Massive Attack have a long record of staunch support for progressive causes, including a bunch of recent activity on that front. They removed their music from Spotify in protest of CEO Daniel Ek's huge investment in AI military technology. They turned down a Coachella appearance due to environmental concerns. They've been at the center of music industry action in protest of the genocide in Gaza, launching an alliance for artists who've spoken out, backing a campaign to geo-block Israel's access to music, and repeatedly expressing their support for Kneecap as the group faces pushback for its own statements on Palestine.
It would be pretty out of character for these guys to employ facial recognition technology at their concerts. Yet last week reports about Massive Attack doing just that began to circulate online. Today, the band has shared a statement clarifying what's been going on and criticizing the outlets that spread "inaccuracies and outright lies," much of which they say was AI-generated. They sound angry.
Their statement is titled "It Isn't What It Isn't." Here's what it says:
Last week, a number of platforms including "Somewhere.Media", "Hidden" and others ran stories relating to our live show & the apparent use of live facial recognition technology.
Via the brainless duplication chambers of Al generated IG accounts, the “story” snowballed, & between entertainment platforms & Al clonethink, nobody & nothing bothered to factcheck. Inaccuracies and outright lies proliferated in tandem with likes & shares. "Somewhere Media" went nowhere near any basic reporting standard, stating that show material was "pulled from public databases."
In contrast then, here's some "low performing post content": Firstly, no Massive Attack live show has ever recorded or stored personal data. Secondly, only government departments, relevant authorities & approved contractors can access public databases in the UK, & doing so in multiple cities/countries would be impossible.
Our show system is live-only, using a simple face-detection effect, combined with a completely fictional "database" that is randomly assigned.
As a provocation on the hyper-expansion of surveillance capitalism (with a bit of mirth) it works quite well, with recent emphasis placed on ICE repression & targeting of students, & student repression in Serbia depicted via face tags that describe specific roles in student protests.
The irony of an artistic political satire being used to evidence the same controversial activity being used by the artistic satirist is very 2025.
But while the digital attention economy has given us your limited attention, you might like to notice that when they're not arresting carboard sign carrying pensioners for terrorism, the UK government (& especially its police forces) are overreaching almost all other western democracies with their use of public facial recognition ... while there is no specific legislation regulating police use of these systems.
The parrot line used by supporters of intrusive police & government surveillance technology is "if you've got nothing to hide, what's the problem?" Only the same does not apply to them...
An investigation by the human rights group Liberty revealed that several UK police forces have refused to disclose details of agreements or contracts with US spy-tech firm (& Gaza genocide profiteer) Palantir.
In fact, it was only via freedom of information act requests we learned that British police forces are working with Palantir "to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens' political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information."Remember voting for that?
Neither do we.
The slideshow ends with the above image of the fake facial recognition server. See Massive Attack's original post below.
