“This Song About the Extinction of Humanity Will Ease Your Fears About A.I.!”
“Meta’s newest advertisement…[uses] the David Bowie song, “Five Years.”…It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass-extinction event in five years.” – Silberling, Amanda, July 23rd, 2026, “Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction” TechCrunch
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg here! To what occasion do you owe the honor of my presence, you may ask? I’m glad you did! It seems a significant number of you have voiced concerns over A.I., and the dangers its explosive, unrestrained emergence onto our unprepared planet present. Your reservations are heard, and acknowledged. Accordingly, I am here to announce the launch of our new ad campaign, “The Future is For Everyone!” If its tailored imagery and dismissive language aren’t enough to convince you we have your best interests at heart when it comes to A.I., perhaps our choice of the song to accompany it will be. That song is David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a feel-good ditty about the realization of humanity’s imminent demise in the span of that very time frame.
Like everything we do here at Meta, we put our best minds to work on this campaign. They’re the same minds that never thought to listen to “Five Years,” or even Google the lyrics to realize how utterly moronic and self-owning its inclusion in this targeted propaganda is. Missing the message of “Five Years” is something that can’t even be attributed to garbled enunciation or sonic distortion. One would need to have a severe hearing problem, or an obvious ulterior motive, not to connect the dots on its clearly articulated words, and their meaning. Guess which category we fall into?
Our denial of the human impacts of the A.I. revolution is just one symptom of the disease of unfettered capitalism. Another is our open disdain for democracy and our covert attempts to destroy it. Our oft-professed support of, and capitulation to Donald Trump and his fascist-adjacent cronies should make this pretty much self-evident. We have to give them something to wet their beaks! Where else are we going to get it if not from you, even in the absence of any choice on your part? The Nerd Reich is upon us, and David Bowie is its unwilling herald.
We’ve also loosened regulations on the content that can be circulated on our platforms, much of which falls into the realm of disinformation, and hate speech. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism? Have at it! We’re free-speech absolutists, after all. The fact that I support this, despite being Jewish, indicates more than just a shocking lack of morality and restraint; it also signifies a complete absence of self-awareness, self-respect, and even self-preservation! Avarice is funny like that.
The risks are real, but so are the benefits, and those benefits greatly outweigh the risks. At least for the few dozen ultra-wealthy white men like me who are mercilessly pushing things onto you that you don’t want or need for the sake of our own enrichment. Interesting too that this statement comes against the backdrop of high-ranking researchers at Anthropic expressing concerns that A.I. could wipe out humanity within the next decade; a milestone that is coming up somewhere around that five-year mark, give or take a few.
To quote the song: Five years. That’s all we’ve got. Enjoy it while you can. I, for one, and planning to spend it making these advances even more inescapable, while holing up in “Billionaire Bunker” in Miami. Even I’ll need a shelter to take to when the other shoe drops, and a reality not too far from that of The Terminator manifests. “Judgement Day” is upon us, my friends. Enjoy!