In the ‘90s, digital devices were still new and scary. While screens emerged as parallel experiences for adolescent escapism, a keychain-dangling doodad elicited the first moral panic about virtualized society.
Behold, the sinister Tamagotchi.
Ovoid-shaped toys from Japan, Tamagotchis were handheld “virtual pets” that would “die” if not given constant attention by their owner. (“Attention” was allotted by pressing buttons every hour, like Desmond from Lost.) After millions of kids were found nurturing their virtual playthings, coddling parents with no sense of irony freaked out about their children’s equally coddling obsession with their mewling gizmos. Amid a barrage of think pieces on the dangers of technology, a new psychological disorder—the Tamagotchi Effect—was coined to describe our emotional attachment to robots and software agents.
Whether any of these reactionary parents survived to see the iPhone is unknown.
SEE ALSO: CYBORG; MECHANICAL TURK; PHANTOM VIBRATION SYNDROME; TRUMAN SYNDROME
On the eve of April Fools’ Day (HINT, HINT) in 1998, David Bowie took the stage at a glitzy book launch party in Jeff Koons’s studio in Soho to read from a new biography, Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928–1960. The exclusive shindig feted the abstract expressionist who, at the age of thirty-one, destroyed nearly all of his paintings before tragically leaping to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
As Bowie read the heart-wrenching account from the monograph, an au courant crowd flitted about the room—writers (Jay McInerney, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, John Ashbery), art denizens (Frank Stella, Julian Schnabel, Jeffrey Deitch), and other assorted glitterati (Charlie Rose, Iman, Billy Corgan). Journalists mingled in the trendy herd, asking partygoers for remembrances of Tate. They recalled his gallery shows and mourned his premature death. Copies of the book passed hand-to-hand. If anyone bothered to open it, they found epigraphs from Bowie and Gore Vidal, who cryptically called it “a moving account of an artist too well understood by his time.”
There were too many signs. The book was, obviously, a hoax. Rather than a biography, it was essentially a novel—still by the same hand, the English writer William Boyd, but in cahoots with Bowie, Vidal, and a handful of conspirators. “Nat Tate,” everyone groaned upon realization, was the rather obvious conflation of London’s two biggest art museums, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery.
Hoaxes usually serve some objective. For the least interesting ruses the reward is financial, but the more sharpened ones expose some small defect of the human psyche. The obvious goal of Nat Tate was to satirize the feigned romanticism of artist biographies. And it worked. But the scheme had another, more remote target: epicurean elites. The hoax exposed how a crowd of feckless artist intellectuals will do anything to appear in-the-know, going so far as to fib when asked, “Do you remember the great artist Nat Tate?”
SEE ALSO: LEROY, JT; ROCKEFELLER, CLARK; UNRELIABLE NARRATOR; WARHOL, ANDY
While editing a film, a director will often use music from a different movie as a temporary score. This is temp music—the stopgap score meant to be replaced once the composer finishes the soundtrack.
But after weeks in an editing booth, delicately matching each movie frame to an interim soundtrack, a director can sometimes fall in love with the dummy composition. So when the final cut is handed over for real orchestration, the director sometimes tells the composer to imitate the temp music—within the legal bounds of a replica, of course. At this moment, film composers lose their wiry-haired minds, as would any artist told to mimic another’s work.
Since the advent of nonlinear digital editing, which simplified sound and image remixing to a few drop-and-drag mouse strokes, film music has become noticeably less memorable. This copy-and-paste attitude toward moviemaking, coupled with the MIMICRY of temp music scoring, helps explain why today’s blockbusters can seem redundant, forgettable, and monotonous.158
SEE ALSO: AUTOMATED DIALOGUE REPLACEMENT; DARK SIDE OF THE RAINBOW; FAKE SHEMP; RETCONNING
Teoing (often #TEOING; sometimes t’eo-ing) is an internet meme where you pose for a picture with an invisible girlfriend. The term derives from Manti Malietau Louis Te’o, a star Notre Dame linebacker who in 2012 started telling the media a weepy tale about his Californian girlfriend surviving a violent car crash and then dying of leukemia. It later turned out that the girlfriend, “Lennay Kekua,” was a complete fiction. Te’o had been the victim of an elaborate social media hoax. (A devout Mormon, Te’o unwittingly assisted the ruse by lying to everyone about meeting Kekua, when in fact he had been CATFISHED.)
After finishing second in the voting for the Heisman trophy (losing to devout boozehound Johnny Manziel), Te’o would go on to have a prosperous NFL career. Lennay Kekua would later appear at No. 69 on Maxim’s annual “Hot 100” list, despite not being a real person.
SEE ALSO: CATFISH; COLEMAN, ALLEGRA; CANARY TRAP; HONEYTRAP; SOCKPUPPET
Let’s suppose you have a friend who has developed an exotic taste: He loves to devour human flesh. “Chomp chomp,” exclaims your cannibalistic comrade between bites of homo sapiens quadriceps. “More succulent than filet mignon!”
