The other day, I was crying uncontrollably in Zoom therapy when my laptop died. I was alone in my room staring at a screen. Everything felt so absurd.
The internet used to be a place I would go to illegally stream episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after school. Sometimes, it would be at my best friend’s place where one of us would keep lookout while the other messaged boys on MSN Messenger. I would always return home eventually.
Now, I am always on the internet. At least, a self-censored spectre of my personality is constantly accessible on my various profiles. I tailor which facets of my personality to display depending on the platform—but I am never 100% honest. Never wholly human.
On the internet I see videos of people dying. When I close my eyes I see them dying, too. They’re dying when I go to protests downtown, dying when I look up at all the video advertisements looping high above our banners, looking down on us like cheery tyrants hawking flimsy sweatshop-made pants.
There’s nothing human about algorithms except all the bodies fuelling them. We created a new Earthling that survives on our collective fears and desires. The internet fossilizes parts of us. The internet knows everything about us except the weight of our souls.
P.S. Created in loving tribute to 1.) Arthur Jafa’s Love is the message, the message is Death 2.) The internet trend ‘core core’ and 3.) Hito Steyerl’s Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, and named after John Brosio’s Two Earthlings.
P.S. 2.0 When I excavated the camera I recorded parts of this video on from the bottom of layers of junk drawer detritus, it still had photos of my sister and I at the ROM in 2007 on the SIM card, pointing up in awe at dinosaur bones. Mercifully, by the time the dinosaurs saw that bright dot in the night sky, it was already too late.
My first exposure to Hito Steyerl’s video art was at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2019. I watched in horror as robots were beaten over and over again in Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), the art installation with three video feeds looping simulated robot abuse between massive block letters of the phrase “HELL YEAH WE FUCK DIE.” According to Billboard, those five words were the most common among English language chart-toppers of the era. I wondered what we were training these machines, these machines who could never truly understand pain as is human nature to understand pain, of the world and their natural place in its order. I took photos of the installation on my iPhone and then set them as my screensaver because I thought it looked cool. Every time I opened up that devious brick to log in, I saw those words. Hell yeah, we fuck die. They lost all meaning upon repetition.
In Phil Jones’ 2021 book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism, Jones explains the concept of the Mechanical Turk. The phrase derives from a marvelous 18th-century chess machine that played full games of chess on automation, ‘thinking’ over each turn for itself against human opponents. It was a hoax. There was always a human hidden inside the machine.
Today, Mechanical Turking is a phrase used to describe "microwork" for various large tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google, where humans are given seconds-long micro-contracts to complete individual pieces of work such as tagging a person in a photo or identifying what constitutes hate speech and pornography. Sometimes, these tasks are used to train ‘artificial intelligence’ military drones like for Google’s contract with the American Department of Defense, where a person completes CAPTCHA-esque tests where they select which photos are buildings, which photos are people. The people completing these micro-contracts are unaware of the context for these tasks. In Palestine, M2Work offers micro employment to what they describe as ‘the most underprivileged people in the world,’ a deceptively generous sounding sentiment from a collaboration between Nokia and the World Bank. On the Nokia website, under defense industries, they encourage potential military clients to “leverage automation.”
In Arthur Jafa’s single-channel video art, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), Jafa splices footage of moments throughout Black history to the soundtrack of Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”. Jafa draws from an expansive archive of varying visual quality, where the viewer feels a thrum throughout dash cam footage and speeches of Black leaders. The medium is the message, where we bear witness to the grinding of capitalism against the exploitation of human beings struggling out from under its boot. But what use is simply bearing witness, over and over again, other than a false catharsis?
In 2009 Hito Steyerl published an essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” She argues that poor-quality images are not intended to be Platonic ideals of the original subject. Instead, they are about the conditions of their own existence in and of itself—they are about reality, she concludes, in all its contradictory glory. I desperately hope that Steyerl is a fan of the internet video art trend, ‘corecore.’ Corecore, which the website Know Your Meme defines as “the collective consciousness of all ‘cores,’” splices together social media video clips seemingly at random, creating an overwhelming sense of dread in my soul every time I watch a compilation. Still, much like Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s robot, I just can’t help myself.
I shot all the auto-fictive footage in Future Earthlings on my childhood digital camera, an HP Photosmart M437. It takes absolutely dogshit quality footage. I wanted that to be the point, the juxtaposition of the everyday banality of my middle-class conventional life—laundry, groceries, transit, office, friends, dishes, laundry again—with a bombardment of slick internet footage. We created this beast, a new future Earthling, that runs on our blood and collective desires. What will we do to each other?
