beyond creepiness

One thought about that incredibly creepy Snapchat TV ad — so creepy that I’m not even going to link to it — the interesting thing to me about it is not, in fact, the creepiness, it’s the fact that the big selling point is using augmented reality to deprive the people around you of their own faces and substitute faces (human, animal, vegetable, whatever) you prefer. It’s not accidental, I think, that the ad is set in a subway car, because public transportation confronts you with the plain old humanity of those you live among. Snapchat, the ad says, can relieve you of the burden of living among other human beings. It’s an ad made by sociopaths for sociopaths.