Of course, this upsets you. “You can’t eat your own species!” you implore your friend. Finally, after much pleading, you convince him to stop eating human carne. But he needs to wean himself off his favorite victual, so he tries a new product: Fooman. Tastes just like human, but made of tofu.
Here’s the question: Is Fooman an ethical replacement? Or does it accidentally reinforce the idea that eating human flesh is acceptable?
Tofurkey—the most successful meat substitute brand—presents a similar dilemma to vegetarians: Can eating the idea of a prohibited food unintentionally justify consumption of the actual food?
Not all that long ago, a “fake” veggie burger tasted nothing like its “real” meat antecedent, so a devout vegetarian could convince herself that it was a completely different edible product. But as food science has advanced, meat replacements have become much more . . . well, meaty. Discussions around the two newest high-tech meat analogues—Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat—consistently recycle a specific descriptor: bloody. “It tastes bloody,” says many a reviewer, suggesting the substitute has high verisimilitude with real beef. But is reproducing the taste of blood with laboratory plants really the desired outcome of the anti-meat community?
Tofurky, likewise, attempts to simulate turkey without becoming turkey. But if that simulation continues to progress, if Tofurky continues to be more turkey-like, at some point you have to wonder, When does the fake become the real? When does tofurkey become turkey? (In vitro meat, in which animal flesh is grown in a lab rather than in an animal, introduces a similar quandary.)
If you are vegetarian, asking these provocative questions at Thanksgiving dinner will not save you from Uncle Larry making jokes about eating rabbit food. However, you might try dropping this tidbit: Tofurky is technically different from tofurkey (note the dropped -e). The former is the brand; the latter, the product. But the company who first introduced Tofurky in 1995 owns the trademark on both, so you might be splitting feathers.
SEE ALSO: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST; FRANKENFOOD; A MODEST PROPOSAL; SAMPURU
When Kramer tumbles into Jerry’s apartment, when Marlo Stanfield defends a Baltimore corner, when Mulder and Scully investigate a rare chupacabra sighting, when Homer devours a donut—all of it takes place in the mind of an autistic boy in a Boston hospital. At least according to the Tommy Westphall universe theory.
In the ‘80s hospital drama St. Elsewhere, Tommy Westphall was a minor character—until the final episode. In the final scene of the series, Tommy shakes a snow globe containing a miniaturized version of the hospital, implying that the entire show had taken place in his mind.
This surprise ending has shocking consequences, especially for other television shows. In one episode of St. Elsewhere, for instance, doctors visit the bar in Cheers, thereby placing both shows in the same fictional universe. And if one show exists in Tommy Westphall’s dreamscape, then the other must, too.
From there, the fantasy spread, virus-like, across the television landscape. Cheers spun off into Frasier, tainting that universe with Tommy’s imagination. And when John Larroquette calls into Frasier Crane’s radio show, another world is corrupted. And then when The John Larroquette Show references Yoyo-dyne, a fictional company found in everything from Star Trek to Angel, the Tommy Westphall syndrome goes airborne across genres. The fanciful illusion becomes a global pandemic when St. Elsewhere’s Dr. Ehrlich (Ed Begley Jr.) has a cameo on Homicide: Life on the Street, dragging in omnipresent character Detective John Munch (Richard Belzer), who has been on more shows than any other character in television history, including The X-Files, Arrested Development, The Wire, 30 Rock, Law & Order, and The Muppets.
Eventually, the Tommy Westphall universe infects most of television, gobbling up Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show, Buffy, I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, and hundreds of other shows.
Like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the Tommy Westphall universe is amusing because it exposes the uncanny interconnectedness of fictional worlds while foreshadowing the incestuous world of Marvel Comics, which has created its own infinite loop of cross-referenced fictions. But the theory becomes an existential crisis when real people appear in the Tommy Westphall universe. Michael Bloomberg, for instance, played himself on 30 Rock. Which begs the question: If Michael Bloomberg exists only in the imagination of an autistic boy in a Boston hospital, what does that mean for you?
SEE ALSO: THE FOURTH WALL; PLATO’S CAVE; PHANTOM TIME HYPOTHESIS; TRUMAN SYNDROME
Toyetic is a nasty neologism, forged for this synthetic era of synergistic entertainment experiences.
An adjective initially coined to describe a movie’s potential to generate revenue from toys (“Star Wars is incredibly toyetic; 12 Years a Slave, not so much”), the definition of the term has evolved to encompass all possible merchandising opportunities for any type of media property—the rock band repurposed as a breakfast cereal, the video game character transposed onto a beer koozie, the television show liquefied into candy, the politician plasticized into an action figure. Now that everything and everyone is a brand, the word toyetic must exist to capture all that latent product licensing value.159
The toyetic tipping point was probably 1971, when Quaker Oats Company decided to buy the movie rights to Roald Dahl’s beloved book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Despite no previous experience in film production, Quaker financed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the one starring Gene Wilder) with the unabashed intention of launching a new line of candy. Sweet-toothed concoctions from the novel, including the Scrumdiddlyumptious Bar and the Everlasting Gobstopper, appeared concurrently both as fantastical confections in the musical film and as real products in checkout lanes. Kids ate it up.
