Teenage Kicks
In an age of wishful mnemonics, be careful what you fish for.
There’s a thread making the rounds on Twitter in which people are loosing it due to the a TikTok-Teenage-Filter which makes them look young again.
I like this woman who totally get’s it: "This is not me."
I said it before in the context of the Face through time-paper: “These AI-anachronisms are one of the most fascinating things coming out of this technology, like imaginary reincarnation with a time machine (…) i expect a full working generational Face-DeLorian within a year or so.“
That DeLorian just landed, and the reactions are deeply unsettling.
What does it mean when the past is called back not via artifacts from their own time, as in photographs or memorabilia, but breaks into the present by applying their visual patterns onto the current?
We already have a phenomenon of a social media induced distorted image of the self, dubbed Snapchat Dysmorphia and Instagram Face, that lead to a boom in plastic surgery to make faces more compatible with photo-app filters. There's already people building digital Twins of their teenage selves from their old journals and I expect these trends to grow.
I haven't read much about psychoanalysis, but I can't imagine it's healthy when the past doesn't stay in the past, and can be applied to your present with a click.
We already have a media environment which is deeply atemporal and inifinite, in which there is no beginning and no end. The narrative structures of our lives are dissolved by an endless stream of stuff from all eras, blending together into a space without a temporal dimension based in the continuing passage of time in the present. Now this kind of atemporality can be applied to the images of yourself, in ever more sophisticated ways.
What creatures do we become when you take away the temporal dimension that holds our narrative structure together, the very foundation of our psychological makeup? After all, what we call the Self is nothing but the story we tell about ourselves, using memories and current events to investigate who we are and where we want to go.
Our evolving ability to edit that story by digital means, to distort memories even further than our mind already does, is deeply concerning.
In this video Thomas Flight analyzes the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once in the context of the technology of wishful mnemonics aka AI:
In an interview with Slashfilm, The Daniels - the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once - explain how this movie is about the infinity of our digital world:
Scheinert: we've talked a lot about what it's like to have grown up with the internet, and how that exacerbated the typical generational divide, and what it feels like for everyone, no matter old you are, to live right now with the internet (…) we wanted the maximalism of the movie to connect with what it's like to scroll through an infinite amount of stuff, which is something we're all doing too much.
Kwan: Yeah. So it's about finding each other in a very noisy world. Cause I think right now everyone's struggling to figure out how to do that, and I think our stories are struggling to keep up with it. The life cycle of the movie is years. The life cycle of the internet is, like, milliseconds. And so our stories are kind of failing to keep up. This movie is an attempt to tackle all of that, in a way that combines the smallest things and the biggest things.
Like what is the most personal thing?
What is a realistic TikTok-filter bringing back your teenage self other than a device to edit your most personal thing: the memories of your self?
This atemporal aspect of AI-anachronisms are the promise of a fountain of youth, a disconnect from the flow of time itself. You can be everything, everywhere, at all ages, through the whole history of the universe, all at once.
We know that these sort of stories never end well, because mortality, the end of all things for the self, is what defines us. In the greek myth of Tithonus, the godess of dawn Eos falls in love with a man and Zeus grants her wish to make him immortal. But Eos forgot to wish for eternal youth, so Tithonus aged forever, until Eos turned him into an cicada.
Now we have technology inducing an illusion of "Forever Young", and in real life, it shatters us into pieces:
We already live in an age that is deeply saturated in a retromania that has been going on since more than 20 years now and which started at the end of the 90s with the reemergence of 80s electro sound in the techno underground, evolving into electroclash and then this just never stopped.
I call this phenomenon "The Big Flat Now": Digital technology collapses the experience of time passage into a present kackophony by dissolving narrative structure, and the possibility to transform yourself into your teenage version is its latest iteration.
I’m not so much worried about paperclip maximizers, but I do think that technology which is dissolving the narrative structure of your self into atemporal, editable grey goo can be damaging to the psychological makeup of society.
In an age of wishful mnemonics, be careful what you fish for.
This newsletter was riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes. I like your work but honestly, it was impossible to get through this post