The Social Media Mental Landscape
I do spend a lot of time on the internet. I guess it is the default for many of us today. I have noticed how things have changed recently. I don’t really know why but I started to notice the crowd in the subway: no one reads newspaper (I have just noticed 2 newspapers on more than thousands encounters) nor books. Of course everyone is absorbed by their smartphones. Likewise when I moved to a new place it took me 3 months to actually install the TV: I had no interest in doing it (then the FIFA world cup started). My first ideas on the massification of internet was that it was a good thing. Indeed instead of being a passive spectator, you become active. Moreover you are no longer slave of the broadcast schedule of legacy media. On top of that you have access to all the knowledge of the world at the tip of your fingers. Things looked bright.
Coulrophobia
Coulrophobia is the fear of clowns. I think this might include this fear of the Disney parade in which you have all those dolls with their frozen smile. The fakeness of an eternal joy is the most efficient allegory of hell. The Girardian mimetic spell makes you feel that whatever would happen to you couldn’t express it. You remain blocked into this forced posture of a purposeless smile. One could smash a hammer on the foot of Mickey, he would still harbors its stupid smile. No one will hear you scream here.
Midjourney
The image in this post are produced by the AI Midjourney. Has the name of this AI been chosen after the first verses of Dante’s inferno ?
“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”
I don’t know but that would make a lot of sense.
Now the scary part is the following one: we are living in a mental landscape that looks like those images. Indeed on social media your interactions are mediated via an AI that lists things that are supposed to be intersting to you. The “home” and “for you” things on Twitter are produced by an AI that is going to present you the conversation going on as it see fit for you.
What makes you believe that the mental landscape created by this AI is not looking like those picture of perfect female bodies ? Have you ever wonder why sometimes you feel strange about the atmosphere ? Maybe because the atmosphere looks like that:
A picture is worth a thousand words. They help you to pinpoint vague feelings. But they don’t stick (at least in my mind) as much as words.
I will return to this article from time to time. Just to remember in what landscape my mind is wandering.
Yeah one of these days we may have Soft Deep-Fake and Hard Deep-Fake.
I am making up this as I go understand! Soft Deep Fake is just a Computer Graphic Image generated from a gazillion images to render you a fictional string of perfect images to play like frames to form a film, or maybe a single image it will mould and placate in what ever way to obtain the same effect than when you were watching a 24 frame a second clip or movie. That is soft. Hard is when it could be the same thing except now it takes a bit longer to assemble and render, because you asked the ai to incorporate a spescific person, plus other spescific people in a twisty plot within an erotic thriller where these chosen real people will be rendered as deep fakes indistinguishable from their real selves professing and doing things they would never ever have done in real life, but did so as images forming smooth high definition film- so real you feel you can touch its warmth and smell its perspiration.