Popular entertainment has been a gooey candyland slide ever since. Many movie franchises have become long-form advertisements for merch, including the Disney extravaganza Frozen—an unequivocal blockbuster at the box office ($1.3 billion) but a mere flurry compared to its avalanche of merchandising revenue ($5.3 billion). Star Wars was successful in theaters, but its box office take ($2 billion) is matched every year in merch sales. These numbers ultimately have a huge effect on what entertainment gets produced. Minus their huge toyetic quotient, shrink-wrapped productions like Transformers or Battleship could never exist.
And yet, Hollywood evinces no discomfort at casting itself as a glamorous infomercial, especially if the role is delivered with heavy doses of ironic bemusement. The Lego Movie franchise, which is basically a FANFIC mashup of the toyetic cinematic universe, might just be its most self-aware production since Wonka.
SEE ALSO: DEFICTIONALIZED PRODUCT; FANFIC; PRODUCT PLACEMENT; SAMPURU
Trap streets are fictitious roads on maps, inserted by crafty cartographers to spot copyright infringement. When one of these fake streets apears on the map of a competing mapmaker, it suggests that geographical markers are being illegally copied.
Trap streets lead to paper towns—the make-believe hamlets placed on maps for the same reason. They are imaginary geographic markers, but like Dorothy skipping down the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, their mythological existence can create a reality. That’s what happened to Agloe, a fictional town in the Catskills of New York. Originally placed on a map in the 1930s, the nonexistent town took on an elusive charm decades later when entrepreneurs scouted the farmland for a new business. Needing a name for their new storefront, the prospecting owners popped open a map and found they were in Agloe—and so, the Agloe General Store became a reality. (The magical realism is echoed in John Green’s young adult novel Paper Towns, which is set partially in Agloe and was made into an enchanting movie about the very earnest desire to take Cara Delevingne to prom.) By creating a fictitious town, cartographers somehow created a real one. The map preceded the territory.
Though closed decades ago, the Agloe General Store can still be found on Google Maps. “A POTEMKIN VILLAGE general store of the highest order and caliber,” a reviewer of the store has written, giving it five stars. “Founded by two cartographic flatlanders, it has a certain je ne sais quoi air about it.”
SEE ALSO: AREA 51; CANARY TRAP; ESQUIVALIENCE; GERRYMANDERING; IDAHO; NULL ISLAND; POTEMKIN VILLAGE
Most of the time, art avoids explaining itself. Museums are chockablock with vague images that resist simple interpretation. It’s pretty annoying: Art, at its best, tries to fuck with you.
But here, in René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images, we have something else: a picture that seems to speak directly at you. Right there, with words. When translated from French, it could not be more clear:
This is not a pipe.
Okay, maybe it is trying to fuck with you, because that clearly is a pipe.
But you get it. That’s a picture of a pipe, not an actual pipe. Magritte seems to be saying, Images are not reality, representations are illusions.
Cool idea. Maybe this pipe could be our patron saint of misinformation.
But more mystery is brewing in this painting. In addition to the picture not being a pipe, the word itself—p-i-p-e—is also not a pipe. It’s just a bunch of squiggly letters. So not even une pipe is a pipe.160
So, what’s a pipe?
Both the image (art) and the word (language) are human inventions to answer that question. We would be completely unable to understand pipes without those images and words. Art and language are all we know of pipe-ness.
So maybe it is a pipe after all.
SEE ALSO: FOUNTAIN; PLATO’S CAVE
“Fakefest” sounds like what would happen if Coachella bought the festival rights to this encyclopedia and invited Weird Al to host a concert. That’s not too far from reality: Fakefest is a yearly music festival in Atlantic City with a collection of tribute bands—Kashmir alchemically conjuring Led Zeppelin, Dookie puckishly pantomiming Green Day, and Almost Journey nearly reincarnating Journey. Fakefest is the Lollapalooza of misinformation.
Why would someone pay good money to see an imitation? Good question—just one of many that tribute bands pose. Other inquiries that might cross your mind at Fakefest:
• Should a tribute act be an exact clone of the original act?
• Does the audience react differently knowing the band is an imitation?
• Does the perfect tribute band distill or expand the original?
• At what point does an homage resemble satire?
• Can a copy become better than the original?
• Is this just really good KARAOKE?
When you watch The Whodlums perform “My Generation” at an Atlantic City casino in 2017, some part of your brain wants to dismiss them as silly knockoffs, but another part is asking, “How similar is this to seeing The Who in London in 1967?”
The answer might be very similar, or it might be not similar at all, but the answer doesn’t really matter—what matters is the nagging question. Ontological riddles like these give tribute bands a unique power that even their antecedents lack. When you see AC/DC blast power chords in a stadium, you might enjoy rocking out. But when you see the all-girl act AC/D She, you’re thunderstruck wondering what does it mean to rock out?
