I'm witnessing my digital doppelganger on YouTube, spouting words I'd never utter. This is the deepfake dilemma we must address. My blue shirt, a gift from my sister-in-law, became the catalyst for this revelation. It reminded me of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a bureaucratic figure in Dostoevsky's novella, 'The Double', exploring the fragmented self within a vast, impersonal feudal system.
It began with a congratulatory message from a colleague, linking to a YouTube video of my geopolitical discourse. As I watched, I realized something was amiss. It wasn't the content that bothered me, but the setting: my Athens office, adorned with my blue shirt, which had never left my island home. This was a deepfake, a synthesized version of me.
Since then, countless videos have emerged, featuring my face and voice, spreading across YouTube and social media. This weekend alone, a new batch appeared, with a deepfaked me espousing fictitious views on Venezuela's coup. They lecture, pontificate, and sometimes mix genuine statements with fabricated ones. Supporters and opponents alike use these videos, questioning my credibility and intelligence. Some even argue that my AI doppelgangers are more articulate than me.
I find myself in a peculiar position, observing my digital puppetry, a phantom in a technofeudal machine, which I've long criticized for its disempowering nature. My initial response was to demand that tech giants like Google and Meta remove these videos. While some channels and videos were taken down, they quickly reappeared under different guises, leading me to abandon my efforts.
Contemplation replaced rage. Am I not the one who argued that big tech is transforming capitalism, turning markets into cloud fiefs and profit into cloud rents? Are my AI doppelgangers not proof that the liberal individual is dead in this technofeudal reality? I rationalized the partial loss of self-ownership, viewing these deepfakes as feudal enclosures, symbolizing our lack of ownership over our data, social connections, and even audiovisual identity.
However, a brighter thought emerged, drawing from ancient Athens. What if my AI doppelgangers are harbingers of isegoria, a principle of genuine democracy? When I asked AI chatbots to define it, they misinterpreted it as equality of speech or the right to be heard. But the Athenians meant something different. Isegoria, to them, was the right to have your views judged on their merits, regardless of your background or speech. Could AI deepfakes revive isegoria in our technofeudal dystopia?
As we grapple with the impossibility of verifying speakers in YouTube videos, might we be compelled to judge the substance of what's being said rather than the speaker? Could big tech, in its quest to debase authenticity, inadvertently empower isegoria? These questions offer a glimmer of hope.
Yet, this hope is fleeting as long as our technofeudal lords retain their advantages. They control the agora, the servers, feeds, and algorithmic communication tools, allowing them to label their speech as authentic while drowning ours in doubt and noise. This results in a digital divine right, where truth is the patented property of power, not isegoria.
Moreover, their ideology is embedded in the machine, enabling them to extract surplus value from proletarians connected to the cloud and cloud rents from vassal capitalists. Their power lies in the tyranny of shareholder value and the privatization of money. Our task is not to beg for verification but to challenge this system politically, socializing cloud capital and dismantling the forces that threaten humanism.
In the meantime, let our digital doppelgangers speak. Perhaps their proliferation will saturate the spectacle, making us focus on the arguments rather than the speaker. This is a paradoxical hope, but in this hall of mirrors, we must grasp at every fragment of possibility.
*Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician, and author. His latest book, 'Raise Your Soul! A Personal History of Resistance', is available on the Guardian Bookshop.