The other day, I was crying uncontrollably in Zoom therapy when my laptop died. I was alone in my room staring at a screen. Everything felt so absurd.
The internet used to be a place I would go to illegally stream episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after school. Sometimes, it would be at my best friend’s place where one of us would keep lookout while the other messaged boys on MSN Messenger. I would always return home eventually.
Now, I am always on the internet. At least, a self-censored spectre of my personality is constantly accessible on my various profiles. I tailor which facets of my personality to display depending on the platform—but I am never 100% honest. Never wholly human.
On the internet I see videos of people dying. When I close my eyes I see them dying, too. They’re dying when I go to protests downtown, dying when I look up at all the video advertisements looping high above our banners, looking down on us like cheery tyrants hawking flimsy sweatshop-made pants.
There’s nothing human about algorithms except all the bodies fuelling them. We created a new Earthling that survives on our collective fears and desires. The internet fossilizes parts of us. The internet knows everything about us except the weight of our souls.
P.S. Created in loving tribute to 1.) Arthur Jafa’s Love is the message, the message is Death 2.) The internet trend ‘core core’ and 3.) Hito Steyerl’s Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, and named after John Brosio’s Two Earthlings.
P.S. 2.0 When I excavated the camera I recorded parts of this video on from the bottom of layers of junk drawer detritus, it still had photos of my sister and I at the ROM in 2007 on the SIM card, pointing up in awe at dinosaur bones. Mercifully, by the time the dinosaurs saw that bright dot in the night sky, it was already too late.
My first exposure to Hito Steyerl’s video art was at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2019. I watched in horror as robots were beaten over and over again in Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), the art installation with three video feeds looping simulated robot abuse between massive block letters of the phrase “HELL YEAH WE FUCK DIE.” According to Billboard, those five words were the most common among English language chart-toppers of the era. I wondered what we were training these machines, these machines who could never truly understand pain as is human nature to understand pain, of the world and their natural place in its order. I took photos of the installation on my iPhone and then set them as my screensaver because I thought it looked cool. Every time I opened up that devious brick to log in, I saw those words. Hell yeah, we fuck die. They lost all meaning upon repetition.
In Phil Jones’ 2021 book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism, Jones explains the concept of the Mechanical Turk. The phrase derives from a marvelous 18th-century chess machine that played full games of chess on automation, ‘thinking’ over each turn for itself against human opponents. It was a hoax. There was always a human hidden inside the machine.
Today, Mechanical Turking is a phrase used to describe "microwork" for various large tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google, where humans are given seconds-long micro-contracts to complete individual pieces of work such as tagging a person in a photo or identifying what constitutes hate speech and pornography. Sometimes, these tasks are used to train ‘artificial intelligence’ military drones like for Google’s contract with the American Department of Defense, where a person completes CAPTCHA-esque tests where they select which photos are buildings, which photos are people. The people completing these micro-contracts are unaware of the context for these tasks. In Palestine, M2Work offers micro employment to what they describe as ‘the most underprivileged people in the world,’ a deceptively generous sounding sentiment from a collaboration between Nokia and the World Bank. On the Nokia website, under defense industries, they encourage potential military clients to “leverage automation.”
In Arthur Jafa’s single-channel video art, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), Jafa splices footage of moments throughout Black history to the soundtrack of Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”. Jafa draws from an expansive archive of varying visual quality, where the viewer feels a thrum throughout dash cam footage and speeches of Black leaders. The medium is the message, where we bear witness to the grinding of capitalism against the exploitation of human beings struggling out from under its boot. But what use is simply bearing witness, over and over again, other than a false catharsis?
In 2009 Hito Steyerl published an essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” She argues that poor-quality images are not intended to be Platonic ideals of the original subject. Instead, they are about the conditions of their own existence in and of itself—they are about reality, she concludes, in all its contradictory glory. I desperately hope that Steyerl is a fan of the internet video art trend, ‘corecore.’ Corecore, which the website Know Your Meme defines as “the collective consciousness of all ‘cores,’” splices together social media video clips seemingly at random, creating an overwhelming sense of dread in my soul every time I watch a compilation. Still, much like Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s robot, I just can’t help myself.
I shot all the auto-fictive footage in Future Earthlings on my childhood digital camera, an HP Photosmart M437. It takes absolutely dogshit quality footage. I wanted that to be the point, the juxtaposition of the everyday banality of my middle-class conventional life—laundry, groceries, transit, office, friends, dishes, laundry again—with a bombardment of slick internet footage. We created this beast, a new future Earthling, that runs on our blood and collective desires. What will we do to each other?