Cowards on the Central Line

On stickers, smart glasses, and who actually loses the moral high ground

A sticker is doing the rounds on the London Underground. It's designed to look official — TfL blue, sans-serif, laminated like a real notice. It shows a pair of glasses with a Wi-Fi symbol over the lens, and underneath: "Notice to users of smart glasses — How does it feel to be Mark Zuckerberg's little bitch?" Another version, stuck to a train window on the Elizabeth Line: "Everyone thinks you look like a massive nonce." A third shows three stick figures crowded around a fourth, arms out, looming — "Smart glasses: public shaming of users is encouraged across the London Underground network."

The account behind them — bio: "Don't Buy a Swastika" — posted a reel of the campaign in action. At the time of writing, it has north of 225,000 likes, 18,600 reposts, and a comment section that reads like a pep rally.

We have no investment in Meta. None. This isn't a defence of the company, the product, or the wider surveillance economy that will sell you a covert camera the size of a drawing pin — no permit, no disclosure, no debate — on Pinterest right now, today, with a five-star rating and free shipping. If the objection is genuinely to being filmed without consent, that objection should have found its target years ago, in an industry that has been normalising exactly that with zero backlash. It didn't. It found smart glasses, because smart glasses are visible, branded, and attached to a company everyone already loves to hate. That's not a safety campaign. That's a target of convenience.

Who's actually under the lens?

Here's what the sticker doesn't ask, because asking would ruin the joke: who is wearing the glasses.

Some of them are exactly who the meme assumes — people filming strangers for content, which is worth criticising on its own, separately, with an argument that doesn't need a slur to make its point. But some of the people wearing camera glasses on the Underground are disabled. Low vision. Balance disorders that turn a station platform into what one lyric calls "a war with the floor." Degenerative neurological conditions where a camera feeding computer vision back through bone-conduction audio is the difference between navigating independently and not navigating at all. For them, the "smart" in smart glasses isn't a gimmick — it's the closest thing they have to a steady hand.

The stickers don't distinguish. They can't — that's the entire design flaw of a joke built on "anyone I can see wearing this is fair game." So a disabled person gets cornered on the Central Line by three people pointing and laughing at a sign that calls them, unprompted, "Zuckerberg's bitch" or worse, and the 225,000 people who liked the reel never have to know or care which kind of wearer they just cheered on being humiliated. That's the whole mechanism of a pile-on: it doesn't check who's inside the target before it fires.

The moral high ground, and who's actually standing on it

Here's the part that should embarrass everyone circulating this campaign uncritically: it runs on Meta's own platform, with Meta's own engagement mechanics, rewarding exactly the kind of behaviour — public shaming, pack targeting, dehumanising language dressed as satire — that the account claims to be exposing Meta for enabling. You cannot build a brand on "Meta is the problem" and then use Meta's algorithm to organise a crowd against a stranger on a train platform. That's not resistance. That's just using the machine you say you hate to do the thing you say you hate, to someone weaker than you.

And when disabled people push back — when they say, in their own words, that the campaign is targeting people who rely on assistive technology — they get attacked. In the replies. On Meta. By people whose entire identity is built on opposing Meta. One commenter dismissed a disabled person's objection outright: "disgusting take... absolutely ridiculous." Another suggested taping over the camera light as a solution to someone else's mobility or vision impairment, as if independence were an inconvenience to be covered up rather than a right to be respected. Whatever high ground this campaign thought it was standing on evaporates the moment it starts inciting a crowd against the very people it's supposedly protecting.

Hysteria isn't a safety strategy

None of this is a claim that surveillance concerns are fake, or that Ray-Ban Meta glasses are a neutral product with no privacy implications — they aren't, and that conversation is worth having properly. But hysteria is not scrutiny, and a laminated sticker calling a stranger a slur is not a policy position. If the goal is genuinely consent and disclosure, then the same energy has to go toward every device doing the same job more covertly and far more cheaply — the button-cam, the pen-cam, the camera-the-size-of-a-tack-head sold openly on Pinterest — because a visible light on the side of your face is, if anything, the more honest version of a problem that's already everywhere, unbadged and unremarked upon. Aiming all the outrage at the one device you can actually see isn't principle. It's theatre that happens to be easy to film for a reel.

Cowards on the Central Line

This is the context behind the track. It was written from the other side of that sticker — from inside a body where "every second is a grapple with a creeping decay," where a camera and some code are "rebuilding what the dying cells are washing away," and where the people laughing at the light on the frame have never had to find out what it's covering for.

