How many times have you wanted to live like a paranoid billionaire? Well, now there's an app for that too. Protector It’s the “Uber of guns”—not a joke, I swear. That’s how one of its promoters describes it. The idea in a nutshell? You pay a thousand bucks (plus a $129 annual subscription) and get armed ex-cops who escort you around like you’re a threatened VIP.
A promotional video shows girls bragging about ordering security to go to the airport, with men in suits carrying suitcases and lattes. It's carefully constructed viral marketing, sure, but it reveals a lot about our society and what we're willing to turn into commodities.
The Viral Marketing Strategy
The numbers look impressive: 15 million views and counting 30.000 download with only 14 (strategically placed) pieces of content. But there’s one detail that ruins the “triumph”: none of this is spontaneous. The girls in the video (an influencer duo known as “Fuzz and Fuzz”) have freely admitted that they were paid to pretend to use the Protector app.
And that's not the only case. Another content creator, Camille Hovsepian, turned out to be the girlfriend of Nikita Beer, App Consultant and self-proclaimed serial “growth hacker.” Interesting guy, Bier: he claims that once you’ve reached a certain level of wealth, you should just “piss off millions of people on the internet every day by launching controversial apps, just for the love of the game.” He reminds me of someone with even more money than him.
His resume includes advising a health app to change its name to “Death Clock” and add a feature that predicts exactly how and when you will die. It ended up at #6 on the App Store charts and we talked about it here. Brilliant marketing or low-level dystopia? You decide.
Protector, or: the economy of paranoia
I honestly wonder who Protector's ideal customer is. Who the hell spends more than 1.000 euros to be escorted by armed ex-policemen? The app seems to target corporate executives who are concerned about their safety, even going so far as to exploit assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.
Had a Protector been present when Thompson was killed, the crisis might have been avoided.
This statement, contained in a promotional video, is followed by three hypothetical scenarios in which a guard claims that he could have prevented the murder. Exploiting a person's death to sell a service: marketing really knows no bounds, huh?
The Financiers of Digital Paranoia
There is financial support for this madness Balaji srinivasan, a guy known for losing a public bet that one Bitcoin would hit $1 million. This is the same guy who rented an island near Singapore to host a 90-day “Network School,” described as “a technocapitalist college town” for “anyone who doesn’t feel like part of the establishment.”
Protector, by the way, is not even the first app of its kind. There is also Black wolf, which offers armed drivers and operates in five states, with about 256.000 downloads since launching in 2023. The founder Kerry King Brown advertises its service as an alternative to Waymo's self-driving taxis (as if Uber and Lyft didn't exist).
Protector: Dystopian Evolution
The cherry on top? Protector plans to launch “Patrol,” an app where users can crowdfund security guards to patrol their neighborhoods. The more money you donate, the higher the level of security, including robots and drones to monitor the area.
“We are not mall guards, we are real cops,” says a guard in a promotional video. I wonder if we realize the direction we are taking: privatizing security, turning it into a luxury commodity, creating inequality even in personal protection.
In a time when trust in institutions has never been so low, does anyone really think that the solution is an app that lets you hire “private cops”? I don’t know about you, but I find this disturbingly dystopian. But hey, at least they bring you a latte.
