In 2023, a Barcelona ad agency named The Clueless launched a model named Aitana Lopez. She has an Instagram and a TikTok, brand deals, and earnings as high as ten thousand euros a month (Lewis 2024). She has also never existed, her face, body, and selfies were all rendered. She was created after The Clueless found human models to be unreliable, often sick, able to miss shoots, and were opinionated. They made a model without those problems and the audience did not care (Meyer 2023).

Why?

Two and a half years later, this is now ordinary. MrBeast releases versions of himself in thirty different languages, mouth-synced, using AI models trained on his own voice (Mohan 2023). K-pop labels run synthetic idols alongside human ones, and purposefully blur which is which (Yeo 2021). Entire Instagram aesthetics that were once subcultures are now diffusion-model presets that anyone with a subscription and a prompt can occupy.

The framing for the Internet is, and has always been, a new global commons; it's an open plaza where strangers can meet across distance and exchange ideas. This, while not incorrect, is not the entire picture. The network is not other people but what those people have decided to curate about themselves. Every post has survived an internal vetting process designed to upkeep a personal image.

The sociological term for this is context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011). Every audience you might address (coworkers, family, partners, ex-partners, strangers) is flattened into one viewer, and the only response is to flatten yourself into a single transmittable form that survives all of them at once. Whatever doesn't flatten doesn't enter the commons and over time that shape gets smoother. Algorithms naturally reward smoothness.

This was already the situation before AI was invented, before the internet took any recognizable form. Erving Goffman wrote about the presentation of self in 1956. His dramaturgical model split social life into frontstage performance and backstage rest, and the frontstage was always a managed impression (Smith 2024). The internet is impression management with no offstage. Every action may be a post, every thought may be content, experiences are not present but future memories. You are always, in some sense, performing, even being the act of being yourself online is a performance of authenticity.

What happens when the frontstage swallows the backstage is depersonalization. Clinically, depersonalization-derealization is a dissociative state in which you feel detached from your own body and thoughts, watching yourself from a removed vantage point, the entire world behind glass (Mayo Clinic 2023). It is now closer to the default state of a generation. Snapchat dysmorphia entered the dermatology literature in 2018, after surgeons started receiving patients who brought in filtered selfies as the goal image and asked to be remade in the shape of an algorithmic correction (Rajanala et al. 2018).

Once a person is mostly visage, that visage can be priced. Guy Debord's argument in The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967, was that capitalism reaches a stage in which the accumulation of capital takes the form of images, and lived experience is replaced by representations of the self (Marcus 2024). He was writing about television, and undershot. The self as a deliverable arrangement is now mainstream enough that the language is considered normal. The platform takes its cut, and the specs of the product are set by the algorithm. If your personality falls short of the threshold you adjust the personality.

Then the AI tools landed. Initially they read as more of the same, better filters, smarter cropping, automated captioning (Vaswani et al. 2017). But the tools kept compounding. Live face-replacement at video quality, voice clones built from thirty seconds of audio (Dorrier 2023), diffusion models that can generate a year's worth of consistent on-brand selfies for a person who took none of them.

30 seconds
of audio is enough to clone a voice.

Real influencers now deepfake themselves into outfits they don't own and locations they never visited. For the first time the visage can detach cleanly from the body that originally produced it. You can be your visage in the technical sense, on a server, with no flesh attached.

This is the final form of the avatar. A profile picture becomes animated, the avatar becomes thicker, more coherent and autonomous, at the end the human is not there at all. The avatar is the entire social object.

Once you can run a person without a person, the question becomes what the person was contributing in the previous configuration. The honest answer is: less than we thought. Most of what circulated as "you" was already the avatar. The body was a render farm for the avatar.

You are your content could read first like a metaphor, I don't think it is. When you die, your account persists, and the people who never met you in person experience no change at all, because the part they were dealing with is alive in the way that matters to them. Yesterday, I used a gif, and when searching for it I was informed the woman it pictured died two years ago.

The Clueless put it straightforwardly in interviews. There was nothing Aitana was missing that the audience actually needed. Her job was to be the visible part of the relationship the audience was going to have with her either way. They removed the part that wasn't required. It was a novelty, then, now anyone with a subscription to Google Gemini or Kling or a thousand other tools can do the same.