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Deepfake George Lucas Is More Convincing Than Actual George Lucas

Baudrillard was right, and I have lost all sense of what's real.

George LucasLACMA: Art and Film Gala, Los Angeles, USA - 03 Nov 2018

Photo by Matt Baron/Shutterstock

A video purporting to show George Lucas camping out for the premiere of Rise of Skywalker was unleashed upon the world yesterday, and has thrown reality into turmoil.

We have been warned that Deepfakes have the potential to undermine democracy by casting doubt on the veracity of video evidence. If the alleged "pee tape" came out tomorrow, is there any doubt that Donald Trump and his defenders would shout fake? Even if the footage was clear and unmistakable, the existence of technology that can seamlessly meld a famous face onto a stranger's speech and mannerisms can throw any video into contention. But this new George Lucas video has done something much deeper, and much more troubling.

George Lucas Camps Out & Reacts to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - Deepfake Sagawww.youtube.com

Having watched George Lucas being sarcastic and self-aggrandizing in a bad George Lucas wig and a cheap fat suit, I don't know if I believe in the real George Lucas anymore. You can tell me that it's actually an actor and impersonator named Josh Robert Thompson, but when he rolls his eyes at Baby Yoda with perfect contempt, I know that he's the real deal. The essence of George Lucas lives in this video more purely than any footage of the man himself, and I am no longer convinced that George "it's like poetry" Lucas was ever anything other than a character embodied by Josh Robert Thompson.

He seems certain that American culture leaving him behind can only be a damning sign for society. Couple that with the sigh of a disaffected boomer billionaire—pining for Woodstock while he contemplates buying a movie theater to simplify his schedule—and you have enacted George Lucas' entire being since 2005. Skywalker Ranch has been officially relocated to the Uncanny Valley, and I'm now convinced that the original George Lucas, in all his pompous glory, was the first CGI creation of Industrial Light & Magic.

If you haven't watched the video yet, save yourself from the existential dread. It's too late for me. The map has subsumed the territory. All that remains is the simulacrum, and I am left to wonder, if George Lucas is nothing more than this basic character study in a beard and glasses, who actually created Star Wars? I do not have the answer, but If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably Hatsune Miku.

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The Horrifying Corporate Zombies of Branded Twitter

Twitter brands want you to believe they're your friends, but they are all soulless monsters.

Photo by: Nathan Dumlao / Unsplash

In 2012, one of the death knells of Mitt Romney's failed campaign for the presidency was an endlessly replayed clip of him telling a heckler at a rally, "Corporations are people, my friend."

Mitt Romney- Corporations Are People!www.youtube.com

He was expressing his opposition to raising the corporate tax rate, because that ultimately takes money out of (rich) people's pockets. It's not exactly a stunning take for a Republican politician, but what made the clip so damning was how plainly it exposed Romney's fundamental flaw as a candidate. He didn't seem like a real person. There was nothing authentic in any aspect of his public persona. Whether it was Mormonsim, political ambitions, or hundreds of millions of dollars that drained him of all flavor, the result was the concept of bland corporate professionalism made manifest in a suit and a haircut. He was the Uncanny Valley candidate.

There is a parallel issue that has emerged in recent years on Twitter, and I can't quite handle it. Having learned the lesson of Mitt Romney, every brand on Earth has made it their mission to present themselves on Twitter as people with some actual personality—as your cool, quirky friend. And people genuinely invest in these exchanges. There are endless articles about which Twitter brands are "sassiest" and about Old Spice "beefing" with Taco Bell. Who had the better zinger?!

Whichever side we choose, we are the losers when we invest emotion into these empty vessels, because brands are not on our side. There's no such thing as a sassy or a quirky brand, and there are no "good" brands. Brands are not people. They are imaginary entities, devoid of character and attribute—corporate figures that can be erased and remade on the whim of a focus group. They can't feel or think or love, and they can't die. They are philosophical zombies, except that—like the flesh-eating corpse version of zombies—they are doing their best to kill us all.

