# Stimulacra, a vignette On 30th January 2023, Twitch streamer **Atrioc** was doing his usual thing. Making content for the masses, chilling on his computer. But as he was alt-tab-ing through his windows, for just an instance, a thumbnail preview came on screen. Now, nothing on the internet is ever truly gone, and an instance on a video recording lives indefinitely on the hard drives of the video overlords. And what was the preview of? Nothing less than deepfake porn of fellow streamer, and current girlfriend of one of Atrioc's streamer friends, *QTCinderella*. It didn't take long for the half second video turned image to spread like wildfire through the respective streaming communities, and then to spill over into the rest of the gossip internet. Not long after Atroic issues the following apology with his wife standing by in the background to show her support(?): Not show in this clip (unfortunately not findable atm), is the beginning, where he takes time to let people get notified that he is streaming and he allows for enough viewers to log on for him to begin. Atrioc is obviously filled with remorse. He has done something truly terrible. Following the news *QTCinderella* reacted in kind, posting the following tweet: Now you may take a second to pause and ask "who the fuck are these people?" and to answer you, I don't really know. I only know about them because this incident spilled over onto my side of the internet because it was just that big. This may be the furthest reach either of these two "creators" ever have. But why? *Being seen “naked” against your will should NOT BE A PART OF THIS JOB.* The quotes here are telling, but not descriptive. We know that she is not really naked in these videos, but we also don't fully recoil when she spins it this way. For some reason both feel true. I have seen people argue that since it is her face, she has the right to what can be done with it. Legally, to an extent that is true, but as part of streaming on twitch you release your image to the public as part of the user agreement. In many ways, Twitch owns the video representation of her face more than she does. # This is Not a Woman > The Treachery of Images is a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René > Magritte. It is also known as This Is Not a Pipe. ![](img/not_a_pipe.jpg) > "The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my > pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my > picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!" -René Magritte A picture may be worth a thousand words, but both representations aren't the thing in and of themselves. Traditions have warned of us the power of images and their potential folly. The Buddhist proverb warns, "do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon". Exodus tells us "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them." Now both of the injunctions don't necessarily condemn the representation or, image in and of itself, it just demands that the proper order be preserved, that the image does not supersede the thing it represents. ## Simulacra So what happens when we depart from the ancient wisdom? What happens when we allow the value we place on the image to dominate the thing is supposedly represents? > Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 > philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean > Baudrillard, in which the author seeks to examine the relationships between > reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of > culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence. > ... > Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages > [referred to as the procession of simulacra]: > > The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and may even be > correct to believe, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), > this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". > > The second stage is perversion of reality, where we come to believe the sign to > be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil > appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not > faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure > reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. > > The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends > to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim > to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary > images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. > Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra > where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the > (increasingly) hermetic truth. > > The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship > to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim > to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such > claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no > longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of > consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are > expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to > reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as > oversentimental. To put this into more concrete terms, let us take the situation at hand and walk through each of these steps. We can understand Blaire and her creation, *QTCinderella*, one stage at a time. Step one is a faithful representation that is *a reflection of a profound reality*: ![](img/step_1.jpg) Just a picture with grandma as a child, pure and innocent. Not trying to lead the audience on. Not trying to make them feel anything in particular, just capturing a moment, capturing a truth to be enjoyed in the future as a wholesome exercise of remembering where you come from. The simplicity of childhood. The age of the photograph only lends itself further to this point of view. Photographs, before they were nearly free to create, took on an importance, and mastery of photographic images was reserved for few professionals and these are obviously not staged or edited. Step two is a perversion of reality, and unfaithful copy. *An image that is designed to mislead*: ![](img/step_2.png) The second stage is one we are all no doubt guilty of. The online persona, the good angle selfies, the misleading dating profile. Here we see a group picture of girls with a filter on it, and it hardly registers. We have been mislead by images enough to subconsciously adjust what we think the true reality is underneath them. The 10 lbs we mentally add to our tinder date beforehand. This stage is enabled by the introduction of digital cameras and the emergence of social media. Now we have the means to create images ad infinitum, and the social feedback to guide their development. We also have the tools to edit images available to the masses and a cultural arms race of beauty to dump gasoline to the fire. Step three masks the absence of a profound reality. *These are images designed to imply the existence of something that doesn't exists.* Characters in media are the most obvious form of this. Over recent years fandom and fantasy has become pervasive in American culture. Your favorite super hero, or your waifu, or buzzfeed assigned Disney princess. You may argue that these representations can point some higher truth and that seems to go against the meaning of the 3rd step, and while that might be true for some of these characters it is certainly not for others. Streamers are perhaps so of the most insidious forms the the third stage in the procession of simulacra. The low production value and large content output provide the experiential basis of authenticity, but the profit motive twists things ever so slightly. Say what you will about the validity of *QTCinderella*'s story, the person implied by the way the story is told does not exist, and this representation is trying to convince you it does. Story she tells is all to aware of the audience. While this behavior isn't inherently bad or artificial, it takes on a new power when amplified to a large audience that is regularly consuming a dramatized personality *product*. This stage in the procession has spread in the era of **content**, easily produced and disseminated streaming video. From the content, personas are constructed. These personas are reinforced by viewer feedback and refined for their target market. Make no mistake, **EVERY** internet personality belongs to the third step in the procession of simulacra. Step 4 is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. *This image doesn't even claim to be real and has no attempt to do so. It only has meaning relative to other representation.* ![](img/step_4a.png) ![](img/step_4b.png) Deep fakes are created from a massive amount of video data. First you need to train models on what a face is, then you need to be able to locate a face in a video, then you need to have a computer understand what another face would be like in all the contexts of the deep fake video from other non-deep fake video, then you need to put the new face on the other body in every frame of the video. Never before has this been possible, due to the lack of training data, the lack of hours and hours of video to use for the ground breaking algorithms. This technology of deep fake creation can also only be applied to faces that have a sufficient amount of video training data available for use in said algorithms. Perhaps it is calloused to call it a Faustian bargain, but at any time she could have turned the camera off. It was the hours and hours of publicly available video that makes this whole process even possible. Her hand in the third step of the procession of simulacra snowballed into the fourth. ![](img/not_a_woman.jpg) *This is not a woman*. This is a misleading representation of a woman implying the existence of someone that isn't real, reacting to an algorithmic creation that she had a hand in birthing, that is furthering her influence by amplifying the reach of her brand through a public and emotion reaction. ... Or is it? Perhaps it has finally hit her. Maybe she sees now that is wasn't what she bargained for. Her public image was never meant to go past step 2 of the process, fine, she would like to present her best self, but she never meant to create a monster that would eventually devour her! The return of the consequence of reality the way those are felt on the real person being represented have come to bear. *QTCinderella* has since taken down her apology video, but does still stream from time to time. We won't every really know which is true. Does *QTCinderella* revel in her creation or does Frankenstein desire the death of her monster; is she even capable of killing it at this point? I doubt that she knows either, but I do believe the reason this *happening* had such far reach was the novelty of it. This is far from the last time simulacra collide in the public sphere like this, but it is perhaps the beginning of a more self aware audience weighing in on what exactly this means for all of us.