In this sense, tribute bands are like puzzles, which helps explain why so many of them have one differentiating trait that transforms them from precise imitation into unique novelty, as the chart to the right suggests.
These tribute acts are like ALT-HISTORIES. “What if little people started Kiss?” “What if Black Sabbath was founded by Renaissance lutists obsessed with medieval Latin?” “What if Judas Priest were hyper-aggressive nudists?”
Our inclination might still be to dismiss tribute acts as (at best) novelties or (at worst) shams. But the history of popular music contains several instances where the member of a tribute band has joined the band he was imitating. (See the next chart for examples.)
To some, hiring an imitator can appear inauthentic, as though your band were interchangeable with Elvis impersonators. But hiring the poet manqué who trained himself to sound exactly like the band could arguably be the most authentic choice.
Tribute bands are enjoyable not in spite of their artificiality but because of it. They pose questions about originality and authenticity and influence, which happen to be the most interesting topics in contemporary popular music.
SEE ALSO: THE BUGGS; HUMAN CLONING; KARAOKE; SHIP OF THESEUS; WARHOL, ANDY
THIS MUSICIAN... |
...JOINED THE BAND... |
...A TRIBUTE TO... |
...ONLY TO LATER... |
Tim “Ripper” Owens |
British Steel |
Judas Priest |
become Judas Priest’s lead singer |
Tommy Thayer |
Cold Gin |
Kiss |
replace Ace Frehley in Kiss |
Benoit David |
Close to the Edge |
Yes |
become the lead vocalist for Yes |
Jeremey Hunsicker |
Frontiers |
Journey |
become Journey’s lead singer |
TRIBUTE BAND |
ORIGINAL BAND |
NOVELTY |
Lex Zeppelin |
Led Zeppelin |
All female |
AC/DShe |
AC/DC |
All female |
The Iron Maidens |
Iron Maiden |
All female |
Rocket Queen |
Guns n’ Roses |
All female |
Blonde Jovi |
Bon Jovi |
All female |
Mandonna |
Madonna |
All male |
We Got the Meat |
The Go-Go’s |
All male |
Rad Bromance |
Lady Gaga |
All male |
Tiny Kiss |
Kiss |
All dwarf |
Mini Kiss |
Kiss |
All dwarf |
Black-Eyed Pee Wees |
Black-Eyed Peas |
All dwarf |
Chicks with Dixie |
Dixie Chicks |
All transvestite |
Hayseed Dixie |
AC/DC |
In the style of bluegrass |
Dread Zeppelin |
Led Zeppelin |
In the style of reggae |
The Beastles |
The Beatles |
In the style of The Beastie Boys |
The Zombeatles |
The Beatles |
All zombies |
Beatallica |
The Beatles |
In the style of Metallica |
Metalachi |
Metallica |
Mariachi-themed |
Gabba |
ABBA |
In the style of The Ramones |
Red Hot Chili Pipers |
Red Hot Chili Peppers |
All bagpipes |
Mac Sabbath |
Black Sabbath |
Obsessed with fast food |
Rondellus |
Black Sabbath |
Lyrics translated to Latin |
Nudist Priest |
Judas Priest |
All nude |
Zappa Plays Zappa |
Frank Zappa |
Led by Frank’s son, Dweezil |
The Misfats |
The Misfits |
All overweight |
What is the greatest fake-out in the history of the world? The true answer might yet still be completely unknown to us, but this fable of subterfuge is surely the greatest involving a wooden steed.
After the Greeks spent a decade sieging the impregnable walls of Troy, Odysseus devised a sneaky plan involving a giant hollow horse. After constructing the wooden stallion, the Greeks placed it outside the city walls and sailed away, pretending to abandon the war. They left behind one man who claimed to be a deserter—a double agent who persuaded the Trojans that the horse was an offering to Athena. That night, after the Trojans wheeled the equine effigy into the city, around forty Greek warriors, including Odysseus, spilled out from the hollow steed, opened the gates to the returning Greek army, and defeated Troy.
The primary source for this tale is the Aeneid (ca. 20 BCE) of Virgil, but HOMER also mentions the story in the Odyssey. Some scholars read the story as metaphor, but most historians credit the account as true, at least in some respect. (That there was even a Troy, much less a Trojan War, is still debated. No one has obtained absolute, conclusive evidence here.)
Today, Trojan Horse refers generally to an outsider who infiltrates a group and introduces subversion from within. Technologists also use the term to refer to deceptively benign computer code that feigns legitimate use but is written to maliciously damage or steal information.
SEE ALSO: CRISIS ACTORS; FALSE FLAG OPERATION; HISTORIES; HOMER; MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE; MECHANICAL TURK; REICHSTAG FIRE
If you’ve ever approached an open window only to discover it was actually a painting of a window, or been tricked by a T-shirt that looks like a naked torso, you’ve fallen for trompe l’oeil. From the French for “deceive the eye,” trompe l’oeil is a deliberate visual illusion in which two dimensions seem to be three. Painters use the technique to create verisimilitude. And to mess with you.
