The Modern Ghost is Digital

On catfishing, online mirages, digital danger, and our Blade Runner hell.

New York City, 2019. A short film by Lars and I is selected to play in a festival in Brooklyn. We’re on a train to New Haven, Connecticut. Lars has a friend there, Jimmy, who will host us for the weekend.

I’m young. I have the naivety that new artists are poisoned by—the film festival goes to my head—I can taste the sweet sensation of recognition. It feels like this is the beginning of fame and fortune, and it feels like I’ll skip all the meticulous hard work.

I’m nervous for our film to be shown in front of an audience. I’m vulnerable. Lars is saying we should be proud. NYC is fading away in the distance. I get a text from a number I don’t know.

Hey! I heard you’re in town :) I’d love to meet up.

I think I’m a star—people I don’t even know are waiting for me to arrive. I ask who this mystery person is. They give a name, Ashley. I don’t know an Ashley. I grow suspicious. This is a scam. Ashley says she likes my videos. I ask which ones. Ashley has real answers. But how could she know I was here? How does she know who I am? She sends a picture of her face. I don’t know it. She says she knows Hannah—a girl I went to high school with, who was in fact living in NYC at the time. My tensions are eased. I say I’m busy but maybe she can come to the screening. She says maybe, she says she’ll talk to me later.

I don’t know what to make of it. Am I an undeniable force of attraction? Or am I being played? I ask Lars. He seems to disingenuously suggest I must be the former. We arrive in New Haven.

Jimmy picks us up from the train station. I ask Jimmy what he thinks. He says that its weird—but also hints that I might just be a stud.

We get to Jimmy’s house. We decide to watch a movie. We’re ten minutes into the movie. Jimmy pauses it. He says he can’t continue on like this in good conscience. He confesses.

He was Ashley.

I was shocked. I felt like a blubbering fool. I didn’t have Jimmy’s number—and Lars and Jimmy, longtime friends, saw an opportunity to play a prank. Lars didn’t think Jimmy would be so cunning in his impersonation of a female peer. Jimmy feels bad that he’s chosen a strange way to introduce himself. My jaw is on the floor. No one likely suspected, myself included, that I’d be so gullible.

In the end, it makes for a good story—and the remainder of my time in Connecticut and New York was fun and memorable—but this incident also illustrates the peculiarity of our time, and the ease of which someone can pretend to be someone else.

Halloween Anxiety

In the spirit of Halloween, which has slowly but surely become my favorite time of year, I wanted to write something spooky—and this subject, the ways our phones and the internet have allowed for devious or odd behavior—seems like a perfect intersection for this publication and the October holiday.

Today, we fear what can happen online, far more than we fear vampires, witches, and werewolves. Ironically, those classic monsters seem to operate more as tales of comfort and entertainment, than ones that strike fear in us. If you’re looking for real fear, you’re better off reading about cutting edge tech.

Many of us are familiar with the deepfake video, where Bill Hader turns into Tom Cruise.

But this video is only the tip of the deepfake iceberg, and only a sample of the sort of digital crisis we’re barreling toward. There are other haunting practices already in place, of which you might not be so familiar.

The New York Times ran an article late last year on Generated.Photos—a website that makes images of fake people, which you can purchase for the purpose of advertisements. These people are unique, AI creations, which allow companies to specially design (or cast) the models for their billboards or banner ads. Why use real people, when you can buy Fake Carl for a one time fee?

More disturbingly though, at least for me, is Lil Miquela—an instagram influencer who doesn’t actually exist. Lil Miquela is a computer generated image, but she posts photos modeling real fashion brands, she shows personality in her captions, and she has—and it enrages me to write this—three million followers.

This glorified cartoon makes me sick to my stomach. Maybe I’m a panicking, doomsdayer whose overreacting to the world’s advancement, and I’m desperately clinging to a romanticized version of what existence should be—but maybe, just maybe, we’ll soon be living in a Blade Runner inspired hell.

Catfish, Take Two

Catfishing, as you may well know, is the term used to describe the online phenomenon in which the person you spoke to online, is not the person you meet in “real” life. Technically, I was catfished by my friend Jimmy. But this mostly uncommon occurrence, usually happens in the realm of online dating.

