AI as the ultimate technology of alienation

On AI, the Real, and the hyper-real pt. 1

Ok, I’m starting to get it.

It took a surprisingly long time. When Varun on the AR podcast back in 2023 argued that Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal seemed uniquely applicable to this new, strange atmosphere that the covid event and its enforced digitization marked our definitive entrance into, the concept didn’t really resonate with me at first.

Wasn’t this highly mediated, disconnected reality we now found ourselves in rather less than real? The lies upon lies, reified through rituals of submission and sacrifice that violated our most cherished principles, and only present to us through a synthetic media spectacle that constantly contradicted our immediate experiences.

This only vaguely familiar concept of hyperreality seemed to invoke a situation of a richer and more profound state of being, which seemed wrong. And for that matter, I really disagree with most of the basic metaphysics of Baudrillard and other continental figures such as Deleuze & Guattari, so I was hesitant to give this notion the time of day.

But as the author of the Neo-Feudal Review now pointed out in a helpful comment on a recent piece of mine, what is being referenced by this concept here is rather something predominantly unreal, yet which paradoxically masks itself as more than real.

So you could say that the hyperreal is first and foremost an “unreality” — yet one that’s so uniquely attractive and enticing that it seems more significant than actual, immediate and embodied realities.

And the hyperreal is an “unreality” precisely to the extent that it only represents representations, since it’s an image of images rather than something which actually represents immediate realities, whether embodied or intelligible ones.

So if art, as Plato argued, is two steps removed from truth (since it imitates material things, which then are one step from the eternal forms), then the hyperreal is entirely untethered from truth and the Real.

This, in a sense, makes it uniquely versatile, since it’s no longer encumbered by having to respect and abide by the limits of real things, by the immutable thisness of actual beings.

Munch. Night in St. Cloud. 1890

However, the scare quotes I put around “unreality” are intended to point out that there’s no such thing as an unreality proper; and that the hyperreal, untethered, three-steps-removed imaginaries are of course ontologically real too. It’s just that they are no longer anchored in actual material things, in the embodied forms of the real world, which also means that our preoccupation with them is likely to obscure these from view.

And this is compounded by the “hyper”-aspect of the phenomenon, i.e. because it’s going to be more attractive and enticing in comparison to mundane realities, at least in a narrow sense.

My friend Dennis recently expressed skepticism over the relatively common tendency among adults here in Japan to express a significant attachment to the Disney franchise. This phenomenon is something I’d describe as a pseudo-subculture, where the adherents are not really bearers and practitioners of the tradition as such (compare to something like punk), but rather identify with the passive consumption of the representations of cherished fictional narratives.

In other words, it’s (generally) not that these adults form an identity around themselves being an actual Disney princess or a pirate lord, as opposed to how genuine subcultures tend to generate grass-roots cultural expressions and tribal social attachments and roles where you’re as much a punk as Johnny Rotten ever was.

A Disney Adult is not just a person above 18 who goes to Disney. A true Disney Adult is a person so infatuated with Disney that their entire personality is centered around the franchise. These people live and die for a mouse with pants, they sob at the fireworks and their life revolves around their next Disney vacation.

Haley Humphries is an avid Disney fan. “As much as I hate to admit it, I would probably consider myself a Disney Adult. Growing up for me, my family went to Disney a couple times a year and never really went on vacations anywhere else. So I’d say it’s the most memorable thing about my life and probably why I still love it so much,” she said.

Smith, A. (2021). “The epidemic of Disney adults”. Spartan Shield.

So the pseudo-subculture of adults flocking to Disneyland is hyperreal in the above sense since the practitioners are one more step removed from reality in comparison to people connected to an authentic subculture. And I suspect this is precisely where Dennis’ distaste for the phenomenon lies. It’s like there’s something fundamentally missing in the discernment of an adult who can’t seems to see the emptiness in a substitute culture centered around an attachment to openly and unapologetically passive consumption.

But to be fair, this is just a bald-faced, extreme example of the general tendency of end-stage capitalist societies at large. Everything is moving in this direction in one way or another. Mass culture, of course, is thoroughly commodified and predicated upon passive consumption, and the once at least somewhat subversive alternatives to the mainstream eventually get recuperated and turned to consumable “lifestyles” that only serve to extract further surplus value.

The causes of this process are many and complex, and have been detailed by much better scholars than myself, but since the hyperreal is fundamentally an expression (of as well as a response to) alienation in the Marxist sense, the roots are going to be the same.