Historically, trompe l’oeil has flourished during periods of artistic realism, such as seventeenth-century Netherlands and eighteenth-century France. In America, feats of optical mischief became popular after the Revolutionary War.
One famous deception, as the genre of artistic subterfuge was dubbed in the States, reportedly even duped George Washington, who tipped his hat to a realistic life-size portrait of a pair of children standing on a staircase.161
Because it emulates the physical, trompe l’oeil exerts greater impact when unleashed on the real world. Outside a museum’s confines, contemporary street art derives a sardonic edge from the ambiguity between reality and artifice. In one clandestine outdoor rendering, the graffitist Banksy painted a trompe l’oeil hole on the Palestinian side of a West Bank security wall, creating the impression of a glittering paradise on the other side.
The Banksy work is reminiscent of another great street artist, Wile E. Coyote, whose many implementations of trompe l’oeil, though masterfully rendered, never yielded their desired effect of capturing the Road Runner.
SEE ALSO: CHINESE ART REPRODUCTION; THE DRESS; THE FOURTH WALL; THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES; TUPAC HOLOGRAM
Before he began to have paranoid fantasies, David had a good job as a production manager on a competition reality television show. “I thought I was being filmed,” he told his psychiatrist, Dr. Joel Gold. “I was convinced I was a contestant, and later the TV show would reveal me.” David thought he was in the reality show that he was working on.162
Delusional states like this are increasingly common, with mental health facilities around the world reporting patients who believe they are being secretly filmed, like a nonstop Candid Camera. They suffer from what Dr. Gold has dubbed Truman Syndrome.
Yes, that Truman—the Jim Carrey simpleton who inhabits the idyllic suburb of Seahaven, which is actually a bubbled soundstage outside Los Angeles, which is actually the set for a hugely popular reality television show called The Truman Show, which, in a final meta-twist, is actually a movie you watch called The Truman Show. Everyone who watches knows it’s a scripted universe, except Truman, who eventually tries to escape the illusion. And like the hero in the final act, those afflicted with the syndrome feel compelled to expose their reality as scripted. They strain to break the confines of unreality television.
The newness of the disorder introduces a challenging question: Does modern culture make us more prone to certain disorders? Or worse, can the virtual simulations of today’s society create new disorders? Some psychologists mock the notion that the zeitgeist can generate a new mental illness. The human brain has changed very little in 500 years, so why should it? But we also have evidence that culture must play some role in mental health. It has been shown, for example, that psychiatric disorders involving delusions are more common in cities, so clearly our environment plays a part. Might the widespread awareness of NSA espionage affect our mental health? Or could a culture that proclaims celebrities are just like us be making us crazy?
“We’ve got the perfect storm of reality TV and the Internet,” Dr. Gold told WebMD. “These are powerful influences in the culture we live in. And for some people who are predisposed, it might be overwhelming and trigger a [psychotic] episode. The pressure of living in a large, connected community can bring out the unstable side of more vulnerable people.”
It might be tempting to deem Truman Syndrome a fashionable new brand of narcissism brought to you by the Kardashians, but one important characteristic defies that diagnosis: People who suffer from the disorder do not enjoy their simulated realities. Trumans strive to be released from the immense anxiety of 24-hour surveillance. Unlike Kim or Paris (or Kanye or Trump), they want their shows to be cancelled.
Trumans are not the egomaniacs who populate reality television. They merely fear that a hyper-mediated society has trapped them in a simulated universe. Trumans are just like most of us.
SEE ALSO: FILTER BUBBLE; FREGOLI DELUSION; GASLIGHTING; SIMULISM; TOMMY WESTPHALL UNIVERSE
Let’s say we decide to go on a trip. After much debate about the best destination, we settle upon Italy, because you love the food. (Fine. Whatever.) While in Pisa, near the base of its most famous landmark, we stage a goofy photo that uses forced perspective to make it look like you’re holding up the Leaning Tower. Is this photo telling the truth?
After we get home from our trip, while transferring our vacay shots to a laptop, you notice something peculiar in the foreground of our Pisa pic. You load the image into Photoshop, zoom into the suspicious area, and—eeeek! There’s a rat! How did the critter go unnoticed back in Pisa? When you zoom in closer, the image is indisputable: A large mangy rodent, just sitting there at the edge of the frame, chomping on what appears to be a slice of margherita pizza with extra basil, like an expat from Ratatouille. Is this photo telling the truth?
While inspecting the image, you also notice an odd gray blotch on your face. You use the clone tool in Photoshop to remove the digital blemish. Is this photo telling the truth?
You then upload the photo to Instagram, applying the “Walden” filter to give it the serene patina of a crisp New England morning. Is this photo telling the truth?
