Looking back to see
Earlier this week, tech reporter Drew Harwell linked on Twitter to a BBC story about a 50-year-old male Japanese biker who used FaceApp photo editing to post to social media as a young woman. The man explained to a TV reporter his rationale: "No one will read what a normal middle-aged man, taking care of his motorcycle and taking pictures outside, posts on his account."
The BBC story frames this all as whimsical fun, pausing only to note that FaceApp was labeled a Russian intelligence threat by the FBI under the Trump administration. It makes no real reference to any potential concern over appropriation, gender, beauty standards, fraud, deepfakes, and so on, as if we lived in a world where this kind of identity play was both unanticipated but totally tolerated.
The full-on replacement of one's identity with another was once the animating principle of Second Life, where you could make a zany avatar and fly around a totally virtual world. But of course, that concept never really took off because the internet proved not to be a separate world where no one knows who is a dog or a normal middle-aged man but a medium that interpenetrated every aspect of life as lived in physical space. The biker wanted to assume a woman's identity not for the sake of a role-playing game but for the tangible real-world benefits that stem from online attention; it can't be bracketed off as though it happened nowhere, as if it didn't have broader effects.
One could see this sort of impersonation as being on a continuum with the entire range of augmented reality apps and filters that have become ubiquitous, and there is debate and controversy about their ethical implications all down the line, whether the augmentations are explicitly fictionalizing or whether they attempt to disguise themselves. This Tech Review article, for example, describes the emerging moral panic about teenage girls' use of one of the more common AR applications, beauty filters: "They are subjects in an experiment that will show how the technology changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves, and relate to others. And it’s all happening without much oversight." One teenager tells the reporter, "“I don’t think it’s just filtering your actual image. It’s filtering your whole life.” You might also add that you are filtering your whole future and filtering the lives of each and every person around you. Where will the filtering stop? The most pervasive filter of all is the one called ideology.
Some of those commenting on Harwell's tweet pointed out that not everyone would get to get away with wholesale impersonation. Who does and who doesn't get called out for using AR however they may choose to use it is marked by racism and sexism — by whether one's received identity is understood as stigmatizing. Some people will be seen to be playing, some will be seen as clever or "sneaky," others will be seen as criminal.
Playing up the idea that middle-aged men are somehow discriminated against on social media for being boring twists the fact that such men have far more latitude in controlling how they present themselves and how they will be seen. It is not as though the impersonator is respecting and honoring the power and position of young women in society; rather he is reinforcing the perception that women should be understood primarily as magnets for attention by sole virtue of their appearance, which in turn dictates how anything else they are doing should be perceived. Look, how cute, she has a motorcycle! He can opt out of the attention and the gendered norms whenever it suits him, whereas women live perpetually with the consequences of unwanted attention, with an ongoing objectification and surveillance that often tries to pass itself off as a kind of crypto-celebrification. Smile please!
Attention can be a form of persecution as well as recognition, sometimes both at once. Social media serve as an especially fraught arena where attention is strongly coded as intrinsically positive and economically necessary even as it can manifest as intrusive, objectifying, nullifying, as being made constantly aware of one's vulnerability and the contingency of one's social value. The recent First Monday special issue on "shame, shaming, and online image sharing" examines some of the ramifications of this. It also calls to mind artist Amalia Ullman's Excellences and Performances project, in which she staged a personality makeover and mental breakdown over her social media accounts.
One can try to take cover in augmentation, in a "fake" or flamboyant performance, but nothing can guarantee that your performances or your sincerities won't be decontextualized or misappropriated. Eventually we see ourselves in someone else's mirror.