...unidentified crying objects...
...object to objecting objectively without objection...
“Put me back in, put me back in”
-Bruce Willis as Mikey the talking Baby in the movie Look Who’s Talking-
Bruce Willis is a fabulous actor, frighteningly banal musician, and sadly retired celebrity who for some reason had a penchant throughout his career in giving voices to babies.
Babies have been at the forefront of digital technology for decades. From an animated 3D Baby-Cha-Cha in 1996 to the CGI talking baby mouths in Bob Clark’s bravura cinematic masterpiece Baby Geniuses, the world continually becomes captivated when baby’s align with digital innovation.
These days I feel like a baby, in that I want to just go back into some slimy cave and curl up like a ball while I live some sort of psychedelic somatic existence dreaming in colors and thoughts that have no meaning. Turn me into a tapestry and give me cosmos!
Some say babies are born with an innate fear that whatever they cannot see does not exist. Their entire existence is sensual, and limited in the early months to exclusively that which they perceive with direct engagement. That is why they love their snuggy so much. Without snuggy in hand or in sight, there is no snuggy, and if there is no snuggy then wannnnnnnnh!
One of the most important milestones for a baby’s development is the concept of object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be sensed. Conceptually established by child psychologist Jean Piaget, object permanence is one of the earliest and most important stages of child development and one of an infant's most important accomplishments, as, without this concept, objects would have no separate, permanent existence. In one sense we might say, whoa boy the ego on that baby, but in another sense there might be no lonelier thought than a snuggy floating untouched, unloved and unconscious in the endless anywhere.
Now pivoting gently and with a lullaby cradling, certain other permanences of objects are starting to troublingly encounter our broader humankind consciousness. Have you noticed an increase in the amount of unidentified and flying objects these days?
Over the past few years the acknowledgement of UFOs has been a hovering topic floating in and out of our daily news consciousness. Scientists, military leaders, folks who eat chili-mac in bunkers, and regular Joes, Janes, Jills and Jerrys alike are not only seeing objects, they are documenting and in some cases destroying them. What were fun Art Bell radio segments decades ago, are now a full fledged and acknowledged reality. This weekend it got so real the US & Chinese militaries went to war with these objects, shooting multiple of them from the sky both known and unknown.
All of this drama has got me thinking about my relationship to the objects in my life, unidentified and otherwise. I am having a real penchant these days for giving voices to the voiceless around me. Now don’t pat me on the back as some altruist, all this means is that when I pin a poster to the basement wall I think ouch. I imagine the tree who made that wall wondering, who gave me this face lift and where the fark is my nose? I imagine the pin as some switchblade wielding buddhist tranquilly stabbing then staying still for eons. My fingers are the sensei guiding the blade wielding meditationist to this violent moment of zen. This fun generally ends when daydreaming I miss the wall stab and instead pierce my own fingers. The student slays the sensei.
Should we be giving voices to things that don’t have them?
What if these objects, object?
Late last year Bruce Willis retired from acting due to an Aphasia diagnosis. Aphasia is a language disorder caused by damage in a specific area of the brain that controls language expression and comprehension and it leaves a person unable to communicate effectively with others. Tastelessly, I say it is possible I have this disease as well, because I seldom make any sense to anyone.
Around the time of this announcement there were conflicting reports as to whether or not Bruce had licensed his digital likeness to a deepfake company. If you are one of the four people reading this blog I am guessing you are familiar with the concept or reality of deep fakes. The term is a portmanteau of deep learning and fake that signifies technology that digitally spoofs someone else's digital existence. It is an incredibly evolving technology with lots of potential…
You might, for example, fix the cussing or change the spoken languages in the movies you are creating about women who climb towers in the middle of nowhere…
[LINK TO AI DEEPFAKE DEMO OF SOMEONE TURNING A FUCK INTO A FRICK]
Or you might make music with artists who are hard to work with otherwise…
[LINK TO VERY WEALTHY MUSICIAN MAKING PRETTY BAD ELECTRONIC MUSIC WITH A FAKE EMINEM]
Or fuck it you might make porn of some folks you watch play games on twitch…
[LINK TO SAD ARTICLES ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHT BEING VIOLATED WITH NO CONSEQUENCES TO THE VIOLATOR]
Or if you want to be the absolute lowest of the low you will produce a new limp bizkit song and video and curse all of humanity…
I pull my snuggy tighter.