Then you write a caption: “Spot the rat!” When you geo-tag the photo, you select “Leaning Tower of Niles,” an actual place in an actual Illinois town, which has constructed a half-size facsimile of the Tuscan column. Is this photo telling the truth?
The next day, your photo of the “Pisa Pizza Rat” goes viral, spawning thousands of memes and GIFs. Are these photos telling the truth?
At what point did this photo start to lie?
This is the quandary of photography—it is always making a truth claim, an assertion that a photo can depict reality, literally and faithfully. But that claim is simultaneously honest and mendacious. As anyone who has taken a selfie knows, all photos tell lies and speak truths.
Since its invention, photography has embraced manipulation. In the early days of the medium, a heavy dose of chemical sophistry was required to make a photograph appear realistic. Today’s digital image-editing software is only the latest innovation in a constant march toward image malleability. This imbalance between realism and perfidy puts photography in the precarious position—ceaselessly claiming accuracy to an audience that scrupulously interrogates it for deceit. The public’s zeal for spotting image manipulation is constant (“This looks ‘shopped”), yet photos are still held up as the paragon of proof (“Pics or it didn’t happen”).
Rather than lose influence through its vulnerability for falsification, as one might expect, photographs almost seem to accumulate power by being susceptible to misinformation. Some of the most famous photos of all time have endured controversies over their truth claims. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the steelworkers lunching atop Rockefeller Center, Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, Marilyn Monroe’s white dress wafting over a street vent, the MOON LANDING, Nessie in the Loch, the Abu Ghraib prison photos, the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, Falling Man, the Zapruder frames—all have been accused of visual tampering of some sort. But even under the most intense scrutiny, these photos only accrue more authenticity. By proclaiming the ability to objectively show the truth while confessing the potential for falsification, photographs have been energized as weapons for both authentication and propaganda. “Photography allows us to uncritically think,” as documentarian Errol Morris once wrote. “We imagine that photographs provide a magic path to the truth.”163
Pictures only accumulate significance by interacting with the world. Only people can imbue a photo with meaning, supply its truth claim. But that meaning is often contested, as anyone who has been enraged by a police shooting video can attest. Even the most precise cameras create images open to debate. People still see what they want to see. Cameras capture only partial truths, from a single perspective. “The camera doesn’t lie,” except when it does, which is always or never, depending on your perspective.
SEE ALSO: FINSTAGRAM; THE MARCH OF TIME; PHOTOSHOPPING; PLANDID; RASHOMON EFFECT; STREISAND EFFECT
Truthiness made its debut in the premiere episode of The Colbert Report in October 2005. In the segment The Wørd, Colbert outlined a society torn in two halves: “We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” Truthiness, as later defined by the American Dialect Society, is “what one wishes to be true regardless of the facts.” It is the product of a society where individual perception is universal reality, where facts can be customized, and where “your gut” matters more than the truth.
“It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts,” Colbert later told The A.V. Club. “But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all.”164
The first installment of “The Wørd” was originally slated to be truth, but Colbert changed it moments before the taping. In a review of the first show, the New York Times cited trustiness, misspelled, as Colbert’s debut word. The paper issued a correction a week later. Colbert used this as more fodder, scoffing that trustiness is “not even a word.”
Media wonks cottoned to the term, invoking truthiness in columns about everything from millennials to the Iraq War. Its use became so profuse that the -iness suffix, which implied a half-hearted stance toward a subject, began to spread to other fakey neologisms, such as fame-iness and youthiness.
“I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist,” Colbert also declared in the segment. “Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen.” However, several dictionaries (and at least one encyclopedia) have found space for truthiness in its elitist pages.
SEE ALSO: EVERY ENTRY IN THIS BOOK
Tulips. Of all the things that could trigger mass hysteria, a bulbed flower imported from the Ottoman Empire made people lose their minds. Or so goes this ubiquitous economic parable.
Though recognized today as an icon of Dutch national identity, up there with clogs and windmills and gouda, tulips weren’t introduced to Europe until the late sixteenth century. The Netherlands quickly became enraptured by its motley petals, elevating the tulip to a status symbol for the middle class. Market speculators—keen to exploit conspicuous consumption—quickly bid up the price of bulbs to exorbitant heights. At peak tulip, in February 1637, a single bulb could cost 6,700 guilders, equivalent to over $90,000 today. This period of irrational exuberance became known as tulpenwoede, or “tulip madness.”
The rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade.
That passage is from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), Charles Mackay’s classic study of group psychology, which popularized the widespread belief that a hysterical flower frenzy triggered an economic crisis that would rock Holland. It took over a century and a half, but the tale of investor lunacy was eventually exposed as hyperbole.
