The band Muse quietly stopped being @muse on Instagram this week — the name now belongs to Meta’s new AI product of the same name. Contrary to viral claims, there’s no proof anyone forced it; it may well have been a deal. In this segment we look forward, calmly, at what the small story reveals about all of us: how a name held for thirty years turned out to be borrowed rather than owned, how much of our own identity lives on ground we rent from a handful of companies, and why — without burning it all down — it’s worth knowing which parts of ourselves we truly own and keeping the truest ones on land no one else can reassign. And the irony that makes it sing: a band that sang about machines displacing humans, gently displaced by a machine wearing its name.