"You slap on your labels, throw your sickening slurs, / Wait until your own steady vision starts to blur. / I'm carved out of iron while your soft tissue whines, / Mine might be decaying, but you ain't got no spine."

Recorded disability hate crime in England and Wales has fallen slightly in the most recent year on record, but that fall is largely attributed to changes in how malicious-communication offences are logged, not to a real drop in hostility — and researchers still put hate crimes against disabled people up roughly 9% since 2020, with prosecution rates sitting around 1–2% of reports (GOV.UK, Hate Crime England and Wales 2024/25; United Response; Disability Rights UK).

That's the climate a viral sticker campaign is dropping slurs into. It doesn't get to call itself harmless because the font is friendly and the outrage is fashionable.

— Art of FACELESS

"Cowards on the Central Line" — lyrics written by MSUX, a musician and producer with an incurable, neurodegenerative disease. Produced by MSUX. Published on the epicFAIL# label by Art of FACELESS. Available on SoundCloud.

The manuscript for the cello part will be made available on the site soon for anyone to use in their own versions. All stems too. We actively seek human artists for MSUX and Art of FACELESS to work with and record or perform their versions of all MSUX's compositions and productions. Please contact us if you're interested. We are based in Cardiff/Athens/Ashville for collaborations.

Lyrics are published below the SoundCloud embed. Comments on SoundCloud are turned off as we have no time or energy for debate. Our work is our comment, and that's final.

LYRICS by MSUX

[Tempo: 140 BPM. Relentless, glitched 808 sub-bass beats, metallic percussion rattling like subway rails, cold synth drone undercutting the track]

(Intro)

Synapses misfiring in the dark.

Static in the skull, circuits keeping me grounded.

You lot slap your little blue stickers on the train window,

Acting hard in a herd, giggling behind your phone screens.

You don’t know what a real decay feels like.

Listen mutherfuckas.

(Verse 1)

Nerves stripping down like bare live wires,

Brain stem cooking under internal fires.

White matter fraying, signals dropping out cold,

Fighting off a rot that’s taking hold before I’m old.

Every step on this platform is a war with the floor,

Balance getting robbed while you whisper by the doors.

I’ve got cameras and code reading edges in the grey,

Rebuilding what the dying cells are washing away.

And you bunch of comfortable, coward-arsed pricks

Think you’re rebels’ cause you stick on some primary-school prints?

"Zuckerberg’s bitch"? Mate, look me in the eyes,

My own central system wants to shut down and die,

And you’re pissed by a lens that’s just keeping me upright—

Step out of your comfort zone, try the dark without light.

[Cello solo]

(Hook)

Look at the stickman pointing on the sign,

Three against one on the Central Line.

Pack of cunty hyenas when the lights start to fade,

Terrified of shadows that the circuits have made.

You slap on your labels, throw your sickening slurs,

Wait until your own steady vision starts to blur.

I’m carved out of iron while your soft tissue whines,

Mine might be decaying, but you ain’t got no spine.

I don't bend, I don't break, I don't swallow your dirt—

Test the machine when the flesh only hurts.

[Cello and recorder solos]

(Verse 2)

Tremor in the fingers, phantom jolts in the spine,

Motor cortex bleeding out the concept of time.

Every second is a grapple with a creeping decay,

While you sit on your arse chatting shit on the way.

Calling disabled people names off a blue plastic sticker,

Reckon you’re the hard man, you couldn't be sicker.

Innocent targets just surviving the street,

While you beg for attention every time that you tweet.

Take away your balance, strip the feeling from your feet,

Watch you squeal like a pig at the very first defeat.

You wouldn’t last an hour where my consciousness lives,

No mercy from the body, not a single fuck gives.

My tech is my armour, it’s welded to the bone,

I stare down the rot completely on my own.

(Hook)

Look at the stickman pointing on the sign,

Three against one on the Central Line.

Pack of cunty hyenas when the lights start to fade,

Terrified of shadows that the circuits have made.

You slap on your labels, throw your sickening slurs,

Wait until your own steady vision starts to blur.

I’m carved out of iron while your soft tissue whines,

Degenerative beast walking straight through your lines.

I don't bend, I don't break, I don't swallow your dirt—

Test the machine when your flesh starts to hurt.

[Angry cello solo]

(Outro)

Mind the gap, fucking cowards.

You’re staring at someone whose own head is a battleground every waking second.

Your pathetic little stickers don't even scratch my paint.

Keep pointing.

I’m not moving a fucking inch.

Now, fuck off!