The ad's entire design assumes engagement of some kind. Choosing not to engage, even briefly, is an act of friction against a system built to remove all of it. Jamie calls it deep listening, and says it's the closest thing to picking up the dust in the escape room: it doesn't make the lasers disappear, but it makes them visible enough to navigate.
Why Does Destinee Say Non-Reaction Is a Form of Power?
From the marketing side, Destinee explains that extreme reactions, positive or negative, are exactly what make a person easy and cheap to sell to. Sharing an ad, mocking it, DMing a friend in outrage, or piling onto an angry comment thread all generate the same kind of data, and that data is what lets an advertiser sort someone into a category and target them more precisely.
She also draws a generational line: younger audiences increasingly mistake reacting online, sharing, commenting, expressing outrage, for actual civic participation, in place of deeper action like contacting a representative. Her conclusion is direct: silence and non-reaction give a marketer nothing to work with.
"It makes it incredibly hard and makes it even more expensive for me to sell ads about you."
Destinee Day, on what non-reaction denies a marketer
That's the whole mechanism, from the other side of the business.
What Is "Friction Maxxing," and Where Does the Term Come From?
Friction maxxing is Jamie's name for deliberately choosing inconvenience inside systems engineered to remove it. The term itself comes from an article by Catherine Gesser Morton, published in January, which argues for adding inconvenience back into daily digital behavior on purpose. Jamie credits her directly and says he'll go deeper into what friction maxing means in practice later in this series.
In this episode, the clearest version of it is the thirty seconds of silence: a small, specific refusal to give a frictionless system the one thing it's built to extract.
Key takeaways
Jamie is retiring his "doom is coming" media literacy talks after watching them leave students without any next step, some in tears by the end of last semester.
Traditional media literacy is transactional, a checklist run from outside the media environment. The new media literacy has to work from inside it, because the internet is now ambient.
The escape room metaphor, credited to Nikki, models this shift: media literacy as continuous navigation of invisible lasers, not a one-time evaluation.
The "borderlands" between online and offline life, a term from Jamie's talks since 2015, have dissolved. There is no longer a clean line to stand on either side of.
American Eagle's September 2025 "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans" campaign ran multiple cuts, including one pulled version echoing Brooke Shields' 1980s Calvin Klein ad.
The campaign landed during a stretch of Trump rally speeches about "good genes" and racehorse theory, including a specific quote from a Bemidji, Minnesota rally.
Racehorse theory traces to Leland Stanford, whose eugenics-driven horse breeding project funded Eadweard Muybridge's 1880s stop-motion photography, the technical origin of motion pictures.
The US Department of Labor and the Department of Defense both posted AI-generated imagery Jamie says visually echoes 1940s propaganda, in the same window as the ad's release.
The ad's creative lineage runs through Abercrombie & Fitch's former CFO and an interview, surfaced by researcher Jenny Chang, in which Sweeney was told to "take it as far as you want."
Identifying who made an ad and why is the easy layer of media literacy. The harder layer is recognizing that any reaction to the ad, including outrage, feeds the same engagement system.
Jamie and Destinee demonstrate the countermeasure live: thirty seconds of total silence and non-reaction as an act of deliberate friction.
Destinee explains the marketing math directly: extreme reactions make a person easy and cheap to target, while non-reaction denies the data that makes that targeting possible.
The term "friction maxing" comes from an article by Catherine Gesser Morton, published in January, arguing for deliberately adding inconvenience back into digital life.
Questions answered in this episode
Why did Jamie move away from his "doom is coming" talks?
Because they left audiences with dread and no next step. By the end of last semester, several of his students cried, and "friction maxing" is his shift toward giving people tools instead of just weight.
What's the difference between old and new media literacy?
Old media literacy is transactional, a checklist you run from outside the media you're evaluating. New media literacy has to work from inside an ambient internet, since there's no longer an outside position to evaluate from.
What is the escape room model of media literacy?
Jamie's metaphor, credited to Nikki, for treating media literacy as continuous and situational: you're in a room full of invisible lasers, and you keep finding and using the dust that makes them visible.
What are "the borderlands"?
A term from Jamie's talks dating to 2015 through 2017 for the space between online and offline life. He argues that space has now dissolved entirely, since online and offline are no longer separable.
What is the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad?
A September 2025 campaign tagged "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," with multiple cuts, including a pulled version echoing Brooke Shields' 1980s Calvin Klein ad as the camera moves up Sweeney's body while she references "genes."
Why does the ad echo the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad?
Sweeney's pose and the camera's movement deliberately restage Shields' 1980s campaign, made when Shields was fifteen or sixteen and was itself controversial at the time.
What did Trump say about "good genes"?
At a rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, Trump said: "You have good genes, you know that, right? … the racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." Jamie cites this as the political backdrop the ad's tagline landed against.
