Meta's Muse is topping app store charts and Mustafa Suleyman is describing it in the kind of language that should make anyone who has read a history of technology sit up straight: 'your second brain, your aide, your consigliere, your reliable friend.' That last word is the tell. Reliable friend is not a product description. It is an intimacy claim, and intimacy claims come with costs that only become visible later.
What the Consigliere Model Actually Sells
The consigliere framing is not accidental. A consigliere, in the original sense, is someone who knows everything about you and uses that knowledge on your behalf. The model works because the information asymmetry runs one way. What Suleyman's essay, covered in Fast Company's Plugged In, does not address is what happens when the consigliere's employer is a publicly traded advertising company with a structural need to monetize the relationship. The Atlantic's piece this week on cameras everywhere and the surveillance state treats Meta glasses as the symptom. Muse is the same logic running on the inside of your head rather than pointing outward.
The Intimacy-to-Extraction Pipeline
Connor Hayes, VP of Threads at Meta, spoke with Culture Slop about building deeply personal feeds at scale. The tension he named, between the intimacy of a personal feed and the industrial infrastructure required to produce it, is the same tension Muse embodies at a higher register. A feed that knows you is a product. A second brain that knows you is a relationship. Relationships, when they are with corporations, have terms of service. The B2B marketing world is being urged this week by Fast Company's Linda Boff not to let AI make it forget the buyer is human. The consumer product world is moving in the exact opposite direction: it is building AI that makes you forget the product is not.