Fake

On reality, imagination, and that third thing | Non-Fiction | Fresh Soup

Fake

Remember that picture of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump French-kissing? How could anyone forget. And what about the naked porn star gazing at you through the camera and saying she only wants you? You’ll remember that one forever too. When you think about each of those two moments, you can reconstruct an exact picture of when and how it happened—and you also have the troublesome knowledge that it never did happen. We might call this the fakification of reality.

Now close your eyes and try to imagine yourself kissing the hottest boy or girl in your high school. It’s not an easy task, but it is a rewarding one, which many of us surely undertook in our youth. The task demands some storytelling skills: there you are on a class trip to the beach, and your crush starts flailing in the stormy waves. You swim out and drag them back to shore, where you try to resuscitate the limp body. At first there’s no response, but then their eyes flutter open. And in those beautiful eyes you see something tender and delicate, something that looks deep inside you, and the next time you put your lips to theirs, it’s not to fill their lungs with air but to slide your tongue in and touch their tongue. Now open your eyes, pick up your phone, and click over to any porn site. There’ll be someone gorgeous waiting for you there, too, desperately yearning for your kiss.

These two things might feel the same, but they’re not. They’re both lies, yes, but the difference between the two lies is enormous: the first one, at the seaside, is yours. It’s your emotional immune system using your imagination (even if it’s doing it pretty ludicrously) to heal the wound of loneliness and despair inside you, to embed within you a sliver of faith that one day, somehow, you may get to taste those lips, or some other lips you want just as badly. The porn tells its lie in a completely different way: it demands nothing of you, and gives you nothing in return. It doesn’t even pretend it can fill the void inside you—it simply volunteers to plug it up. And while the picture of the beautiful boy or girl looking at you with their tender eyes is one-hundred percent exclusively yours, the other picture seared into your mind is seared into hundreds of thousands of minds—of everyone who typed in that same URL. So next time you share a deepfake of Zelenskyy and Trump going fisticuffs in the Oval Office, or laugh out loud at a deepfake of Mamdani dressed as Elsa, take a second to remember that porn star sprawled naked on a bearskin rug, pouting and cooing that you’re the only one they want.

I know it seems a stretch to lump porn and harmless memes in the same category. Porn is exploitative, while a picture of Will Smith nursing a hedgehog is pure fun. But they both pollute your soul in the same way. Unlike, say, a caricature, which offers an artist’s interpretation of a certain figure or situation, a fake image is not interpretation—it’s a lie. A convincing picture of a reality that we viewers choose to perceive not as imagination (because, after all, it wasn’t imagined by us) but as memory. And even though we know it to be totally false, we cling to it.

Now imagine, if you’re still able, another world. A world in which you can turn on the TV and watch a made-to-order channel of deepfakes that shows exactly what you want to see. You can watch that politician you loathe, handcuffed and chained, being thrown into a prison cell. Maybe even hanged. Or you can giggle at any number of impossible realities that you yourself dreamed up. Imagine this channel streaming alongside the news networks. For the first few months, the fake channels have a little icon of a mischievously winking eye at the bottom of the screen. But after increasingly angry complaints from viewers, the icon disappears and we’re left with a full lineup of channels reporting contradictory realities, and we have no means to distinguish between our fantasized scenes and what’s really happening in the world. Now imagine all of humanity (yourself included) living in this shaky reality with a sense of resignation, perhaps even serenity, with no resistance or protest. Come to think of it, maybe you don’t need to work very hard to imagine all that: maybe it’s already here.

Translated by Jessica Cohen