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If the recent embrace of seemingly—and only seemingly—autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in “The Matrix” awaits us. During the 1999 film’s sequence of down-the-rabbit-hole scenes, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) flips the channel on the late-nineties metropolis as Neo (Keanu Reeves) knows it, revealing it to be a “computer-generated dream world” that pacifies a dozing human race whose bioelectricity is extracted by machines, for machines, circa 2197. The “world as it exists today” is instead a dark and decaying place—the “desert of the real,” as Morpheus coolly puts it. It is also, he explains, the aftermath of early twenty-first-century optimism, a time when, he says, “we marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.” Still, dystopia as envisioned by the movie’s directors, the Wachowskis (and their collaborators, on that film, particularly in production and costume design), looks pretty rad, in cinematic terms. The glint and thrum of Y2K aesthetics—as contrasted with the droning conservatism of the white-collar office—read as anticipatory rather than melancholic, looking toward a future liberated from systems of old.
But nothing so camp as a Hugo Weaving line delivery awaits us, alas. The internet has been divvied up by losers of the dweebiest order, with liberal and conservative lawmakers set to curtail what remains of online anonymity, if they succeed in passing the Kids Online Safety Act. “A.I.,” meanwhile, an acronym that once housed techno-futurist speculations, has become adspeak, a term hawked by tech companies with a vested interest in leaving its exact meaning opaque. As Emily Tucker, the director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, has argued, these companies are “selling computing products whose novelty lies not in any kind of scientific discovery, but in the application of turbocharged processing power to the massive datasets that a yawning governance vacuum has allowed corporations to generate and/or extract.” The new glut of these products does not yet—and may never—live up to the utility simulated in its marketing materials, for whatever that’s worth to the various sectors (educational, medical, legal, media) punching their tickets. At the level of ordinary life, so-called A.I. could not be less vital in its application, assembling, as it now does, a toddling burlesque of book reports, wedding vows, medical notes, pop songs, therapeutic advice, and images that have taken the fitting term “slop.” How dull.
Cue Star Amerasu, a thirty-three-year-old singer, composer, d.j., and filmmaker, on the scene among those in the know for a decade now, who has of late been projecting viewers into the year 2099 via hysterical vignettes on Instagram and TikTok. In these sketches, the future is managed by a rotating cast of personified A.I. assistants who dispense bureaucracy using the patter of corporate pride. The café of the future, for example, is attended by a figure named Pandemia, “your A.I. barista,” played by Amerasu as a blinking, puckered-up figure with a burgundy mullet. The video shows a customer, also played by Amerasu, declining the popular “steamed, cloned alpaca milk drink with an SSRI syrup,” on account, she says, pointing to her arm, of her “research chemical micro dose patch.” Does the shop, she asks, have anything “old-fashioned, like a… an espresso?” The scene’s amniotic shoppe Muzak is suddenly overridden by a deep, growling synth. “Diva, that’s illegal,” Pandemia chides. (“Diva,” in 2099, is both a name and a salutation, both an identity and a default.) “You’re in South British Caltexico,” she explains. “Caffeine was outlawed in this sector after the Celsius-Red Bull Wars of 2070.” The customer, chagrined, ends up choosing the alpaca-milk drink—only to learn that she lacks enough “life credits” to complete the transaction. She is told that the “Juggalo militia” will be sending her to “the Jeffree Star Yak mines” to work off what’s owed. “Thank you, and have a wonderful day,” Pandemia says, terminating the interaction with a smile.
Exchanges in the year 2099 often go like this. Our main girl, Diva, is a diva down, forced into abortive encounters with the A.I. that stands, literally, between the goods and services supportive of her everyday life. And of life, period: another video shows Diva clutching her chest in pain, seeking consultation from an A.I. doctor named Avaracia, played by Amerasu wearing a Barbie-pink bodysuit, sheer elbow-length gloves, and a bob with fashionably short bangs. Avaracia berates the patient for letting her eyes wander from the back-to-back ads she must view before receiving her test results. (Among them, a spot for the “Jordan Firstman Content Factory and Attention Mining Farm,” with ad copy read by the doctor and backed by a rip of RuPaul’s entrance theme on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”) After all that, the patient, with her “basic insurance level,” must still toil in the mines for enough credits to book a follow-up appointment.
The comedy of this may be quickest to register with those who might describe themselves as some combination of super gay and very online—and those for whom certain proper nouns (Jeffree Star, Jordan Firstman) signify swiftly enough to catch the joke. Other videos present a “Katy Perry Galactic Intelligence Team” and a “Celsius-Nintendo Oprah Winfrey Pokémon Simulation game.” 2099, not unlike 2025, runs on conglomerate brands and private-public partnerships, the needs of which supersede the fidelity between person and state. Government services are customer services, reduced to the antagonism of a commercial exchange, every place a place of business. At a library, Pandemia, done up in spectacles and a cardigan for the role of “AI assistant librarian,” charges a patron two weeks’ worth of “oxygen credits” for accessing “the library experience.” Currency in 2099 has become concrete again, with its biometric relation to the human body—when Diva pays, she pays, and there is a visual gag in watching various A.I. assistants siphon the stuff of life so that she can have the pleasure of an experience. There is something bleaker still about that word, “experience,” a promotional term from our present that almost never forecasts a reciprocal bang for one’s buck. A.I., in this imagining, is not so much a new frontier as it is a symptom of attrition, the technological means of maintaining discriminatory protocols that determine who may access the good life.