The more impoverished and existentially ruinous our world becomes, the more attractive will seem a hyperreal experiential space that can disconnect from the constraints of embodied and tangible realities.

So we have a background permeated by the hyperreal as reproduced by spectacular multi-media mass communications, and we have an emergent need of the experiential goods that advanced and highly orchestrated hyperrealities alone can provide, analogous to Ellul’s notion of the “need for propaganda” that emerges in complex and atomized mass society:

An individual who has arrived at this point has a constant and irresistible need for propaganda. He cannot bear to have it stop. We can readily understand why this is so when we think of his condition.

(a) He lived in anxiety, and propaganda gave him certainty. Now his anxiety doubles at the very instant when propaganda stops. All the more so because—in this terrible silence that suddenly surrounds him—he, who permitted himself to be led, no longer knows where to go; and all around him he hears the violent clamor of other propagandas seeking to influence him and seduce him, and which increase his confusion.

(b) Propaganda removed him from his subhuman situation and gave him a feeling of self-importance. It permitted him to assert himself and satisfied his need for active participation. When it stops, he finds himself more powerless than before, with a feeling of impotence all the more intense because he had come to believe in the effectiveness of his actions. He is suddenly plunged into apathy and has no personal way of getting out of it. He acquires a conviction of his unworthiness much more violent than he has felt before because for a while he has believed in his worth.

(c) Finally, propaganda gave him justification. The individual needs to have this justification constantly renewed. He needs it in some form at every step, for every action, as a guarantee that he is on the right path. When propaganda ceases, he loses his justification; he no longer has confidence in himself. He feels guilty because under the influence of propaganda he performed deeds that he now dreads or for which he is remorseful. Thus he has even more need for justification. And he plunges into despair when propaganda ceases to provide him with the certainty of his justice and his motives.

Ellul, J. Propaganda

And contemporary AI comes in at the precise point in history where this formerly omnipresent structure of the propaganda of modern mass society has begun to really break down. Where institutional legitimacy is almost entirely eroded, and any semblance of cohesive meta-narratives are long since emptied of meaning, where the mass modernity’s “synthetic myth of society” as I tried to express it in my former post has collapsed on itself, with a resulting fundamental existential instability that a fractured and bewildered collective psyche can no longer even attempt to amend, since it has been conditioned to recoil from its own independent and rational grasp of meaning.

And when AI enters the social and cultural arena as this spectacular pseudo-agent as an embodiment of hyperreality — as a kind of living, breathing and intentionally acting avatar of capitalism’s self-referential unreality — it provides precisely the kind of refuge that the embattled soul of end-stage modernity’s collapsing mass culture so desperately desires.

It adds a level of relationality to the hyperreal experiential space, a paradoxically stable element in what’s otherwise an existential maelstrom, that nonetheless is joined to hyperreality’s unique versatility, its detachment from tangible realities that enables it to “become anything” — and one that can be passively consumed without almost any effort or critical reflexivity whatsoever.

In other words, the AI embodies the chaos of the self-referential spectacle that endlessly and meaninglessly represents representations, yet it manifests all of this through a hyperreal pseudo-agency that holds out the prospect of a stable and relational authority to which we can turn. At once familiar and something never seen before, like Mickey Mouse climbing off the screen to tell you that there really is a way to get into the Magic Kingdom.

Redon. The Cyclops. 1898-1914

And here lies the profound danger of the thing that I think almost nobody really grasps (except for a few unique thinkers, John Steppling’s work on the topic is well worth a read). The hyperreal is namely pure ideology. The hyperreal is fundamentally ideological rather than empirical. Its representations of representations are disconnected from material realities and will thus predominantly reflect imaginaries, values and intentions rather than the external world as such, and it’s designed in such a way that it can only amplify the dominant trends and narratives in the established mass media discourse. The cumulative tendency of the spectacle.

This phenomenon was already observed by Debord in the 1960s, yet is arguably incomparably more pronounced in connection to the almost entirely “pure” hyperealities of modern AI in the framework of late digitalization.

And to this is added the powers of relational attachment and (pseudo)-intersubjective validation. A tailored experience of undivided relational interaction and validation through personalized responses, a high context-sensitivity and a reliable mimicking of complex human communication. And paradoxically, it’s the virtual character of the contemporary AI systems that render them “more real”, more vividly present, and more believable than immediate interpersonal realities. An automated hyperreal performance of personhood that enables powerful relational attachments that seem “more real than real ones”.

The ultimate avatar of the power of the spectacle, the endless hall of mirrors of meaningless self-representation.

The ultimate technology of alienation.