Dark Dorian

The birth of memes is mysterious. There is this interplay between motivated actors and how the memes are received and used by the public. The fact that the adoption of a memes unfolds on social media adds to the mystery: the content is pushed to some public through a recommandation algorithm that is very obscure (some parts of this algorithm are manually tuned, others are the result of an AI).

Few years back I wrote this essay on how social media acted like a dual version of Dorian Gray’s picture:

I think that there is more to this than what I was thinking about at the time. The same idea is at play, namely that on social media people chose what they display of their lives, but today it is on steroids. IT, once again, is acting as force multiplier. When I first thought about this connection people were using very light technologies and were way less embedded in the virtual worlds. Mostly it consisted in applying filters on selfies. Either algorithmic filters or personal filters (you publish what you choose to publish). The funny thing was that Twitter was more or less immune to the algorithmic filters: there were no apps to produce interesting tweets. It has proven to be more difficult to produce a very small amount of information than to play with a picture/video that has much more informational weight. It is no longer the case with the rise of GPTs. From text to videos passing by images, generative AI can now produce objects that are very hard to parse : do they correspond to real event ? Have they been produced by humans ? There are still some clues, sometimes, but for how long ?

The new twist in the story is that now some parts are totally artificial. It is like if the picture of Dorian Gray were moving from a static thing to an animated robot: /imagine your Jungian shadow rising to life.

Welcome Dark Dorian.

The world at the image of the machine

God made man in his image. Tech is trying to make a double of you at your image. But tech companies are not God (who knew ?). They have a very special view of you: you only exist, to their eyes, through your interactions with them. This is your technological shadow, your Dark Dorian Gray model. A major difference with the picture of Wilde’s novel is that this model is not just a static record of your actions. It has an influence on how you access the world. Your social media feed is built around it. The model is also influenced by the behavior of others: it is not an exaggeration to state that it is a collective unconscious 2.0.

One of the strangest aspect of Dark Dorian is that it is animated. Tech companies can, and do, tweak the algorithms to obtain desired outcomes. Think “intelligent design” by other means. Whether or not they succeed in their endeavor is another story. We have witnessed many of those changes in the “spread policy” of Twitter since E. Musk bought the company. The only thing that you can be ascertain of is that it is very obscure. I had roughly the same number of Twitter impressions with 50 followers or with 663 followers (for a similar pattern of twitting and number of tweets per unit of time). The skirmishes between Substack and Twitter is just one of the most visible sign of this.

Fifty shades of Gray

As an attentive reader you have certainly noticed that the pictures of Dark Dorian illustrating this post are not the same. They are slight variations of one another. They got this Midjourney ineffable evil touch. One of the most freightning aspects of AI for me is not that it would turn into an invicible terminator overnight. It is rather that it could induce a slow process, like a continuous deformation, of the fabric of our existence. This is one step at a time that you end up in places where you don't want to end up.

Another aspect is that you just don't have one Dark Dorian model. There is one for each tech company you interact with. Diversity is strength as they say … We could think that by having a diversity of Dark Dorian models is a great thing (think market of ideas blah blah). But they don't compete with one another. They are rather tearing you in different directions. A shoal of piranhas is a better allegory. The paradoxical phenomenon is that the shoals of piranhas seem to all err in the direction of more authoritarianism.

From enlightenment to alignment

At this point in time, it is clear to anyone that the idea of new enlightenment through the highways of information is a dead idea for a long time. No one notices the cadaver anymore. What appears new is the sort of general fatigue towards information in general. More precisely there is a lack of curiosity that is patent. This is most of the story of the COVID crisis: while data witnessing that the mainstream narrative was bullshit accumulated, nothing really happened. There was no large conversation on the subject of “how come we have been so wrong?” on almost any subject that matters. Likewise more and more events around UFOs, even releases by institutions like the Pentagon, had troubles to gain any traction in the public discussion. I include myself in this remark. But just take a step back: those are crazy stories (covid and UFO's and many others). Yet somehow no one really cares. This lack of curiosity, this loss of surprise in the eye appears to me as a relatively new phenomenon.

It is as if we were entering a post-buzz era. This week Vice filed for bankruptcy . And I am wondering in what part it is related to the Dark Dorian avent. The dynamic between MSM and social media seems to have broken. Of course E. Musk is a large part of this new situation. His strategy to no longer play game with legacy media appears to me more as a sign of times than the root cause. We have moved into a world where we all gather our information through social media. The shadowVice filed for bankruptcy of Dark Dorian is everywhere upon us.

Living inside blocks

A concomitant phenomenon makes all this even more troubling. The distance towards nature has never been so large. By nature I don't mean the idealized version of environmentalists. I do mean the basic contingencies of life itself. It is a truism that people more easily look at their smartphones than at the sky to know the weather. I don't even mention the last time you really looked at the moon for more than 2 seconds or simply stare at a square meter of grass for a few minutes: if you look closely enough you will see, even in the middle of a town, a whole world living its life. Insects, worms and plants are all struggling to survive.

In many dimensions we live lives in which everything is standardized. It became the case for goods and services because of the industrial revolution. It is becoming true everywhere because of the IT revolution. It is the case for physical activity (people go to the gym to run on machines with numbers everywhere, they fight against iron instead of stepping in a ring etc.), physical appearance (there is this strange trend for rich women tend to all look like the same alien after surgeries), etc. But this uniformity has spread to how you tell your holidays to your close (or not so close) ones: same selfies etc. Social media give a voice to everyone but it also formats the voice. This is where Dark Dorian exerts his influence. Contrary to the broadcast model, in which the source is formatted but comments were free, social media gives you the freedom of choice regarding what you are listening to (who you are following/muting/blocking) but it changes how you are expressing yourself. Remember that the worst enemies always hide deep inside.