A person, let’s say his name is Fred, is so insecure that he believes the only way to attract a mate is to pretend to be someone else entirely. Fred drags out the online interaction as long as possible—getting the potential mate, we’ll call Melanie, to invest time, energy, and hopefully feelings into him. Then, if Fred ever summons the courage to meet in person—which rarely happens in this case—Fred hopes that Melanie will accept him for who he actually is, and forgive him for his deception.

This of course, is a disgusting, backward mating dance. And its practice and tactics, have been adopted by those with malevolent intent.

In this instance, I’m referring to scammers. Gone are the days of Persian Princes emailing you with bad grammar, with the promise of cutting you in on their inheritances.

Scammers have been forced to adapt, I suppose, because people today are exposed to so many advertisements and bullshit, that we have a sharp, discerning eye. This is best illustrated on Instagram, where people will be able to detect and skip past an ad quickly, despite how hard advertisements try to emulate regular people’s language, behavior, and posting style.

Recently, I crossed paths with one such scammer:

It started with an instagram message. I didn’t follow this person, so the message was buried as a “request” I had to accept in order to view. It said “I like your article.”

I didn’t respond—mostly because I didn’t see it. Then another one came in a week later. “I think you’re a really good writer”

Okay. I like flattery as much as the next person, yes, but also, I’m trying to build an audience on Modern Anxiety, so I try to make an effort to engage with fans of this publication. I decide to respond.

This profile was named Tara. I was clearly talking to a real person. She asked what the next article was going to be about. I said I’d see what inspiration hits. I asked how she found my writing. She said she found me on Substack’s main page—of which I was recently featured.

She said she went to SDSU, probably because she knew I also went to school in San Diego. She said she was an english major. I checked her profile. She has one follower, and no posts. I grow suspicious. A sorority girl at SDSU with one follower? Yeah right.

She tries to flirt. She wants my number. I say I have a girlfriend and ask if she’s a mystery internet ghost. She says “lol no I swear my account got hacked.” She wants my number. I press her further on whether she is actually a person named Tara. She wants my number. She sends some bullshit generic selfie to try to make her seem real. I’m spooked, weirded out, and I stop responding.

I check back later on Tara’s profile—and Instagram says it doesn’t exist. Tara—or whoever is actually behind Tara—is on to the next fake name and next potential victim.

Where to?

Where is this all headed? All of this, from financial scams to AI influencers, is under the umbrella of the digital ghost.

In my essay on the Power of Fame, I talked about the fact that for the first time in history, everyone (or at least the younger generations) has a “public facing landing page.” In that essay I fretted about how people can make money off fame—and that fame is often talentless or undeserved. But what I didn’t talk about, is that public facing landing pages require no verification.

There is of course, the famous blue badge with the little checkmark that social media companies don on public figures. This ostensibly prevents followers from getting confused or from following imposter accounts. But then again the blue badge isn’t too official. Lil Miquela has one after all.

You don’t need a driver’s license or any proof of identification to make an Instagram or a Twitter—and from the companies’ perspective, that makes sense—it would be bad for business, and it’d take a lot of the fun and lawlessness out of the whole experience. But we have an unprecedented amount of communication and information crisscrossing the planet, and almost none of it can be vetted in real time.

The effect of such, we have already seen. Misinformation. Misconstrued. Misunderstanding. “Fake news.” The line between so-called experts and actual experts, blurred. Trends whose origin matters not. It’s a blizzard of untrustworthy and mind numbing shit.

But I think Bo Burnham said it best, in his song That Funny Feeling, “The backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.”

What are we to do with all this? Should we make more AI influencers? Should we let deepfakes happen? Should we continue to absorb only the information that pleases us and confirms our biases?

If Facebook’s whistle blower and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma isn’t enough to turn the tide then what will be? Should we just wait for Elon’s Neurolink to update our brains so that we can fight algorithmic fire with algorithmic fire?

Are we going to let these ghosts take over the mansion?

Or are we going to prioritize humanity?

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