Influenders: Discovering the End of the Universe

More human than human

The new AI-rendered video by the Dor Brothers, Influenders, is a significant piece of art. It is more real than the reality it’s satirizing, literally and figuratively.

What does it mean that for so many of us, our attention can be captured 100% of the time by displaying to us our world in ruin?

Do we long for a world in ruin? Do we want things to collapse so we can prove how right we were about the collapse coming, as we’ve known it would?

Are we actually watching pornography made by moralists, as paid advertisements from the Machine are fed to us by strangers we’ve misunderstood as our friends?

Is the background disaster the money shot or is it the narcissistic, self-regarding influencer—fitness model, spiritually model, feminist model, Bitcoin model, race and gender activist model, manosphere model, biker model, entrepreneur model, video game “athlete” model, investment model, anime-ASMR model, supplement model, rage-bait radio model, conspiracy theorist model… we fantasize, it’s low-grade virtual fornication. It’s one message, whatever our fetish.

Which do we gravitate toward:

Narcissists of every brand and identity who say they want nothing more than to make our lives slightly better in the material world…

… or the literal end of the constant, interminable, hellish state of existing inextricably alongside this in the material world?

Do we long for the end of the world?

At bottom, what are these influencers doing?

Influencers would tell you they’re looking after their needs but, of course, influencing isn’t the only way to meet one’s needs. It is a profession that successfully attracts and maximizes for shameless narcissists willing to do absolutely anything to find more material wealth in this dying(?) world, competing in a never-ending rat race to the bottom.

Influencers would tell you they’re selling products they enjoy, products they think others would enjoy. Most of America can’t afford to purchase novelty kitsch off Instagram on a regular basis, but they sure can want it really hard. Their wanting— that’s where the profit is. And who better to buy it from than the people who we fantasize about being - rich, lazy, self-centered, maybe on vacation?

What are these influencers doing from the perspective of the Machine? They are targeting micro-demographics of reachable people (as many influencers as are required to efficiently cover every micro-demographic, of course) and selling them an image of how the world is, has always been, and will always be. We are witness to the distortions of our reality provoked by ads that run during Super Bowls and awards shows, the stuff they want us all to see.

Everyone does not need to visit Monster.com, but everyone does need to know that the Monster.com commercial represents a desirable reality, not only for Monster.com, but for you. You’re the point. We believe the Corporation and the Machine adapt to our reality, not us to theirs.

Influencers at the end of the world are constructing a reality on behalf of the corporation, on behalf ultimately of the Machine. These influencers are in the False Reality Construction business. Your belief (and your purchase) are how the False Reality is made real (to you).

What world are they constructing? Why would I need a fitness food delivery service if all the restaurants are destroyed? Do they even believe the world is ending? Of course they don’t, but it is on TV.

What is the Machine saying, constantly?

Machine: “It’s all going to burn, but you’ll be okay, because you sold our False Reality so well. You helped to build it. You don’t have to say thank you, we understand, and you’re welcome.”

Machine: “We really appreciate what you did for us, but in order for us to keep you okay, you’re going to need to keep doing that thing you did, but harder, because everything else is so bad and you really need to look out for yourself. You wouldn’t want it to happen to you, too.”

Machine: “The world is going to keep getting worse in all the ways we’ve told you about. The best way to look out for yourself is by supporting us as hard as you can. No promises, but you’ll be first in line.”

What to make of the fact that AI made the video with direction by the Dor Brothers (who I am encouraged to assume are real people)?

The influencers represent the False Reality and have made themselves part of it. The characters they’re playing on their own private TV set are not the characters they are in the world. Their worth is judged by how much attention they’re able to attract from how many followers along for the ride, whether or not those followers are foreigners, predators, perverts, people running info ops, or bots (also known as not actual people). Does any of it even have to be real? Of course not.

The Dor Brothers with the help of AI, however, represent reality exactly as we find it. We are a people who have become obsessed with watching the world burn on TV and adopting whatever beliefs, whatever picture of reality the Machine chooses to advertise to us.

We imagine ourselves as friends with the grifters and narcissists online because otherwise it’s creepy to pay so much attention to them. We aspire to be them, to have their lives. At least it’s not our lives. No one wants to be us, and why? As for the influencers, the world has been burning down around them for a decade and they're still busy trying to make digital strangers like them for social credits that they might one day be able to convert into some of the Regime's fiat currency.

“Trust her, she’s the closest to the disaster,” is not the sort of discernment our time calls for.

What we need is more: “All those people close to the disaster and getting rich from it might be part of the problem!”

We are addicted to being influenced because we are addicted to the False Reality the influence constructs. We cannot let the falsehoods go because the False Reality is all we’ve ever known. We long ago stopped believing there was something on the other side.

We pretend XformerlyTwitter isn’t still censored and that allows us to trust that what we see there is true, or at least more true, or at least sort of true. We say we’re using Instagram for work and Facebook to keep in touch with our families, as though these are the optimal approaches, while using Instagram for voyeurism and Facebook for gossip and arguing about the political soap opera. The platforms censored and shamed our friends, our neighbors, and ourselves en masse and yet we cannot let them go.

We say it’s waking people up. If that’s true, it’s because the False Reality is tattered and torn, seen straight through by too many people now. We judge our awakeness relative to those we see as still asleep so we can pretend we are not.

Influencers allow us to enter a False Reality in which we fill all our inner voids with sins-by-proxy—greed, wrath, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth, and above them all, pride, all on display, all the time, in whatever color or flavor or feeling we need the most. Whatever it is, next time, we need a little more. We fantasize about the world in which we’ll have all the things and friends and cool experiences and then reengage our screens to pretend that world is real.

Gatorade used to tell us to Be Like Mike by drinking Gatorade. No one so far has been successful. Most of us knew it was never going to happen. But when Heyleigh from the gym says buying a fitness-meal food-delivery program will make you look like an athlete, well, I mean, Heyleigh looks like an athlete on the TV in your pocket, sort of. We no longer aspire to great heights, but we can at least aspire to being see as like an athlete online.

We don’t have to be anti-tech and I’m not advocating that we should be. This AI-human collaboration, Influenders, exists on the outside*, it comes from outside. It is of a technology greater than the technology displaying it. This is a display by the Machine, of the Machine. It contains more reality than do the real-world subjects it displays.

We don’t have to shun social media and I’m not advocating that we do, although it may be wise to do so. It’s worth considering whether we’ve become addicted. If we have to lie to ourselves about our reasons to continue doing something, chances are we should not be doing that thing. If we can’t stop doing it anyway, chances are we’re addicted and we need to accept what that means, begin again with that.

There is nothing holding us back. We simply have to stop believing what we see on screens is or will be our reality. We have to stop believing that what’s happening on screen is real. What we are seeing is that which the Machine wants us to see. What it displays does not have to be real and we should be heavily biased to the skeptical side. We should demand and receive overwhelming evidence and full transparency before we form a belief that what’s on TV happens to share even the slightest attachment to a discernible reality.

At some point, this fever will break. It has for so many, particularly in the last five years. People have recognized the Sunk Cost Fallacy** of their lives and woken up, turned around, and attempted to correct course. I did. Many do each day.

That’s all we can do when we’ve reached the End of the Universe and Influenders is a Starbucks across from another Starbucks.

* Coined by the philosopher Nick Land, The Outside is that which lies beyond structured, coded, human experience—outside language, politics, subjectivity, and order. It is alien, inhuman, and radically other.

** Sunk Cost Fallacy: the tendency to stick with a project or decision even when it's not beneficial, because of past investments (money, time, energy, etc…)