It’s true, tulip prices did quickly rise and fall over the span of a few years, but Mackay exaggerated the overall effect of the tulipomania. Bulbs jumped to 10 times the annual salary of an average worker, but that doesn’t mean a middling Dutch East India dockhand had thrown his life savings into the flower futures market. Modern economists, who have studied the historical records more closely, have shown that the tulip trade was conducted almost exclusively by wealthy merchants, not the hoi polloi. The hysterical masses were not so massive; tulipomania had a negligible impact on Holland’s prosperity, with adverse effects limited to a small number of people.165
SEE ALSO: BEANIE BABY BUBBLE; MONEY; PONZI SCHEME
“What the fuck is up, Coachella?” roared Tupac Shakur, arising from beneath the stage, chill as Jesus after a few days in Hades. The question was rhetorical, not that Tupac could have heard the crowd’s answer. He was a ghost.
Coachella didn’t even exist in 1996, when the LA rapper was brutally murdered in a drive-by shooting. But here he was, shirtless and ripped, on stage at an ecstasy-fueled music festival in 2012, chest-pumping his final hit, a posthumous single called “Hail Mary,” brimming with biblical references of violence and regret. Like an invincible CGI superhero, Tupac seemed a demigod, reincarnated to rap. Not even a bullet supposedly from Suge Knight could take out this spooky mirage.
Technically, the “Tupac hologram” wasn’t even a hologram—neither the fantastical Princess Leia kind, nor the legit laser kind. The Coachella apparition was actually a modern rejiggering of a Victorian visual trick called “Pepper’s ghost,” first used in an 1862 dramatization of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Using a projector and angled glass to reflect a ghostly 2D 2Pac onto a Mylar screen, the close-enough simulacrum tricked the stoned audience into believing the rapper messiah had been resurrected.
Even if the tech was chintzy, the lo-res solution had high-fi implications. We could now reincarnate celebrities! Technology’s endgame was always immortality, and the Tupac hologram seemed another small step toward eternity. It made you wonder, if 3D rendering continues to progress toward the singularity, who wouldn’t watch a reunited Beatles at Madison Square Garden? Could Hendrix play the Super Bowl? Might Elvis take residence on the Vegas Strip literally forever?
Unsettling but intriguing, the hypothesis seemed plausible because of the dual setting: Coachella, that diorama of misspent celebrity youth, and You-Tube, that crypt of eternal viewing, where the Tupac hologram video became a viral sensation. Like the summer of love on infinite loop, the clip proposed something both compelling and disturbing—the perennial celebrity.
Alas, nothing can last forever. Just five months after Coachella, the company that created the hologram technology filed for bankruptcy. Digital Domain Media Group, which also did special effects for dozens of films including Transformers and Titanic, was gone in an instant. The ersatz Tupac was shuffled back to the depths of nostalgia, but the company left behind one memorable trinket: an Oscar it won for reverse-aging Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
As Biggie once said, “It was all a dream.”
SEE ALSO: THE ARCHIES; HUMAN CLONING; KARAOKE; MIKU, HATSUNE; PHOTOSHOPPING; TROMPE L’OEIL; WARHOL, ANDY
“I propose to consider the question,” began the English computer scientist Alan Turing in a 1950 paper on artificial intelligence, “Can machines think?” Turing was being coy; he knew the question teemed with inherent problems. “Thinking” is a wildly subjective term, open to many definitions. Does solving complex math problems constitute thinking? How about translating Sanskrit? Or winning at Gilmore Girls trivia night? Giving a TED Talk?
Turing thought he could break through the definitional problem of cognition with a simple test. He devised a thought experiment that begins with an interrogator standing before a wall with two slots. Behind one of the slots is a human; behind the other, a computer. The interrogator passes a question into each slot. Answers are returned from the other side. After repeating this many times, an evaluator reviews the results to determine which slot returned the most human results. If the evaluator fails to distinguish man from machine, Skynet is nigh.
By preferencing results (what it says) over process (how it works), the test seems like a clever way to avoid the messy question of what constitutes cognition. (It’s like the ol’ behaviorist trick for identifying a duck—if it swims like a duck, and it quacks like a duck. . . .) But this method leads to a predicament. The test seems to imply that acting smart is the same thing as being smart. If you are a person who watches cable news, you recognize the problem with this law of logic immediately.166
The philosopher John Searle eventually refuted the Turing test with his own hypothetical experiment. In the Chinese Room test, as it was called, the setup is similar, except the interrogator slips messages in Mandarin. In this task, a computer might perform quite well, but a human could easily fail. Who’s the smarty-pants now?
As Searle seems to prove, acting sufficiently human is not the same as being human. This is a major concern of the Turing test, but there is a much bigger problem. If every artificial intelligence scientist started using the Turing test as their benchmark, they would be creating robot monsters that are trained to deceive. Consider interrogator questions like What color is your hair? or Where were your parents born? Answering these questions does not produce a “right” answer but instead involves fooling the evaluator. The computer is incentivized toward bluster and diversion. If AI scientists were to use the Turing test as their goal, they would effectively be teaching computers to lie. Which seems kinda terrifying! “Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test,” one science fiction novelist has written, “is smart enough to know to fail it.”167
While his test had its faults, Turing was a critical figure in the field of computer science. He really did help the Allies win World War II by cracking encrypted Nazi messages, as Benedict Cumberbatch depicts in The Imitation Game (2014). But his most peculiar legacy might be CAPTCHA—those tests where you decipher inscrutable characters on websites to determine your human-ness. Intended to deter automated bot abuse, the elusive game is named in honor of the Turing test. (The mealy acronym is picked from the phrase Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Engineers have an odd sense of humor.) Technically the robot-detection system is more of a Reverse Turing test. As you click around the web, a computer evaluates whether you are human.168 Or as that circumspect bot HAL 9000 once wisely asked, “Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”
SEE ALSO: CYBORG; ELIZA EFFECT; MECHANICAL TURK; POLYGRAPH; RORSCHACH TEST; UNCANNY VALLEY; VOIGHT-KAMPFF MACHINE; X.A.I.
