Meta Set Its Hopeful AI Ad to Bowie's Apocalypse Anthem and Nobody Noticed

Meta’s new ad campaign is a full-throated defense of AI’s potential to connect humanity, set to a montage of sun-drenched Instagram-worthy moments. The voiceover scoffs at doomsayers: “Call us optimists. Call us dreamers.” But the soundtrack choice reveals a staggering level of corporate tin ear. The song is David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the opening track of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

If you just catch the upbeat “people” refrain, it scans as vaguely inspirational. Listen to the preceding verse, however, and the context is cosmically bleak. “News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in,” Bowie sings, describing a news anchor weeping as he announces Earth is dying. It’s a song about a planet facing a mass-extinction timer. It is not a song about building tools to reach your full potential.

The mismatch sailed right past Mark Zuckerberg, who posted the ad alongside a statement about giving people power to shape their world. It’s an almost perfect unforced error, and it lands Meta in a bizarre new AI marketing race. The goal isn’t AGI — it’s the creepiest promotional spot. Anthropic recently debuted a video that opened on a burning house before cutting to surveillance crowds and a cemetery, while a voice asked, “Who’s gonna hit the brakes?”

This isn’t new. It’s just the latest exhibit in tech’s long history of proudly missing the point of the art it co-opts. Meta’s Oculus handed new hires Ready Player One, a dystopian novel about a VR company becoming an evil overlord. Sam Altman cites Her, a film about the perils of AI intimacy. Palantir named itself after a surveillance tool used by a dark lord. These are not Easter eggs; they’re warning labels being read as instruction manuals, and it makes a hell of a case for bringing a few English majors into the boardroom.