"New Face of America"
Above is a picture of Lil Miquela, a computer-generated character on Instagram with 1.5 million followers. In the raft of press she has generated, sometimes she is described as a fictional character or a digital avatar, sometimes as a "fake model" or "virtual influencer." The Wikipedia entry about Lil Miquela identifies her as part of an art project that also encompasses Brud, a fictional branding company created to substantiate and elaborate Miquela's backstory, which involved her claiming to be a sentient robot from California who feuds with other "robot" accounts. It probably makes the most sense to see Lil Miquela as a species of augmented reality, in that her image is often grafted into real-world scenes alongside flesh-and-blood people.
A lot of the coverage of Lil Miquela buys into the idea that she represents the future of fame and the influencer economy. Some expressed concern about whether her account was deceptive, as though Lil Miquela were trying to pass as real and that somehow jeopardized the status of actual people in Instagram images. A Syracuse professor told CNN that Lil Miquela was "deeply problematic," and that "we need the brands to disclose. We also need these companies to help so they're not facilitating and participating in this mass deception." Presumably the professor sees ambiguous digital avatars as a species of post-truth fake news that supposedly threatens the "end of reality."
But the fake-real controversy seems like a red herring, one that Lil Miquela's operators have themselves tried to foment. In the narrative created for Miquela, she insists on being a robot, as having an artificial intelligence, when in fact she is just a glorified sticker. But the more people express concern that people might mistake Miquela for a real person, the more convincing that illusion becomes, and the more Miquela and other synthetic creations like her can be used to drive down the earning power of human models and influencers.
As Cherie Hu suggests in this newsletter, digital avatars are only as valuable as the backstory they are assigned and can plausibly carry. The logic of influencers (and pop music and celebrities, etc.) is largely based in vicarious identification — one indulges the fantasy of being like the star, of sharing their glamor, of partaking of their particular location in culture. Lil Miquela evokes a particular identity that is ostensibly "artificial" and unmarked by human conflict; her appeal is at least in part grounded the access she affords to that identity, of seeming to be outside contingency, innocent of unjust privilege, free of ingrained prejudice, free of the burden of history.
The more people talk about her as a robot, the more purchase this fantasy has — she comes from code, not from any real place. We too can pretend to come from nowhere, made entirely out of our self-will, with desires that have not been shaped by experiences of racism and sexism and other historical forms of inequality, hierarchy, and injustice. Instead of reflecting that history, we can express a pure wish to be "influential," as if influence could be detached from the struggle for power.
The approximation of identity politics Miquela's operators have had her enact — having her advocate for intersectional "robot rights" and such — might seem to complicate this identification, but it actually reinforces it, making concerns about injustice seem like a low-stakes matter for fictional play open to anyone. The rhetoric of identity politics is deployed as a kind of marketing ambiance that evokes the youthful zeitgeist of wokeness, but in a realm outside the legacy of human conflict.
Miquela bears a resemblance to the CGI face that Time made in 1993 for one of its "special" immigration issues. The face was presented as a projection what the future of America was going to look like. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant analyzes this and similar images as dehistoricized fantasies of a deracialized American future.
The point of the "special issue" on immigration, Berlant argues, was to reassure readers about the process of Americanization in the face of "waves" of migrants who supposedly threaten it, and to reassert "white cultural prestige" "at the moment of its statistical decline." The cover image fades out particular immigrants with particular historical circumstances and replaces them with "a melding of different faces with the sutures erased and the proportions made perfect; she is a national fantasy from the present representing a posthistorical — that is, postwhite — future." In other words, at the moment that "white" was becoming a specific identity rather than the absence of one, it became important to offer white people a fantasy of a postracial future so they could continue to imagine they would not be marked. (Trump is offering a different, more aggressive fantasy, of a reversal of that statistical decline through revoking citizenship and expelling nonwhite immigrants.)
The CGI face, then, posits an idea of the "normal American" that is "organized around a future race of cyborgs, or mixed-race but still white enough children." The fantasy embodied in the face is a "body without history, an abstraction that mimes the abstraction of the American promise that retains power because it is unlived."
This analysis offers a different way to understand Lil Miquela, not as a non-human but as a figure from an idealized future where human difference is resolved not through political struggle but through process of automated averaging and morphing. In that sense, Miquela is a visual expression of an algorithmic sublime, a representation of the possibility that the history of racialization can be reversed not through struggle but through the administration of statistically driven processes that can eliminate the way any bodies have been marked socially and historically.
The degree to which Miquela seems believable or real becomes an expression of how much viewers are licensed to believe in the postracial future. She allows viewers to think that it's realistic to abstract other people (and themselves) from their particular history and believe that relationships and influence can be conducted on that plane. The possibility that Miquela could "pass" is not a threat but a promise. When people are concerned about her "reality," it is expression of hope. Miquela might crowd out some real-life influencers, but she doesn't represent a future in which privileged forms of identity are threatened. When people talk about automation, or "robots stealing our jobs," it is partly a wish, a preferable scenario to "immigrants stealing our jobs."
It may be that Lil Miquela's popularity stems in part from how she basically represents the opposite of an immigrant. Berlant notes how the Time immigration issues address the anxiety over the idea that "masses of immigrants are necessary to provide the proletarian and creative cultural energy for the nation's well-being" — that immigrants are not only a source of low-wage labor, but also of innovation, revitalization, and faith in the American project of being able to start fresh and build a new identity for oneself. Miquela can seem to provide that without actually being from anywhere else. When Miquela echoes identity-politics rhetoric, it is in this context: permitting a fantasy where social justice can be encoded, can simply appear within the frame like a form of augmented reality, superimposed over historical forms of struggle, which are made to fade into the background, even as they continue to intensify.