Don't worry about privacy. Just make more content. It's fine.

Back in May, I wrote that Meta Ray-Bans are “a Cybertruck for your face” and “great for weird fucking losers that want to look down your shirt and plaster it all over Instagram.” Well, a little update lol: Instagram is finally cracking down on that last part.

As Business Insider reported last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri is banning “pickup line kind of videos.” As with every moderation decision Meta makes, this is probably going to be very vaguely defined, not target any users with actual audiences, and ultimately result in more insidious behavior from the aforementioned weird users. I know this will happen because that’s how Meta’s business model has always worked. They invent some new torment nexus and then spend all their time tweaking the moderation to softly police all the horrible behavior caused — and rewarded — by the torment nexus. But the Meta Ray-Bans are the most egregious example of this yet.

I’ve long said that good augmented-reality glasses could be very cool. I actually think a lot of the horrors of the modern world are caused by the one-app-per-screen experience of the smartphone and bringing multiple windows — and context — to mobile computing would be a net positive. I would happily buy a pair of glasses that both extended and opened up my smartphone’s screen and meant I no longer had to use it as a computer in public. Open a bunch of windows while I’m sitting on a train, use built-in cameras to orient the augmented reality features, make all of it end-to-end encrypted, and maybe even block the ability to use those cameras as actual cameras.

And if a user were to use those cameras as cameras, there’s certainly no reason to not have a big unavoidable flashing light letting people know. Meta Ray-Bans have an LED that flashes when the camera is in use, but there are all kinds of complaints that it’s not immediately visible to those not wearing the glasses. I, also, in the course of researching this piece discovered a whole world of (mostly) men teaching each other how to bypass it. So perhaps this entire idea is dead on arrival. Fun fact: In Japan, it’s illegal to sell smartphones that let you mute the shutter sound. Because of perverts!

Meta Ray-Bans are not trying to solve real problems with mobile computing. They want you to think they are, of course, but the rotten core of the whole project means they can’t actually admit what they’re doing. They’ll tell you the lack of end-to-end encryption is so their AI model can work as an assistant for you, and they’ll say that you need the AI assistant because it’s a better hands-free experience than glasses that work as a mobile display for your smartphone, and they’ll say that the video capabilities are perfect for posting to Instagram or letting the AI assistant tell you information about a flower you’re looking at or whatever. It goes on and on and on, but the truth is very clear.

They need the glasses because Meta’s attempts at making phones and operating systems have been a flop. They dumped their AI into the glasses because they need a way to sell their AI. And the content-creation tools they’ve built in, like taking photos and videos, are meant to populate Instagram feeds because it’s a great way to get users to advertise the glasses for free. But this puts Meta in a hilariously awkward position. They want users to post Ray-Ban footage to Instagram, an app still overwhelmingly popular with young women, and they clearly know their glasses are perfect for creeping on young women. So what have they done? Well, they’ve recently partnered with Kylie Jenner and Blackpink’s Jennie Kim to paper over that little conundrum. As Salon recently wrote, “Meta recruited a celebrity to make smart glasses feel safe for women. They aren't.”

There is some evidence that Meta’s marketing campaign is working. Sales of the glasses tripled in 2025. And smart glasses-created content — not made by perverts — is beginning to organically populate my feeds. Over the weekend, I came across a video of “Vader the Golden,” a very cute golden retriever that wears Meta Ray-Bans to record his point of view.

His owner, who posts under the handle @katyymorgann, doesn’t appear to be working directly with Meta. Though, when Vader’s Ray-Bans videos are shared to Instagram they have a tag on them that reads, “Ray-Ban Meta glasses,” which is auto-generated from the video footage metadata. And when you click on that tag it takes you right to the Ray-Bans shop. The perfect little loop. And one must assume Instagram’s algorithm is looking for and promoting posts with that tag. They’d be stupid not to!

The glasses are no safer than they were a few months ago and the moderation policies about what kind of footage you can upload are no clearer — to say nothing of all the creepy footage that isn’t being uploaded publicly — but who cares right? Don’t worry about that stuff. Put them on your dog. Make content. It’ll go viral.

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Lewis & Conger is 158 years old, and pretty weird, and you've never heard of it. We're re-launching this historic store with a little game — see if you can pick out the lie, amidst the two strange-but-true facts from our past.