One of the most upsetting things about these Twitter brands is that some of the people writing these tweets are legitimately clever. There's a lot of real talent being subsumed by the capitalistic effort to commodify every aspect of our lives and convert all of Earth's vital resources into profit as quickly as inhumanly possible—before impending climactic collapse destroys the global economy and the wealthy retreat to luxury bunkers, protected from the fulfillment of Mad Max's hellish vision.

Creative ability that could be used to connect people and make them aware of the pressing issues that concern the entire planet is instead being funneled into efforts that can only numb us. These innocuous jokes build warm feelings toward emblems of the forces we should be rallying against—a hazy comfort that conceals the fact that our society is rapidly destroying the possibility of livable conditions for humanity.

And in our numb state, we see Greta Thunberg's passion and assume it's an act. We question the price tag of the Green New Deal and resist the vision of a transformational shift akin to the war movement in the 40s—which is seen as an unquestioned good, despite the fact that climate change is a far more dangerous threat to humanity than the Nazis could ever have hoped to be.

In our numb state, we see protesters clogging the streets and, instead of joining them—propagating a general strike that spreads throughout our cities until we can begin the real work of dismantling the cancerous systems of greed consuming our planet—we complain that they are making us late to our jobs. The jobs where we serve our unfeeling masters: the corporate zombies that will kill us all.

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The Uncanny Inevitability of Whitney Houston's Musical Hologram Tour

Whitney Houston's hologram will tour this January through April.

A hologram of Whitney Houston is seen during the dress rehearsal of 'An Evening with Whitney Houston'

Photo by Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

This fall, Whitney Houston will go on tour.

Or at least, a holographic version of her will. The late singer's image—recreated via laser beam shot through a prism—will be transmitted out on stages across the world, allowing millions of fans to experience the star's legendary presence in not-quite real life. The tour will kick off in Mexico on January 23 and will end in Belarus on April 3rd.

Entitled "An Evening With Whitney," the tour will be "a celebration of her best work," according to Brian Becker, the chairman and CEO of BASE Hologram, the company responsible for this. Previously, BASE sent simulations of Roy Orbison and opera singer Maria Callas around the world.

Unless there's an afterlife and Whitney Houston is looking down from above, the real Whitney will have no say in where and how her image will be projected. Many fans aren't happy about that. "Capitalism will recreate your likeness and project it in front of millions, so it may posthumously profit off you for eternity," wrote one disparaging Twitter user. "There are truly no limits to its ethical depravity. Nothing is sacred."

— (@)

Another wrote, "Utterly disrespectful and disgusting. Let the greats Rest In Power. Shameful they're using her name and likeness for this. An evening with Whitney? "That" is NOT Whitney Houston. I'm sorry Nippy, you deserved better."

It's true that Whitney Houston will have have no say in where her image is going to be sent and what she's going to sing on this tour. This raises a lot of questions about the dead and what it means to respect a person's posthumous legacy and autonomy.

Namely, what do we owe the dead? Is a hologram tour that different from a posthumous biographical film that pieces together a person's narrative? And if so, why?

Whitney Houston seems like an inevitable choice for a hologram tour, but in some ways she's also a particularly terrible selection because of how widely and deeply beloved she was and is. Fans are so tenaciously invested in her legacy that it seems like this concert has a good chance of being canceled, in both the real world and the digital one (the lines between these worlds, of course, are feeling blurrier by the day).

Still, is a hologram tour so different from what record companies have always done to artists, creating images and projections of who they are and selling them at thousands of dollars a seat? Regardless, there's something so profoundly uncanny about the concept of buying tickets to see a 3D representation of a deceased person that it's hard to imagine one of these tours ever sitting right.

In the end, hologram tours seem like the logical result of late capitalism's desire to drag every last penny out of each product and consumer, humanity's desire to transcend death, and the emergence of the technology that theoretically makes this transcendence possible. The problem is that Whitney Houston herself never signed off on her own rebirth—but if she had signed a waiver allowing her hologram to be projected after she dies, would that make a hologram tour more okay? What if a living artist started sending out holograms instead of (or even while) actually touring, and would it make a difference if the holograms were broadcast live? Or is there something irreplaceable and sacred about seeing your favorite artist in the flesh?