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United States News Title: Video: 'Barack Obama' Calls Trump a 'Total and Complete Dipshit' Of course, that isn't real. It's a video created by comedian and Academy Award winner Jordan Peele, employing increasingly easy-to-use programs to demonstrate the coming age of nearly seamless "fake news" images. A couple months ago, when the Reddit user deepfakes first publicized his ability to swap anyone's face into porn, the reaction was swift and mostly univocal: This was a threat to the very universe! As the reliably alarmist Motherboard hyperventilated: An incredibly easy-to-use application for DIY fake videosof sex and revenge porn, but also political speeches and whatever else you wantthat moves and improves at this pace could have society-changing impacts in the ways we consume media. The combination of powerful, open-source neural network research, our rapidly eroding ability to discern truth from fake news, and the way we spread news through social media has set us up for serious consequences. Well, no. For starters, the control and manipulation of images and events has been with us forever. The powerful have always been able to do this, going back to the days when leaders would kill people for publishing unauthorized versions of speeches. Contra Walter Benjamin, whose "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) is one of the most influential essays written in the past century, the ability for more and more of us to detach words and images from the specific time and place of their creation and instantiation is incredibly liberating. The same types of technology that allow us to put a mustache on the Mona Lisa and circulate that image globally also allow people to speak truth as they see it to power. Reappropriating, misappropriating, decontextualizing, recontextualizingas all that has become easier and easier over the years, the result has been a wellspring of letting the relatively powerless speak. That was the essential insight of the early scholars of fan fiction, such as the semi-notorious "slash" fiction written by Star Trek fans shortly after the original series was canceled in 1969. Fans started writing stories in which Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock engaged in sadomasochistic sexual adventures and sell them using the code K/S via newsletters (hence the term slash). As Constance Penley of the University of California at Santa Barbara wrote, Slash fans do more than "make do" [with mass-produced materials]; they make. Not only have they remade the Star Trek fictional universe to their own desiring ends, they have achieved it by enthusiastically mimicking the technologies of mass-market cultural production, and by constantly debating their own relation...to those technologies. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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