Every video shot on Meta's smart glasses trains Meta's AI. Every hour you spend on a platform is an hour of unpaid labour for a trillion-dollar company. Marina Hyde's conclusion: your side hustle isn't your job. Working for free in Big Tech's content mines is your job.
Where this was said
At 45:30 · chapter starts 41:00
Marina pivots from Meta hardware to a flesh-and-blood test case: Michael Barrymore, Britain's biggest light entertainment star of the 1990s, who fell catastrophically from grace after a man was found dead and sexually assaulted in his swimming pool following a party. Never charged but effectively cancelled, Barrymore has found a second life posting TikTok videos of himself chatting to strangers in supermarkets. He now has 4.4 million followers — nearly three times Nigel Farage's count — has been reposted by Sabrina Carpenter, and is estimated to earn at least £250,000 a year from the platform [1] — Marina Hyde "Michael Barrymore earns at least £250k/year from TikTok: Former UK light entertainment star Michael Barrymore has rebuilt his public presen…" 42:00 . The ethical complexity is immediate: those shop workers never signed release forms. Usdaw, the shop workers' union, stepped in to raise the issue publicly precisely because no individual had personally complained — the concern is structural [2] — Marina Hyde "Michael Barrymore has 4.4 million TikTok followers: Michael Barrymore, once Britain's biggest light entertainment star before a career-endi…" 41:30 . Richard notes the key distinction: holding a phone up so that people can see they are being filmed is fundamentally different from filming with glasses that most people won't even notice. The Barrymore case is, both hosts agree, an early iteration of a problem that the smart glasses will make vastly more common and considerably harder to police.
Michael Barrymore, once Britain's biggest light entertainment star before a scandal ended his career, now has 4.4 million TikTok followers — nearly three times Nigel Farage's count — by posting everyday footage of himself chatting to people in shops. He earns an estimated £250,000 a year. But shop workers union Usdaw drew the line when no one had signed a release form.
Michael Barrymore, once Britain's biggest light entertainment star before a career-ending scandal, has gained 4.4 million TikTok followers by filming everyday interactions at shops, surpassing Nigel Farage's 1.5 million.
Former UK light entertainment star Michael Barrymore has rebuilt his public presence on TikTok with 4.4 million followers and is estimated to earn at least £250,000 a year from the platform.
The UK shop workers' union Usdaw publicly challenged Michael Barrymore over filming shop workers without consent, noting that conventional TV productions require signed release forms.
Marina Hyde argued that the average person effectively works six unpaid hours a day for tech companies by generating content and behavioural data that trains their AI systems.
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