The west bay's billboards aren’t for you, as our friend Wendy Liu saw and showed us, those incomprehensible tech billboards that loom over the 80 as monuments of dominance. In their total lack of pandering to you, as consumer, their resistance is futile is very legible: when you're not the consumer, you’re the consumed.
By contrast, the walls will sell you glasses to see with, if you get on BART in the East Bay; they will explain exactly why you need them. Here in Rockridge, perhaps, you will feel seen as you are told that you need tech glasses because tech is trying to consume you. Here, perhaps, they feel you.
Last year, Zenni was "empowering shoppers through AI," but it's a sign of the times that their ads are now all about protecting yourself from facial scanning (and when you need computer glasses, they mean "glasses that keep computers from hurting your eyes"). Especially in the context of all those Mullvad VPN ads–which trumpet your cookie-free ability to move without being tracked–it's all about how technology will protect you from technology.
There's something about the medium and the message, here, or at least about how omnipresent the freedom from being surveilled is, everywhere you look: On the train, the ceiling looks down at me and yells CHOOSE PRIVACY (through cloud-based business software).
Obi Kaufmann's "Birds of the Bay" is an outlier, a visual breath of fresh air. But like Philip K. Dick going for a hike in the Oakland hills, you bring your tech paranoia with you. When you look at those nice watercolors, do you see soaring, freedom, and Mt Diablo visible on a clear day? Do you feel like your phone just lost service? Or is it the vulture in the foreground that leaps out, surveying you like a drone in a world of carrion and carrion-to-be?
It can be nice that at least these ads know they're selling to people who want protection from Big Tech. At least selling us little tech, in response, isn't the alienated confusion of looking up at whatever B2B insanity is currently glaring down at the 80. At least they are trying to get our buy-in. At least on some level they think they need it.
After crossing into the West Bay, on the way up out of the underworld, one is confronted with a different vision of what glasses can do for you, and of the person they can help you be:
The VPN and Zenni ads mostly had the courtesy to stay on the other side of the BART tracks, but in the Powell Street station, you can't look anywhere and not see Meta trying to sell you their cursed AI Ray-Bans. I made a spectacle of myself, trying to take a picture of all of them, in their massively compressed color spectrum; the reds and yellows of the East Bay have given way to, at most, a blue that just barely pokes its head out of grey.
The irony is that they still frame the damned things by your freedom from tech: You'll want to put your phone down for this. Unlike those slaves to the smartphone who look down at their device, enthralled by it, owned by it, our heroes and heroines in metaglasses gaze up past the horizon line, filled with power, equanimity, and the grim ascetic smugness that tells you you're being seen by a founder. Their waves and layers of the dullest brown and grey clothing you've ever seen mark them as the uncontrolled, free, endowed with the kind of ease that you too can have (if you let Mark Zuckerberg do the updated version of the lid specula scene in A Clockwork Orange).
When you climb the final stairs onto Market, from Powell, you'll see why you've been subjected to so many goddamn metaglasses ads: a Ray-Ban shop selling them, right there, when your face hits air:
There's a part of me that wanted to write a little "here is why the East Bay is better" screed, and of course that's true as a general principle, but it'd be pretty silly to hang that on a comparison of ads in public transit. I'll take Obi Kaufmann's birds any day (and it does feel like someone allocating ad dollars on BART made an east-west distinction). But if there's a vibe to be deduced, here, from the completely arbitrary trip I happened to take the other day, it's that even the expensively-drab dressers luxuriously declining to smile don't really want you to see that they're wearing the new Google Glass.
(Remember that piece of shit? Remember fantasizing about slapping it off the face of anyone you saw wearing one in public? And then not seeing anyone wear one in public? Because everyone knew what was on everyone else's mind about it?)
I'm kind of glad that the people who made these ads know they don't want you to know they're surveilling you, that they know you won't like it. I like that they even know you don't want to be doing the surveilling, that wearing meta's google glass is like parking a fart on your face. I like that the the best argument for putting a computer directly onto your face is: wouldn't it be great not to have your cursed smartphone? Don't you just hate having to frame the entirety of your world through a computer?