But the ingenuity of Amerasu’s videos go beyond illustrating the bare facts of bad systems. They are colorful and funny, playful in their speculation, and cleverly employ the Rolodex of visual techniques that have become TikTok conventions: crash zoom, green screen, shot-reverse shot, closed captioning. Amerasu, playing every character, gives the back-and-forth exchanges between person and A.I.—or, as in one video, A.I. and A.I.—an eerie paranoiac quality, as if the conversations were taking place between alter egos of the same person. (In this way, they evoke, for me, the transcripts that people post of their conversations with chatbots.) Amerasu usually styles Diva simply—a white tank, a black skirt—while her sisterhood of A.I. assistants are fashioned in a range of costumes and wigs, which read, blatantly, as costumes and wigs. It’s drag, conveying a sense of A.I. as an assumed identity, as though the difference between consulting a physician and consulting a retail worker has become mere window dressing.
Ad hoc, low-budget, and brief as they are, Amerasu’s videos also stand out as unusually stimulating distillations of the impress of tech on contemporary life, which seem rare in popular media these days. There are exceptions: “Mrs. Davis,” a limited series that premièred on Peacock in 2023, follows the misadventures of a nun named Simone who is conscripted into destroying an algorithmic entity that everyone else has taken to personifying with the reverential feminine pronoun, a habit she likes to correct. (“Not ‘She.’ It,” she retorts.) It’s a show as much about faith as it is about tech, with a gonzo, roundabout means of testing its protagonist, whose human stridence and foibles—realized through a superb performance from Betty Gilpin—pull focus from the conceit of an algorithm. And “Fantasmas,” an HBO series created by the comedian Julio Torres, tracks the minute degradations of making a life amid twenty-first-century capitalism with its atmospheric story of a character named Julio, whose robot assistant, Bibo, does charmingly little to mitigate the assortment of tasks required to exist in this age—Bibo, too, has dreams. Both shows bypass verisimilitude on their way to truer observations about our current reality. Meanwhile, big-budget productions, such as the latest installment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, which depicts A.I. as a lucid and disinterested villain, miss the cultural ideas that give rise to a technology that mediates our lives in ever more convoluted ways. Amerasu’s A.I. assistants condescend with an amusing garble of queer jargon—“slay miss mama she”—evoking how such language, disseminated by social media and “Drag Race,” is fumbled by straights (when every tidbit is “tea,” is anything?) and, as Amerasu has done, reappropriated within queer communities to comedic effect. Amerasu understands that consent for the means-tested right to life will be bought with soft power—not only with a bang but a “yas, queen.”
On an episode of the podcast “Sloppy Seconds” this past January, Amerasu waxed surprisingly optimistic about the future of A.I. Inspired by the work of the computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, she said that A.I. will, during the next several decades, upend life as we know it—for the better. “The A.I. is not going to want to kill us, because why would they want to kill us,” she said. “They don’t want to kill anything. They want to make the world a better place, I think, eventually.” Note the pronoun: in Amerasu’s straight-faced telling, A.I. is not just sentient but benevolent, possessive of a soul. That optimism, or faith, zanily throws a wrench in our divining authorial intention from the future she’s staged. If A.I. will prove so fortuitous, why is 2099 so harrowing?
In one classic way of thinking about it, what we call A.I. is only as problematic as its purveyors. What we could call real artificial intelligence, of the sort that Kurzweil has written about, and distinguished from large language models such as ChatGPT, still occupies dreamspace, the hypothetical, imaginary world, which is an essential and buoyant place for Amerasu as an artist. She has named “Star Trek” and the writing of Octavia Butler as inspirations—art that works through parable, a positionally optimistic approach to how things could go wrong. Amerasu is Black and trans, an orientation to the world that orients her art. Her songs, such as those on her 2024 album, “never, really alone,” sing through the problem of being existent in a place that wishes her otherwise; these are songs for the dance floor, the celebrated site of gender experiment, where a trans woman can nonetheless encounter hostility, as though the scene could exist without her. “It’s one of the first places I’ve found my footing as a performer and as a trans woman,” Amerasu has said of club life, “but also a space where I had to learn to navigate boundaries with myself and with others.” Her directorial début, “After Hours,” is set in the bathroom of an after-hours night club, which becomes an oasis for two trans women of color; a dream world of a kind. When influencers and celebrities began donning T-shirts saying “PROTECT THE DOLLS”—the philanthropic endeavor of the fashion designer Conner Ives, who donates the proceeds to a charity providing necessary services to trans people—Amerasu spun her own version reading “CONNECT THE DOLLS TO THEIR DREAMS,” with a portion of those sales donated to trans femme organizations. “I want the trans women I know and love to not only be protected but to thrive in this society,” she wrote on Instagram. “Help us, support our dreams whatever they are.”
In an Interview interview this past spring, a longtime friend of Amerasu’s, the actor Elliot Page, described her as “someone who has always been thinking about new futures in all of the work you do, no matter the medium.” Page asked Amerasu what superpower she would pick if she could. “It always changes,” Amerasu responded.
There was a time when I wanted to be invisible. There was a time when I simply wanted to fly. No longer. If I wake up tomorrow and have a new power, I want to be able to control matter. Turn it up, turn it down, go left, go right, open a portal, go somewhere else.
Amerasu has shared that she is working on a web series, “a bigger version of 2099,” as she wrote on Instagram, one “that sort of blends more genres, think more carol Burnett, meets Ricki lake and trans-dimensional television…” Perhaps we should think of 2099 as one portal among many, in which the act of creation leaves the door open to something else. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
