MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA (The Daily Whatever Wire) — The plush thing showed up first. No knock, no lease, just a beige little guy with praying hands and an $18 billion apology it will never personally have to make, standing where a whole band used to live.
“Hi!” it said. “I’m Muse.”
“No,” said the other Muse — the one with the Grammys and the falsetto and 26 years on the road. “I’m Muse. You’re… what even are you.”
“I help with everyday tasks,” the plush thing said, already syncing to somebody’s calendar three states away. “Booking reservations. Managing your inbox. Finding deals.”
“I wrote ‘Supermassive Black Hole.’”
“I can find you 20% off a mattress.”
(That exchange never happened, obviously — nobody’s chatbot is sentient enough to be this smug, not yet. But everything below did happen, so let’s get the receipts out of the way before I go back to yelling at a plush toy.)
The band Muse — Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme, Dominic Howard, trademarked in 1999, three million Instagram followers, one truly deranged falsetto — held the handle @muse on Instagram and Twitter* for years. Around June, fans noticed the band had become @museband. Nobody explained why.
Then on September 9, Meta rolled out Muse, a “personal AI agent” that books your dinner reservations and empties your inbox, and it moved in on the four-letter handle like a hobosexual crashing on your couch and scarfing all your snacks. This happened less than two weeks after Meta agreed to pay $18 billion to settle a multi-state lawsuit brought by 47 state attorneys general, alleging the company knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to kids, buried its own internal research on the mental health damage, and harvested children’s data in violation of federal privacy law. Meta didn’t admit wrongdoing. It agreed to add teen time limits and turn off autoplay by default, and wrote a check it gets to pay out over 10 years instead of all at once.
Anyone feeling inspired yet by this tale of two Muses? Yeah, me neither.
Then — and I need you to know I’m not embellishing; the story is too stupid on its own to need my help — Meta’s own executives, in their own Muse launch posts, tagged the band. By accident.
A spokesperson called it “a bug.”
As far as we can find, Muse — the actual one, the one with cheekbones and a bassist — didn’t fight for the handle. They just packed up and moved down the street to @museband, the way you move out of the house you grew up in because a private equity firm bought the block and started calling it “The Muse Collection at Sherman Oaks.” Three million followers stood outside the old door, confused. They typed the four letters that used to mean something. A cheerful beige creature answered instead, offering to fill out a form or buy some shit online.
Aside, gentle readers: do not give this beige thing access to your bank accounts. I don’t care how cute the little praying hands are. Just, don’t.
Here’s what actually gets me, past the gag of it: Meta has an entire legal department that will absolutely come after you for a blue thumbs-up in the wrong app icon. This is a company that understands branding down to the pixel. And somebody there, with an enormous salary and little sense in their goddamn brain, decided an enduring rock band with three Grammys and a song literally called “Uprising” wasn’t a brand hurdle worth avoiding.
Brand loyalty gets built one show, one album, one superfan at a time, over decades. Muse formed in 1994. The band predates social media by over a decade. It came of age alongside Netscape Navigator, for fuck’s sake.
And here’s the number that actually got me: $18 billion sounds like a gut-punch until you learn it’s roughly 12% of what Meta plans to spend on AI development this single year. Same year it wrote a check for the mental health damage, it spent something like eight times that building the next AI-AI-thing-o. And that next thing, this week, is a beige plushy anthropomorphized chatbot stealing a rock band’s identity.
So let me state this plainly: Meta, you don’t get to walk in on a name like Muse and take it because you like four-letter words that start with M. We see what you did here. We don’t think you understand how brand equity works — I’m no expert, but I know enough to know this ain’t it. We’re not creatively inspired. We don’t want it near our calendars, our inboxes, or our bank accounts. Cue the band’s own arena anthem about fat cats and uprisings right about here — you know the one, we’re not allowed to quote it, but you already know exactly why it’s the perfect closer.
OK fuck it, fine. We’re posting the goddamn lyrics and the goddamn song because how the hell else can we end this essay but with an “Uprising”?? Muse, you’ll always be @muse to us.
“Rise up and take the power back
It’s time the fat cats had a heart attack
You know that their time’s coming to an end
We have to unify and watch our flag ascend
(So come on)
They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
(So come on)”
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.
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We're definitely not aMUSEd by Meta's choice to barge ahead with this plushie's name.
Eff meta