AI, Simulacra, and Joan is Awful

A friend of mine had recommended that i must watch Joan is so Awful – an episode in the Black Mirror series. My better half arm-twisted me into watching it recently. Such serendipity …

I think this particular narrative of two women was disturbing at many levels. At the most surface level, it helped explain the current ongoing strike by actors in the film and television industry, where AI and its associated powers could not just substitute performers but exploit them.

At a deeper level, the narrative only reinforced what Jean Baudrillard – a french postmodernist had anticipated many decades ago. In my blog on Disneyland, Selfies and Simulacra, i had spoken about the notion of Simulacra where it is “… copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original…”

Joan is Awful is a narrative that offers the transition of the simulacrum – from being a mirror accurate to the original story or life journey a protagonist is going through to the perversion of the original to soon becoming meaningless and arbitrary.

Perhaps one of the things that AI and its tools would do is to create simulacrums of such real life ordinary narratives – making these enticing to begin with, and then render it meaningless and arbitrary – triggering a sense of despair and doom for us.

In the Netflix series (and ironically so), the ability of the human mind to create and to entertain itself gets substituted or replaced by the machine creating meaningless replicas of our living stories to be consumed by us, and subsequently that these simulacrums grip us and then imprison us with self hate and schadenfreude at a very mundane level.

Like multiverses inanely echoing our meaningless journeys, the episode ends with some hope where Joan embraces the ordinariness of her life while violently disconnecting from the helplessness induced by media.

Picking up from the machine built Matrix, the episode again reminds us that ugliness, perversion, pain, loneliness and the dark side of human psyche has a far greater pull than joy, peace, and wellbeing.

A must watch – for it leaves one mulling over many aspects.

Interestingly, the cast of characters are only women, homosexual men, asian men and women … marginals at best and even that is something to mull over.