celebrities

Miquela Sousa is one of the hottest influencers on Instagram. The triple-threat model, actress and singer, better known as “Lil Miquela” to her million-plus followers, has captured the attention of elite fashion labels, lifestyle brands, magazine profiles, and YouTube celebrities. Last year, she sported Prada at New York Fashion Week, and in 2016 she appeared in Vogue as the face of a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign. Her debut single, “Not Mine,” has been streamed over one million times on Spotify and was even treated to an Anamanaguchi remix.

Miquela isn’t human. As The Cut wrote in their Miquela profile this past May, the 19-year-old Brazilian-American influencer is a CGI character created by Brud, “a mysterious L.A.-based start-up of ‘engineers, storytellers, and dreamers’ who claim to specialize in artificial intelligence and robotics,” which has received at least $6 million in funding. Brud call themselves storytellers as well as developers, but their work seems mostly to be marketing. Lil Miquela’s artificiality has made her interesting to elite fashion labels, lifestyle brands, and magazine profiles — she’s appeared on the runway for Prada, and in Vogue as part of a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign; recently, the writer Naomi Fry profiled her for the magazine’s September issue.

Miquela inhabits a Marvel-like universe of other Brud-made avatars orbit, including her Trump-loving frenemy, Bermuda, and Blawko, her brother (whether that’s a term of endearment or a genetic relation, it’s not clear). The three are constantly embroiled in juicy internet drama, and scarcely does one post to their account without tagging, promoting, shouting out or calling out another. In April, when Bermuda allegedly hacked Miquela’s account, deleted all her photos, and demanded Miquela reveal her “true self.” Miquela eventually released a statement: “I am not a human being. . . I’m a robot. It just doesn’t sound right. I feel so human. I cry and I laugh and I dream. I fall in love.” But the character wasn’t revealing anything true: Miquela is a character scripted by humans. The robot ruse only upped her intrigue: not only has it added a new layer to the character’s fiction, it has added a new layer of fictional possibilities. more...

The video above is a “funny” take on the role of Twitter in our everyday lives from this past summer (I think). I know, who cares about celebrities and nothing is less funny than explaining why something is funny. But because the video isn’t really that funny to begin with, we’ve nothing to lose by quickly hitting on some of the points it makes. Humor is a decent barometer for shared cultural understanding for just about everything, indeed, often a better measure than the op-eds and blog posts we usually discuss in the quasi-academic-blogosphere. Those who made this video themselves are trying to tap into mainstream frustrations with smartphones and social media and their increasingly central role in many of our lives. So let’s look at the three main themes being poked at here, and I’m going to do my best to keep this short by linking out to where I’ve made these arguments before.

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We are currently facing a cultural crisis of authenticity. Since the early 2000s, we have seen the concept “authenticity” slowly move from margins to mainstream (Reynolds, 2011), encapsulated by feverish celebrity gossip surrounding breakout stars like Lana Del Rey, personified through the rise of the urban hipster as folk devil (those self-professed taste arbiters of cool who ride “fixies” through the urban landscape, collect obscure records, and wear vintage clothes), and exemplified in Web 2.0 and the rise of social media (especially curatorial media like LastFM and more recently, Pintrest), where we are all now encouraged to share, like, and make public pronouncements of our personal tastes. In the contemporary zeitgeist, it seems that we are all “grasping for authenticity” in an attempt to make our lives seem more important, substantial, and relevant (Jurgenson, 2011).

In this environment, identity is constructed both on and offline, but our online identities are increasingly coming to define our public identities. As such, the “online commons” (Lih, 2009) becomes an important space of identity construction and conflict. more...