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On Thursday morning,<\/span> Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence<\/a> will not \u201cmake us less connected\u201d or \u201cleave us behind.\u201d It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track \u201cFive Years,\u201d which is about, among other things, the end of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cCall us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want \u2014 but we\u2019re betting on people, and we like those odds,\u201d the narrator says<\/a>, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. (The ad also takes special care to highlight use cases for its controversial<\/a> smart glasses that are not, say, harassing women<\/a> while surreptitiously recording them.)<\/p>\n The snippet of \u201cFive Years\u201d used in the ad includes the following lyrics:<\/p>\n I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies<\/p>\n I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs<\/p>\n My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare<\/p>\n I had to cram so many things to store everything in there<\/p>\n And all the fat, skinny people<\/p>\n And all the tall, short people<\/p>\n And all the nobody people<\/p>\n And all the somebody people<\/p>\n I never thought I’d need so many people<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n Perhaps understandably, it skips other parts of the song, including the opening:<\/p>\n News had just come over When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said that he \u201cwould like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about \u2018Five Years\u2019 and its meaning: having optimism for the future.\u201d Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I would wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism,\u201d reads the quote, which is itself sourced from NME Magazine<\/a>. \u201cIf one can take the micky out of the future, and what it is going to be like \u2026 It\u2019s going to be unbelievably technological.\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, BowieBible.com also notes that the song \u201cspeaks of a dystopian nightmare in which Earth enters its final five years, for reasons undisclosed, and the ensuing panic, violence, and attempts at redemption.\u201d<\/p>\n BowieBible.com also quotes from a 2018 interview<\/a> with drummer Mick Woodmansey: \u201cWell, we chatted about it, and we knew it was about the end of the world and pretty depressing,\u201d Woodmansey said of the song. \u201cI remember when we recorded it, he was actually in tears. He was doing the vocal and he was actually crying.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Jeremy D. Larson, the deputy director of Cond\u00e9 Nast sister publication Pitchfork, taking songs out of context for commercials is a time-honored tradition. He points to a Carnival Cruise ad<\/a> that uses an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction. (He also says that since Warner Chappell Music owns<\/a> Bowie\u2019s catalog, they are the ones with discretion over where his songs end up.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n