Two teenage boys in Cologne, Germany, allegedly steered a humanoid robot in human clothes and a fake mustache up to a 16-year-old girl, had it touch her buttocks, and livestreamed the whole thing. Police have confiscated the robot and admitted they have never seen anything like it. Welcome to the future, where the assault is remote-controlled and the footage is already online.
A Robot Walks Into a Crime Scene
Here is what's known so far. Police in Cologne are investigating an incident in which a humanoid robot, controlled by two teenage males, touched a 16-year-old girl's buttocks and made sexually suggestive gestures toward her. The robot was dressed in human clothes. It was wearing a fake mustache. The two males reportedly livestreamed the encounter for an online audience.
The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi flagged the case in her column this week, and the details are almost too stupid to be real. Almost. Anyone who has watched the internet for more than a few years can see exactly how this was going to go.
Police have seized the robot. A spokesperson told the Associated Press the department had not been aware of this phenomenon before, calling it "new territory for us." That is a remarkable sentence from a police department. Somewhere in Cologne there is now an evidence locker holding a mustachioed robot, and a detective is filling out a form with no box for it.
Rule 35 Is Undefeated
Mahdawi has a theory she calls rule 35 of the internet, a sequel to the famous rule 34 about porn. Her version: whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women. The Cologne case is a clean, tidy proof of concept.
The evidence keeps stacking up. Meta's camera-equipped smartglasses, which critics have taken to calling pervert glasses, handed so-called manfluencers a way to film women in public without their knowledge. The footage lands on TikTok. The women often learn they were recorded only after their identities are shared and strangers start harassing them.
Then there's the Flock license plate tracking system, which an extraordinary number of law enforcement officers have reportedly abused to track the locations of exes and other women they were sexually interested in. And AI image generators, which have been pointed overwhelmingly at women and girls. A 2023 report found that deepfake pornography made up 98 percent of all deepfake videos online, and 99 percent of it depicted women.
Meta Has Thoughts and Prayers
Let's linger on the glasses for a second, because the corporate response is instructive. Meta has instituted a few bans and made some privacy updates. That is the full extent of the effort. There doesn't seem to be much appetite for actually solving the problem.
At the Meta Connect 2026 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg did not feel the need to apologize to the women whose lives have been upended by his technology. Not a word. Imagine building a product that predictably turns strangers into content and then standing on a stage without mentioning the people it hurt.
That's the pattern. Build the thing, ship the thing, collect the money, and treat the harassment as a trust-and-safety footnote. The harm isn't a bug that surprised anyone. It's a cost that somebody else absorbs.
Robots Get Better Legal Protection Than You
Mahdawi points out that humanoid robots are still far pricier than a pair of smartglasses, but that won't last. Bank of America predicted last year that mass adoption of humanoid robots will begin in 2035 as costs fall, with 3 billion of them by 2060, replacing 20 percent of the industrial workforce and 50 percent of the service workforce.
So the Cologne mustache bot is a preview, not an outlier. Every one of those machines is a potential avatar for someone who wants to touch, follow, or intimidate a person from a safe distance, with a livestream running.
Meanwhile, the legal system is already showing which side it's on. This week in Philadelphia, a woman was arrested after allegedly blocking the path of one of the Uber delivery robots now rolling through the city. Case law has found that police officers are generally under no legal obligation to protect citizens who aren't in their custody. Yet they seem surprisingly keen on protecting robots. A delivery bot gets a cop. A teenage girl gets a spokesperson saying the department is in new territory.
The Rest of the Week Was Also a Lot
The same column rounds up a few other items that tell you where the culture is. A looksmaxxing influencer who goes by Clavicular, famous for smashing his own face with a hammer, was charged with rape and drug offenses in Massachusetts last month, charges his attorneys deny. People are reportedly willing to pay $7,500 for a week of his dating coaching at Camp Looksmax.
On Fox News, Stephen Miller's wife Katie Miller blamed the fall of Rome on women who stopped having babies and put their energy elsewhere. Someone buy the Millers a history book.
Mahdawi, to her credit, ends on a grim joke: by 2060, robogroping may be as commonplace as catcalling is today. It's funny. It's also a forecast.
The Dingo Take
"New territory for us." That's what a Cologne police spokesperson said about a robot in a fake mustache groping a teenage girl, and no, it is not new territory. It is the oldest territory there is. Men found a new way to touch women who didn't want to be touched, and the only novelty is the delivery mechanism.
The pattern is so consistent it should be a procurement requirement. Before any company ships a camera, a tracker, an image generator, or a walking machine, someone in the room should be forced to answer one question: how will a creep use this on a woman by Tuesday? Nobody asks it, because the answer costs money and the victims aren't the customers. Meta didn't ask. Flock didn't ask. The people selling humanoid robots by the thousands aren't asking either.
Here's the part that should make you furious. When a woman stands in front of a delivery robot in Philadelphia, she gets arrested. When a girl in Cologne gets groped by a different robot, the police need a minute to figure out what category of crime they're even looking at. The machines have lawyers and lobbyists. The girls get a case number, if they're lucky. Fix that, or enjoy 2060.
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