At that moment of pure frustration, when your brain exhausts all logical options, when the paradox traps you in a recursive loop and the mental puzzle gapes toward infinity, you stand at the abyss, exhaling your last gasp: “It’s turtles all the way down.”
This sardonic phrase derives from philosophy, a field not especially known for jocular quips, but when trapped in infinite regression enigmas, even philosophers need jokes. Through the ages, the aphorism has been endlessly repurposed in debates as vast as the big bang theory, evolution, the chicken or the egg problem, flat earth theory, and monotheism.
Variously attributed to Bertrand Russell, William James, Aleister Crowley, Native American mythology, and Indian philosophy, the phrase surged in awareness after the publication of Stephen Hawking’s best-seller A Brief History of Time (1988), in which he recounts the story of an elderly lady approaching a scientist after a cosmology lecture:
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Vicious infinite regression anecdotes are hilarious.
SEE ALSO: FLAT EARTH THEORY; NOT EVEN WRONG; SHIP OF THESEUS; ZENO’S PARADOX
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
—W. B. Yeats
“Twerking FAIL” was a thirty-seven-second video uploaded to YouTube in September 2013. In the opening frames, a young woman is seen initiating the eponymous selfie video, alone in her minimalist apartment. She cranks the volume on her stereo and begins the booty-dominant dance known as twerking. After mounting herself into a handstand, she balances against the door, still gyrating, just as another woman (likely a roommate) enters the apartment, knocking over the twerking dervish onto a candlelit table, setting her lower body ablaze with fire, screaming frantically, like Miley Cyrus plunged into lava. LOL.
After the video accrued 10 million views, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel confessed to staging the entire thing.
It was funny. But the lasting effect of this hoax video has been a nagging sensation that every piece of content on the internet might not be real. Now, anytime a vaguely suspicious video appears on You-Tube, the masses scream fake!, convinced that Jimmy Kimmel is the demiurge behind all viral mischief.
SEE ALSO: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; CLICKBAIT; CRISIS ACTORS; ZARDULU
158 For more on this theory, see the YouTube video essay “The Marvel Symphonic Universe.”
159 A short list of toyetic individuals who have their own action figures: Snoop Dogg, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, van Gogh, Marie Antoinette, Steve Jobs, Snooki, Shakespeare, Einstein, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, MC Hammer, Carl Jung, Ann Coulter, George Lucas, and Adolf Hitler. If your name hasn’t been licensed onto the merch list, consider yourself a nobody.
160 Just to complicate matters: Pipe originally referred only to a wind instrument; today, it has several meanings, including the receptacle for tobacco.
161 For maximum trickery, the artist, Charles Willson Peale, framed the painting, Staircase Group, with an actual door. The artwork, painted in 1795, can be seen today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
162 “David” is a pseudonym. The account is from the book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness (2014), by Ian and Joel Gold.
163 The quote is from Morris’s magnificent Believing Is Seeing (2011), in which he investigates the veracity of the iconic Valley of the Shadow Of Death—a 1855 photograph taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War. “The first iconic photograph of war,” as he calls it, was almost certainly a fake.
164 The remark was likely inspired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously said, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
165 The creation of a new class of investment, known as an option on futures, helped curtail the economic damage. This new investment vehicle converted prior future contracts from the obligation to buy the commodity to the opportunity to buy it, thereby minimizing risk. It was the price for a tulip option—not the actual price—that actually went bonkers.
166 This is a peculiar thing to say about a computer scientist, but Turing’s sexuality seems to have played a role in devising this test. In its original incarnation, the experiment was called the Imitation Game, and instead of man versus computer, a man and a woman were behind the wall. Succeeding in this game meant that the evaluator was unable to determine your gender. After a life of passing as straight, Turing tragically committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and enduring chemical castration treatment.
167 The quote is from Ian McDonald’s dazzling AI-heavy novel River of Gods (2004). Jonathan Nolan, the creator of HBO’s Westworld, said something remarkably similar on Reddit: “I’m not scared of a computer passing the Turing test. . . . I’m terrified of one that intentionally fails it.”
168 More terrifyingly, the data from Google’s image-based CAPTCHA system, known as reCAPTCHA, is used to train artificial intelligence systems.
