The editologic of deepfake Joe Biden
Everything’s true in Lalaland
The narrative for the last decade was that the internet is radicalizing you. I’ve read — and written — countless stories arguing that idea. And maybe it was true at a certain point or still is true at the very top of the funnel. But I think most people are online enough now to actively seek out content — real or fake — that makes them feel good (even if “feeling good” for them means feeling very bad and angry), entertains them, and reaffirms their worldview. (…) Nowadays, if someone tells you that Democrats eat children and shows you an obvious deepfake from a QAnon Telegram group of Joe Biden talking about harvesting adrenochrome, that’s not them falling for misinformation or disinformation. That’s just them telling you what they believe.
I’ve been saying this for years now: Desinformation is not about getting fooled by wrong information, but about using reality-based and digitally edited symbols as narrative devices for whatever story our tribes want to hear: Fake news is “merely“ a new form of fairytales to reaffirm our beliefs and the morals of the tribe.
This deepfake its not really about Biden sending troops, it’s a new kind of storytelling, and debunking stuff like this is missing the point (albeit debunking stuff like this is necessary when boundaries between the real and the fake become that blurry).
We use this sort of folk etymology not as “information” but as symbols for a kind of meta-truth that emerges from and transcends the content of the fake — it is about the symbolic meaning of the fake, not it’s content. With digital technology, reality becomes a formable mass of grey goo with which we can create symbols with a click now. News segments transformed and filtered with democratized editorial tools are narrative devices in an ideological fight of the memetic online tribes.
Debunking for this kind of usecase of desinformation is just saying the signifier is not the same as the significant, which, duh, most people aleady know. It’s not about “Biden sending troops“, it’s about “Democrats bad“.
This follows from the democratization of publishing tools, in which everyone is able to edit media on a professional level now with a readily available digitized mass of dissolved reality-based content: Download that news report, edit that audio track with a fake voice, let it talk about whatever, go viral, enjoy your online fame and get your oxytocin/dopamine kicks from a tribalistically distributed hormone economy, there's a hundred apps for that now. I call this principle Editology, in which the logos — the word of truth and reason — is transformed by the logic of the edit.
Last time i wrote about this was in the context of that racist deepfake of Disneys Little Mermaid-trailer. I took a paragraph from that article and replaced Mermaid with Biden:
We made our symbolic world editable and packed it into a pocket computer for everyone to play with, and now we wonder that people create warmongering Biden-versions with it. The editological principle of Joe Bidens states that all Joe Bidens exist in all variants in latent space, and somebody will find them and edit them into variations of Biden-speeches. Editology also means we're having a fight over the logos, about which version of those Bidens represents truth. That's roughly 9 billion truths in the RAM of our pocket computers fighting about which one is more authentic than the others, more zeitgeist, or more just. These are a lot of fighting plato caves. Too many for my taste.
This logic of the edit holds up for all kinds of phenomena, from ideologically motivated deepfakes like in these cases to Martin Gurris revolt of the public, in which elites lost control over the information-sphere, to people freaking out because TikTok-filters transform them into their teenage selves, and in a few decades, to AI-cinema and digital lucid dreaming.
On the other hand, I think this principle created by cheap editing technology will give way to an opposing force that will increase the value of the real and the authentic, which comes with it’s own set of problems about which I wrote in a short note here:
Authentic media may become a luxury good in an AI-Brave New World, where the masses are fed what they want until they starve of monoculture, and the rich are reading handpicked social critique embedded in fine art and movies played by real actors, a new demand for authenticity and a guarded reality in an editological world.
Steven Pinker also touched on this in a recent interview about the pushback against AI:
we all have deep intuitions about causal connections to people. A collector might pay $100,000 for John F. Kennedy’s golf clubs even though they’re indistinguishable from any other golf clubs from that era. The demand for authenticity is even stronger for intellectual products like stories and editorials: The awareness that there’s a real human you can connect it to changes its status and its acceptability.
But boundaries are blurry, and the deepfakes above tell a true story for the MAGA-crowd, who enjoy their guarded reality just as we enjoy ours, which to them is just as or maybe even more authentic than any real unfaked news report.
Myths and fairytales are truer than true, they are meta-true, and the editologic of a digitally transformed world is a postmodern machine using existence as fodder for a giant mythmaking-reality-shredder, producing nine billion truths per second. Soon, this logic will be available as an AI-Chatbot in an ideological preference of your taste.
The editologic of digital technology is a subjective truth maximizer, and paperclips look funny compared to that.