What is racehorse theory, and how does it connect to motion pictures?
Racehorse theory traces to Leland Stanford's eugenics-driven horse breeding project, which funded Eadweard Muybridge's 1880s stop-motion photography of a running horse, the technical origin of motion pictures and the source of film's 24-frames-per-second standard.
How does this connect to recent government social media posts?
Jamie points to the US Department of Labor and the Department of Defense both posting AI-generated imagery he says visually echoes 1940s propaganda, around the same time as the ad and Trump's rally remarks.
Who made the Sydney Sweeney ad, and what's the media-literacy angle?
American Eagle's CFO previously held the same role at Abercrombie & Fitch, and researcher Jenny Chang surfaced an interview in which Sweeney was told to "take it as far as you want." Jamie calls tracing this the easy layer of media literacy; the harder layer is that any reaction still feeds the engagement system.
What is the "30 seconds of silence" exercise?
A live demonstration where Jamie has Destinee, and the audience, go completely silent and non-reactive for thirty seconds, modeling non-engagement as a direct act of friction against a system designed to extract a reaction.
Why does Destinee say non-reaction denies a marketer data?
Extreme reactions, positive or negative, make someone easy and cheap to categorize and target. Silence generates no data, which makes that person harder and more expensive to sell to.
What is "friction maxing"?
Jamie's term for deliberately choosing inconvenience inside frictionless systems, drawn from an article by Catherine Gesser Morton published in January.
Episode chapters
00:01
Retiring the "doom is coming" talk
Jamie opens by admitting his usual approach, describing the coming doom without offering next steps, left some students in tears by the end of last semester.
01:13
Introducing "friction maxxing"
Jamie frames this new talk as a deliberate break from his old approach: giving people tools, not just dread, starting with the definition of transactional media literacy.
03:41
The escape room, revisited
Jamie returns to the lasers-and-dust metaphor from the previous episode, credited to Nikki, and previews two 2025-2026 case studies of frictionless architecture in the offline world.
05:03
Destinee asks for the old-school comparison
Destinee asks Jamie to define what agency and media literacy looked like in the transactional era, before getting into the new version.
05:35
The Lamborghini problem
Jamie compares traditional media literacy to being handed the keys to a high-performance car: a real skill, but one that assumes everyone wants to drive the same way.
07:25
Destinee's journalism-school checklist
Destinee describes the if-this-then-that decision tree she was taught: is the source reputable, is the author credentialed, is it a newscast or an opinion show.
08:12
The borderlands have dissolved, and the Sydney Sweeney campaign begins
Jamie argues the line between online and offline life has dissolved, then introduces American Eagle's September 2025 "great jeans" campaign and Sweeney's shift from a politically ambiguous celebrity to the center of a controversy.
10:38
Multiple ad cuts, the Brooke Shields echo, and eugenics defined
Jamie breaks down the ad's two versions, including the pulled cut that restages Brooke Shields' 1980s Calvin Klein campaign, then defines eugenics and its Nazi history directly.
12:53
The Trump rally quote and racehorse theory
Jamie reads Trump's "good genes" and racehorse theory remarks from a Bemidji, Minnesota rally and traces the theory back to Leland Stanford.
14:59
Eadweard Muybridge and the birth of film
Jamie connects Stanford's horse breeding project to Muybridge's 1880s stop-motion photography, the technical origin of motion pictures.
16:28
The Department of Labor and Department of Defense posts
Jamie points to AI-generated imagery posted by the Department of Labor and a "SecDef has great genes" post from the Department of Defense.
17:22
The Abercrombie & Fitch connection
Jamie traces the ad's creative lineage to a former Abercrombie & Fitch CFO now at American Eagle.
18:19
Jenny Chang's research and "take it as far as you want"
Jamie credits researcher Jenny Chang with surfacing the interview in which Sweeney was told to "take it as far as you want," then sets up the thirty-second silence exercise.
19:39
Thirty seconds of silence
Jamie leads a live, on-air demonstration of complete non-reaction as an act of friction against the ad's design.
21:27
Destinee on marketing and false civic action
Destinee connects online reacting to a generational mistake about civic participation, then explains from the marketing side why extreme reactions make someone easier to target.
24:06
Naming "friction maxing"
Jamie ties the exercise back to the term "friction maxing" and flags that he'll break the next two case studies into separate episodes.
26:26
Wrapping up and teasing Kylie Jenner
After a brief real-world interruption, Jamie and Destinee agree to close this episode here and pick up Kylie Jenner's Meta Ray-Bans next.
31:03
Crediting Catherine Gesser Morton and previewing wearable frictionless tech
Jamie credits Catherine Gesser Morton's January article as the source of "friction maxing" and previews what frictionless architecture looks like as wearable technology, ahead of the Kylie Jenner and Kalshi episodes.
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
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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.