Here's a hint, all the bizarre things you see here are real things we sold over the decades.

The official White House X account posted a parody of the Rick and Morty opening featuring President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. (Vance is obviously Morty lol.) I haven’t seen anyone take credit for the video, so I assume it’s AI or at least partially AI-generated.

This is video is dumb and embarrassing, like everything else The White House puts out, but I’m starting to get a little confused as to who any of this is supposed to be for. Mediate tried to link this to a recent interview Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon did that mentioned Trump, but the White House post went out before that interview was published. I sort of think they just… did this….

But, again, who is this supposed to be for? The Gen Z and alpha right-wingers, who would also be into Rick and Morty, are into way more racist stuff and less likely to be on X. And I can’t see millennial right-wingers be super excited by something so obviously boomer-coded, but I can’t imagine boomers really appreciating the Rick and Morty tie in. I thought the replies would give me a better sense who likes this sort of thing, but all of them are from leftists and libs telling them to go to hell lol.

This posting-for-no-one tone is something I’ve noticed across most of the Trump admin’s online behavior recently. It all feels very boring. It turns out even journalist Nate Silver has noticed this. “Most of the Trump-related stories this summer have been boring and dumb,” Silver wrote on X over the weekend. “Maybe we're moving on from him being the central figure in American politics.” And I agree! They lost their juice!

A whole bunch of Claude conversations leaked over the weekend. Users noticed that you could search “site:claude.ai/share” and it would list hundreds of Claude conversations that had been shared between users. If you don’t use AI at all, most of these chatbots have the ability to generate a link to a specific conversation, so you could send it to someone else. It’s not great that these links were indexed by Google and it’s good that Anthropic quickly removed them, but you would also think that people would be a bit smarter about what they’re telling AI chatbots and what they’re sharing with other people.

Per Reddit’s r/ClaudeAI subreddit, the leaked conversations included a crypto wallet and keys, a lawyer discussing contract details, and “a truly staggering amount of incestuous erotica, some of which was bizarrely ‘shared by Anthropic.’” Would love to hear more about that last one!

This is not the only AI-related security breach to be concerned about at the moment. There’s a new exploit called ShareRoot that uses Claude’s Cowork to access to every file on a Mac. And last week OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 Sol autonomously hacked Hugging Face’s internal databases. OpenAI and Hugging Face now say they’re working together to investigate exactly what happened.

On Wednesday, I may have blogged a little too hard. I wrote a piece arguing that millennials, more than any other generation, lost a lot of their creative work thanks to corporate tech platforms and venture-backed digital media. I have received A LOT of messages from depressed millennials telling me that I didn’t have be so rough about it lol. Well, I wanted to add an addendum to that piece.

It seems like a surprising amount of young people think Robert Pattinson is Gen Z, either literally or spiritually. He is, for the record, older than I am. And he was the age I am now when he made The Batman. (The amount of relief I felt writing the last two sentences was indescribable.)

I could write a whole thing here about why people think Pattinson is Gen Z — he has the personality of someone who was Zoom schooled, he still has most of his hair, he kind spent about a decade making smaller movies and bounced back in a big way post-COVID, his Batman felt decidedly unlike Marvel slop — but I actually don’t think it matters. If you’re a millennial, just start telling older people you’re Gen Z. Fuck it. For whatever reason, Gen Z is less threatening to Gen X and boomers and they want to help them. Just tell an older person with money you’re Gen Z and ask for some of that money. Who gives a shit.

I am being followed by this video across every platform I frequent. So I started getting curious about where it came from. Like all viral content in 2026, it’s more of a combination of different parts than it is one exact work. So there are a few pieces to it. Here’s what I’ve got for you.

The video is from the 2006 Russian animated film Dobrinya and the Dragon. You can watch the clipped scene here. The original song is pretty good actually. But as for the song in the TikTok, it’s a mashup itself actually. It’s “Up n Down” by Only Fire combined with the song “God race” by the artist Metaroom. Which is apparently from the soundtrack of a Peruvian web series called ENA.

And that, my friends, is how many layers your average meme in 2026 has!

P.S. here’s The Odyssey in 70mm VapeMAX

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***