This comes hot on the heels of Sexy Beasts, where contestants don elaborate prosthetic makeup before going on a blind date. The conceit is that by concealing their actual faces, their true selves will be better able to shine through.
The common factor behind both these shows is the idea that by working a human ‘self’ loose from its embodied presence in a physical body, provides ever greater freedom to be our ‘true selves’. In a promo video for Alter Ego, one of the singers explains his desire to perform via alter ego: “There’s something about how I look behind this alter ego,” he says, “that I feel like it’s held me back”.
In 2018, Aaron Bastani promised that automation would create a world of super-abundance for everyone, leading to a socialist horn of plenty and liberation from work via ‘fully automated luxury communism’. Today, that’s morphing into a dream of emancipation not just from work, but from our very bodies: fully automated luxury Gnosticism.
But this dream has a sting in the tail. For many adolescent girls now, what holds them back isn’t their bodies but the impossibility of living up to the image they project online. Reports are emerging of teenagers so dependent on tweaking their selfies with Instagram ‘filters’ they become unable to interact with people in person.
Even Facebook’s own research now shows that life lived through too-perfect selfies is toxic for teenage girls. Meanwhile, for those whose jobs by definition can’t be unmoored from their bodies, the push for disembodied life has still more unsettling implications. Because no matter how loudly you promise that luxury Gnosticism will be fully automated, someone still has to take out the bins, stack the dishes and care for those who can’t care for themselves,
Their existence is a painful reminder that while Covid has accelerated the rise of the robots, even prompting the launch of a robot Covid nurse, we haven’t yet managed to automate blue-collar workers out of existence. Instead they’re increasingly downplayed: there’s a new presumption of mandatory, masked facelessness for the lowest-status people whose roles regrettably require them to show up to work in person. Lockdown’s abrupt reminder of how radically we depend on manual workers did not prompt a new appreciation of the working class.
Meanwhile, the middling strata — the so-called ‘Zoom classes’ — forms the key target audience for unreality TV shows that present virtual life as liberation. And for some, the shift to remote working has indeed been a net positive. For those with space for a home office, and families already formed, going virtual can be liberating — while there are still plenty of reasons to log off and focus on real life.
But for those who are single or less professionally established, the bleak reality of ‘remote work’ is less bucolic. This is the group for whom fully automated luxury Gnosticism offers the greatest temptation: when IRL life looks like sitting on your bed in a shared house, with an incipient case of laptop burn and one of the top 10 most popular girlfriend apps for companionship, why would you ever want to log off?
“I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia,” writes Zero HP Lovecraft, “and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.” It’s tempting to imagine that Britain’s thus far more moderate approach to Covid restrictions — it feels like everyone has unmasked for autumn — will save us from such baroque extremes as we saw at the Met Gala. But we shouldn’t be over-confident: whether it’s quinoa or statue-smashing, what starts among the American elite has a habit of percolating out to the American imperial province that the United Kingdom now indisputably is.
At the start of the pandemic, we imagined embodied, in-person human life might grow more valued as a result of the disruption. And indeed it has: but not for everyone. That endlessly creative world Gibson imagined is now romanticised and sold back to us by the people commissioning unreality TV. The right to remodel our ‘meat avatars’ is politicised as the new front for civil rights. The danger of taint by other physical bodies is a key public-health message. But how you experience fully automated luxury Gnosticism depends on where you sit in the class hierarchy.
At the bottom stand masked, anonymised servants, clad in face coverings and uniforms until they can be automated out of existence. In the middle sit the Zoom classes, for whom virtual life can be a perk or a nightmare. For the lucky ones, it’s a chance at family life, but for others it’s more like an endless, lonely shift as (in Zero HP Lovecraft’s bitter phrasing), “pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads”.
And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves. Whether this emerging political order comes dressed as civil rights, TV entertainment or public health, we should see it for what it is: an assault on the humanity of all but the aristocracy.
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