I’ve been expecting for a while that major politicians and stars would transition to being something more like mascots or vocaloids, out of recognition that their job is to appeal to people and have an air of legitimacy, and this is a job that real people are very unsuited for.
I think you’ll see it first with movie stars, because the degree of liability associated with your stars being real people is enormous, and you’re not using any of their realness anyway. These jobs already require large staffs of full-time experts to systematically scour away all their human particularity in order to prepare them for the investiture of an archetypal role, so at this point the actual person is a vestigial inconvenience. Once you fully virtualize celebrities there’s no longer the same kind of risk of scandal – if cultural norms render their old presentation taboo you can change it gradually, and if there’s a scandal it will typically be localized in particular staff who can be sacked without permanently damaging the brand. This also works better for media companies – practically speaking, they already treat stars as assets, but they can’t really own or maintain full control over them as long as they’re real people, so full virtualization makes business sense and is a logical continuation of the current trajectory. At this point the main hurdles are technological, I think.
But it’s more interesting to note how politics works this way, and what actually got me reflecting on this again recently was the Ukraine election – how a wholly fictionalized brand can not simply substitute for but outperform an actual political career, and therefore may become the kind of thing that ambitious politicians need to build in advance, and political factions need to cultivate. Major politicians are already as fictionalized and committee-designed as movie stars, and having the brand face be a notional figurehead who serves the interests of one or more back-room owners would be a more efficient arrangement than the current process, where you need to be the former type of person to get elected and the latter type of person to actually “do politics”.
This theory is disconcertingly plausible…and, I’ll be honest, it freaks me out like no product of the discourse has done in years. Not so much because of the points made directly, but the first-order implications – yikes.
We’re not supposed to outsource our symbolic occult glory to robots. We’re supposed to outsource literally everything else, and keep the only prize worth having for ourselves.