The sobering realization that most monsters are human can be exploited by capitalizing on this monstrosity and by alchemically transforming it to entertainment. With this in mind, in this brave new world, a question then emerges: can Ai create new micro-myths for us, armchair demanders of justice, and is this a good thing?
Oren Ben Yosef
Here is an unrealistic body image problem that often goes unnoticed. Growing up in the eighties and the nineties, there was one thing that always bothered me while watching my favourite cartoon violence on Tv – how come the villains ALWAYS look better than the good guys? In every possible cartoon of that era, we were always amazed at the wonderful, intimidating-yet-alluring appearances of the wrong moral side of the story. Who cares about a macho, blond guy saving the world, when there’s an entire evil force of which the essence is the forced hybridization of man and Cobra snakes? Also, you mean to tell me that it is be sheer chance that an entire fleet of evil robots can transform into guns and war planes, while the good guys turn into Volkswagen car and a Jeep? It was also the colours – with the evil masterminds always garment themselves with the best colour in the world, while the saviours of the day settle for blue or something. We were watching these shows, secretly admiring how awesome one can look like, if only he aims to destroy the world. But besides this unhealthy appearance-shaming of the heroes, there was another, more serious side effect to this ideological schism in aesthetics: it made us think that villains look like monsters.
This is the core of the problem in the movie 8mm, in which private investigator Tom Welles (Nicholas Cage) tracks down the person responsible for unspeakable crimes in snuff films. The villain, masked – as villains should be, may call himself Machine, but in the end, when the mask is down, Welles, like us viewers, is surprised and perhaps disappointed to discover that who he thought would look like a monster, or at least like a machine, is just a guy. Not MACHINE, but just George Anthony Higgins. Judging Welles’ surprised look when Higgins’ mask is down, the villain mockingly asks: what did you expect? A monster?
In the past week, I have stumbled upon a new rabbit hole on social media, in which people film themselves confronting, with cameras, public shaming and/or fists, a specific kind of villains, hated by most people on planet Earth, not including one small island. Pedophile hunters lure and trap – not prey, but predators – people who are on the way to meet an underage boy or girl, exposing these people to the world, handing them to the police or handing them some good ol’ smacking. Now, you will never find me saying anything positive about child abusers, and while I am personally against the death penalty, I will not lose sleep over the execution of someone like that. But watching these videos, I couldn’t help but examine the face expressions and body language of these people – in the very moment in which they realize that their life, as they knew it, is over.
I remember an old video of an Al Qaeda soldier caught by a different local force in the middle east. This guy, a big guy who by himself butchered dozens of people, is now laying on his back on the back of a pickup truck. He is tied down and he is closing his eyes, not allowing his captures the pleasure of seeing him afraid. His captors throw something next to this guy, a heavy metallic apparatus of some sort, and while they did not intend to hit this guy or to scare him, he scare-jumped when this object landed next to him because his eyes were closed and he was surprised. Then, this big guy who butchered dozens of people began crying. Not a machine, just Higgins.
Back to the predator hunting, these people who do the most horrible of things, never seem to look like monsters. Instead, they look like, no offense, losers. The numerous videos of pedophile catching let us see the sexual predator as a wounded, frightened animal, reminding me of Goya’s painting, Saturn Devouring his Son, in which Goya cleverly painted the horrific father as scared and almost mindless. In the Netflix series Black Mirror, this is shown in two different episodes. In the first episode, White Bear, we follow a woman who wakes up to a post-apocalyptic Britain. The streets look empty, and people are behaving like excited zombies inside their houses, recording her frightened wandering on their phone, and never offering help. Things get much more serious when masked villains appear, with the obvious intent to hurt the protagonist, who has no recollection of who is she, where is she and why. Things are getting worse and worse for this nameless woman, who then discover she a terrible virus that is spread through the screens of mobile phones has turned the majority of the population into mindless, video-recording drones. However – and if you haven’t watched this episode yet, then please accept my sincere apologies for the spoiler – it is then revealed that our hero is a child murderer, condemned to be the object of entertainment in a new theme park, where the crowd is invited to video her terror all day long, until the end of the day, when the woman is reminded about what she did, only for her memory to be erased again for the next business day. The second episode, Shut up and Dance, which is ranked in the top five Black Mirror episodes, or so the author of these words thinks, presents a different form of entertainment. In this episode, our hero is being mercilessly extorted by an unknown hacker who broke into his laptop and recorded him doing admiring a nameless porn site. Our hero, a sweet, harmless guy who is being bullied by his coworkers and by all means seem not ready to face the world, is then sent on a terrifying set of missions, including recruiting another victim, robbing a bank and fighting to the death with a third person. When the police catch finally catch him, after he was forced to kill a guy, we then learn that our hero, who served as a form of entertainment for the unnamed hacker and perhaps – his or her audience, was not watching an ordinary porn site, and that he is a pedophile (oh yeah, I’m sorry – Spoiler alert!).
We like seeing monsters from a safe distance, and these videos of predator hunting do exactly this. The countless documentations of pedophiles getting ambushed in the street are not means of justice, but of entertainment (sometimes even at the expense of delivering justice). Browsing through these endless videos, one can then see that the audience’s enjoyment takes priority in the strangest of ways. Similar videos begin to appear, with hashtags like “#fakescenario”, in which an alleged pedophile is being cornered and confronted. Is this real? What am I actually watching now? In another video, some guy is sitting on a couch, sobbing and begging for mercy. The accompanied text leaves no place for doubt – this is another pedophile, a father, who was getting caught. The scene, however, does not change. This is a fixed camera on a guy, pathetically asking not to call the police.
Then I saw a small note, marking this video as an Ai video. In this stage of advanced simulation, then, there is no more crime and no more vigilante effort, but rather a pixelated, alchemical distillation of regret and terror, to the amusement of the masses. Pedophiles must be caught and punished, make no mistake, but here we are – watching this artificial video, in which there is only the trumpeting of a coming punishment, but there is no crime and no criminal, except in the mind of the creator of the Ai video and of the guy watching it (that’s me!). I then think of how I am watching a mythical justice being delivered, rather than the aftermath of a crime. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard shows how the simulation does not differ from the real thing. If you do not believe this, then take a fake gun (this example is from Baudrillard’s book) and show it in the middle of the bank. You will not be arrested by fake police, but by a real one. But in the case of this fake video, the words of Robert A. Segal, in his book Theorizing about Myth. Segal mentions the story of Oedipus, who ended up having sex with his mother and killing his father. There are two victimizers in this story, Segal claims – the storyteller and the audience. Through the simulation of pedophile-busting, the myth of terrified regret is being exalted through the popularity algorithm – from the guy prompting this strange request from the Ai engine to the guy watching it for some reason.
To the materialistic, demiurge-like browsers in social media, who build their own worlds, their own world framings, through preferred topics, ideas and opinions to be shown on their feed, this may not matter. A real-world documentation and an Ai simulation have the same number of pixels. It is then left to us, anti-demiurgical humans, to take a stand. First – to recognize stimulating simulations as demonic interferences. Second – to rethink the bonding of justice with entertainment. Which one is harder? I honestly don’t know.
Oren Ben Yosef 