It is not for nothing that simulation is the first term in Donna Haraway’s outline of informatics of domination. Now we are at the beginning of something new, at the start of an even deadlier game. If the threat of simulation was that it not only eclipsed the real but that it was also prescriptive and performative, that it could actualize the virtual, how are we to think about so-termed deepfakes—not simply the production of synthetic video, as with revenge porn, or Obama speaking the words of Jordan Peele, but the generation of images of people who do not exist? Generative language models, generative adversarial networks: as these machine learning systems become “better” and scale up, what new alliances will they compel, and with what consequences? How, in other words, might we think about a politics of and for the moment of generation?
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