IIt was my blue shirt, a gift from my sister-in-law, who gave everything. It made me think of the lowly bureaucrat Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Double, a disturbing study of the fragmented self within a vast, impersonal feudal system.
It all started with a message from a respected colleague congratulating me on a video talk on some geopolitical topic. When I clicked on the attached YouTube link to recall what I said, I started to worry that my memory wasn’t what it used to be. When did I record that video? Within minutes I knew something was wrong. Not because I found fault in what I was saying, but because I realized that the video showed me at my Athens office desk wearing the same blue shirt that had never left my island home. As it turns out, it was a video featuring some of my deepfake AI lookalikes.
Since then, hundreds of videos featuring my face and my voice have spread across YouTube and social media. Even this weekend, another crop up showing me saying imaginary things about the coup in Venezuela. They lecture, they say things I could say, sometimes they mix things in that I would never say. They rage, they preach. Some are crude, others unsettlingly inspiring. Supporters send them to me, asking: “Yannis, did you really say that?” Opponents circulate these as proof of my stupidity. What’s worse is that some people argue that my lookalike is more outspoken and assertive than me. And so I find myself in the strange position of being a spectator, a phantom, of my digital puppet. technofudal machine I have long argued that it is not only broken, but designed to be nullified.
My initial reaction was that I wrote letters to Google, Meta and others demanding that they remove these videos. Earlier, several forms were filled in anger, after a week or more, some of these channels and videos were removed, only to immediately resurface in different guises. Within days I had given up: No matter what I did, no matter how many hours I spent every day, deleting my AI doppelgangers to try my luck in big tech, many more would evolve back like Hydra.
Soon, anger gave way to contemplation. After all, wasn’t I the one who argued that big tech not only digitized capitalism, but actually led a great transformation, turning markets into cloud fiefdoms and profits into cloud rents? Aren’t my AI doppelgangers perfect confirmation that, in this techno-feudal reality, The liberal man is dead and buried,
Acknowledging a partial loss of self-ownership, I sought solace in the rationalization of these deepfakes as the ultimate act of feudal enclosure, proof that under technofeudalism we own nothing – not the data output of our labor, not our social graphs and now not even our audiovisual identities. Our new masters see us as tenants on their cloud land, androids whose likeness they can use to sow confusion, to dirty discourse, to drown out genuine disagreement in a cacophony of synthetic noise created for the purpose.
But then a pleasant thought came to my mind, which reminded me of ancient Athens. What if my AI doppelgangers were the harbingers of this isegoria (ἰσηγορία), as bright, promising and absent a principle as real democracy? When I asked several versions of AI chatbots to define it, they all dutifully misrepresented its meaning, defining isegoria As equality of speech, or the right to be heard, or the freedom to address an assembly. But what did the Athenians mean by this word? In fact, for them isegoria This means the exact opposite of today’s “free speech”, which they would dismiss as an abstract right to shout into the void. For Athenians, this meant having your ideas judged seriously, on their own merits, regardless of who you are or how well you actually express them.
Maybe AI can protect against deepfakes isegoria From the clutches of our technofeudal dystopia? When we realize that it is impossible to verify who is speaking in a YouTube video, might we be forced to assess the merits of what is being said, rather than who is saying it? In the process of undermining authenticity, may big tech have inadvertently given away some isegoria A chance? These questions gave rise to a ray of hope.
There was hope that the specter of democracy would still be hanging over our heads if we could only find the motivation to engage in the slow, hard, democratic labor that the algorithmic feed was designed to eliminate: the critical evaluation of the ideas and arguments thrown at us. Alas, this hope, though tangible, is inadequate as long as our technological feudal lords retain two huge, asymmetric advantages.
First of all, they own it agora Themselves – servers, feeds, algorithmic means of communication. They can make their speech authentic with digital seals while drowning our speech in a quagmire of doubt and noise. outcome? No isegoria, But a digital divine right where truth is the patent property of power.
Second, and more cleverly, they don’t need any deepfakes to rule. their ideology is embedded in Machine: the power to extract surplus value from cloud-connected proletariats through various digital devices, the logic of extracting cloud rents from vassal capitalists on their platforms, the tyranny of shareholder value, their imminent success privatization of money,
So our job is not to beg these lords for validation. Our work is political. We must socialize cloud capital, the all-powerful new force that is transforming society and destroying everything that makes humanism imaginable.
Until then, let our digital doppelgangers do the talking. Maybe they’ll satiate the spectacle so much that we’ll eventually stop listening our voice and start judging Discussion On your own terms. This is perhaps the most contradictory piece of hope in the hall of mirrors. But in this carnival, we can grab every piece.