These advances in AI technology are gifting us a digital capability to objectify others. Objectification is the act or an instance of treating a person as an object or thing. Like when you lay off 20% of the workforce at your profitable company because your employees are a bottom line, not humans with intrinsic values to your bottom line. As far as the law is concerned, corporations are people anyways, so a layoff is simply a breakup, and this all isn’t objectification but rather another form of prosopopoeia defined as character masking by noted Marxist, Karl Marx.
In this case the corporation, which is legally human, is also made up of humans who think the other humans besides themselves, are simply objects. In Marx’s Das Kapital, the six roles of character masking in capitalism are roles, interests, masking, inversion, alienation (UFOs are everywhere!) and development. In that fourth role, inversion, “inanimate things, and the relationships between them, are endowed with human characteristics. They become "actors" relating in their own right to which people must adjust their behavior, and they are also theorized in that way.” The market has the power to act, or the corporation must make moves to protect some version of its perceived self and so forth.
(the above video is a sick cut of WEEN — OBJECT you can only watch on youtube not embed)
Objectifying a corporation doesn’t hurt it. Everytime I say “just do it, just suck my balls” to Nike, it simply notes it peacefully on the zendesk while telling its slave children to proceed with the shoemaking. Wait, those aren’t slaves or children, those are workers. I mean those aren’t workers, they are Uighers. We are just talking about the mechanics of the assembly line creating an iconic innovation that uses pressurized air in a durable, flexible membrane to provide lightweight cushioning for advanced performance. This is a business, not life man.
Microsoft has created an AI deepfake audio technology that can spoof anyone’s voice with just 3 seconds of audio. Meanwhile voice actors are having to band together to find ways to stop companies from using their voices without approval. These new technologies in AI are giving us the ability to reproduce human talent to our own personal whims. We can see the worth in the human origins of talent just enough to deem it valuable, but not enough to credit, compensate or consider whether or not it is ok with us using it how we see fit. We are saying, sure you taught my machine to make your art, but it is my machine and now my art.
Meanwhile humans (not corporations) are being hurt by these actions. Whether through job loss, phishing scams via impersonation, weapons development, and/or good old sexual harassment these technologies are revealing more and more the ways in which the digital version of ourselves provides enough mask for us to no longer see eachother entirely as human.
Now the act of giving voice to things that might not otherwise have them can be one of many actions. It can be anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman entities, objects, or concepts. It can be personification, the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form, such as when the sun smiles down on us or when a UFO spooks us into shooting it with bullets. Or it can be a prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object. The UFO said give me your best shot.
We now live in a future where unidentified flying objects are ready to gain identity, so perhaps there is hope we can do the same for these emerging new versions of ourselves.
As we further objectify ourselves into a rapidly progressing digital abyss, what are the ways in which we can maintain our humanity? Because of object permanence I know my snuggy is there even when I can’t see it or hold it. In a world where we have all now become objects, how do we ensure we know we are all still here?
Consent is when one person voluntarily agrees to the proposal or desires of another. As our digital shadows grow I suggest we consider the human who casts them. We can collaborate via consent. I might be a wall or a baby, or just a voice inside of a .wav file, but in the beginning I was a human. Or a dude. Or according to Look Who’s Talking, a single sperm swimming along with my friends listening to the beach boys.
If someone wants us to be something without our involvement we are nothing. When the extension of my me somehow reaches your you it can be our us if we can communicate with consent. As we are perceiving objects, we know they’re there, so let’s take it one step further and establish their theirs.
If we can figure out what objects unidentified and flying are, I have to believe we can also figure out who we are as well. So let’s have conversations with our objects. And look who’s talking now…
If anyone is going to dodge the fate of being successfully deep-faked, it's you!