Transparency (2022)
REBECCA MELMAN
We clamor for the right to opacity.
- Édouard Glissant, “Poetics of Relation”, 1928
“We need first to understand that the human form- including human desire and all its external representations - may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthuman”
- Ihab Hassan, 1977
From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
person (n.)
c. 1200, persoun, "an individual, a human being," from Old French persone "human being, anyone, person" (12c., Modern French personne) and directly from Latin persona "human being, person, personage; a part in a drama, assumed character," originally "a mask, a false face," such as those of wood or clay, covering the whole head, worn by the actors in later Roman theater. OED offers the general 19c. explanation of persona as "related to" Latin personare "to sound through" (i.e. the mask as something spoken through and perhaps amplifying the voice), "but the long o makes a difficulty ...." Klein and Barnhart say it is possibly borrowed from Etruscan phersu "mask."
To be transparent, in its most literal sense, is to be seen through. It also might infer truth, honesty or authenticity. The optimist in me would like to think that most people would like to live truthly, honestly, and authentically. Yet given the chaos ever present in life, we often fail in the virtuous task of being transparent. Such is the often undecipherable nature of humanity. As the French electronic duo Daft Punk put it, “We are human after all, Flesh uncovered after all.”
Person = persona = mask. We navigate life through a mask, IRL and online. As our IRL selves integrate with our online selves, is there a differentiation of the two? The internet, especially social media, gives us the chance to be anonymous. It also allows us to share our likeness, our selves and our lives endlessly. Individuals become “brands'' and must maintain said brands in order to retain social capital. To depict a life that we desire, we curate our feeds with the “right” image, or the “right” opinion. The filter is not just present in the images we post, but also in how we post.
So we got sick of it. And now we want transparency. We want celebrities and influencers to be transparent about their plastic surgeries, their diets, their exercise routines, and even their daily lives (see endless “day-in-the-life” and “what I eat in a day” vlogs). On Instagram and Twitter, friends post political infographics shared by their friends. Either way, it boils down to being “transparent,” or attempts of authenticity. The trials of being transparent become even more arduous when the “real” and the “virtual” blend into an amorphous blob of content and information.
In a recent article in Spike Art Magazine, Sam Kriss looks at the most recent Batman movie as an unintentional allegory of the bizarre world in which we find ourselves—an Age of Irony—in which the attempts at seriousness, or authenticity, have failed. He writes, with cynical accuracy:
“The more serious you try to be, the more ridiculous you will become. Maybe we simply don’t know how to wear a straight face anymore: maybe this stupid Batman is a mirror of ourselves. We respond to a major war in Eastern Europe by posting blue and yellow emojis. We respond to persistent racial inequality by capitalizing a B and harassing celebrity chefs. We measure the ethical response to the cruelties of the world in terms of who’s making the right kind of posts. All possibilities in the twenty-first century seem basically facile and silly, and somehow deeply inappropriate. All activity is a performance. Every political crisis is just a pretext to indulge in some kind of dressing up.”
We are in an Age of Irony. The Whitney Museum, which has endured controversies including but not limited to: a tear-gas manufacturing board member (who stepped down after significant protests), acquiring art (that was donated by artists who were unaware their art would be sold to the museum) for discounted prices sold at a fundraiser for Black mutual aid organizations, and most recently, a worker’s union protest. The 2022 Whitney Biennial included the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s 06.01.2020 18.30 installation, a 4-D cinematic restaging of a chaotic and frightening Black Lives Matter protest that occured 6 days after the murder of George Floyd. In this piece, the viewer is blasted with fans, recreating the helicopters that hovered above the mobilized citizens, while they watch video footage of protesters being tear-gassed and beaten by the National Guard. We are watching a potential nuclear WW3 unfold before our eyes. We see dead bodies among bombed-out cities, towns and villages on our news outlets, mostly via videos taken on cell phones. A 20-year-old Ukrainian photographer, Valeria Shashenok is making Tik-Toks soaked in dark humor, as an attempt to show the world what is happening to her and her country as it is inhumanely being attacked by Russia. Her videos are a typical, particular style of Tik-Toks, in which users process their traumas, mental and physical illnesses, and other harrowing life experiences through this memetic, ironic, silly, and “post”-post-modernist humor. Corporations make gay Pride floats and European governments tweet their support for Ukraine while still purchasing billions of dollars worth of Russian oil.
With all this exposure to violence, we become motivated and desensitized all at once. We become horses wearing fly masks. We see and we hear as normal, but are preserved from the flies buzzing around us. We move forward, but through a protective veil of irony. As we learn more about climate change and unethical labor practices, we want companies to be transparent about their production processes. We want to know what our data is used for; we demand data-transparency. Yet we order from Amazon, we drink from plastic cups and we participate in the data cycle. As it is said that there is “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” it could also be said that there is no true transparency under capitalism. And as long as a majority of the population remains distanced from the complicated processes of data trade, the ins and outs of politics, or even the inner dialogue of our neighbor, true transparency will be hard to achieve.
Between the desire to be known, heard, and listened to, yet under-cover, anonymous and private, where can transparency be found? What happens to the personas we construct in creating a public-facing self? Do they become transparent? Is the mask a means for transparency? Or is it a tool for protection?
In Judeo-Christian religion, God is transparent; God is not seen as a “thing in itself” but rather as a figure of light and life. We create a persona for God, to solidify an abstract concept. In Christianity, a believer is asked to be “transparent” when “in front of God.” Kanye West's recent affinity for masks and facial coverings could be interpreted as an attempt to become transparent. Known to believe in his own prophetic influence, he is publically redefining himself as a divine being, to share the light of God and Jesus’ word through his art (and sometimes via unhinged IG posts). In the past, his public authenticity has landed him in trouble. So why not become “anonymous”?
The internet has given us a dangerous gift of namelessness and facelessness. The combination is a double edged sword. On one hand, as Legacy Russell explains in depth in her book Glitch Feminism, “...the digital becomes a catalyst to a variance of serfdom. With each of us ‘invisible men,’ we remain responsible for manifesting our own reflections, and through today’s Internet, we can find ways to hold those mirrors up for one another.” It allows users to create identities for themselves, ask questions they might not want to ask publicly, create communities and establish solidarity across borders that help subvert oppressive systems, via the “glitch.” But there is a dark side of glitch. Extremes are dangerous, especially when anonymity is involved. A prominent example of this is QAnon. In the newest installment of The Batman, The Riddler is a serial killer with an anonymous online presence. He mobilized his militia of armed and masked followers via livestreams and online forums to destroy Gotham City. And only to further mirror our absurd reality, a masked billionaire (Batman) is the savior of the city. Superhero movies aside, the risks of anonymity are valid and dangerous. The issue, however, is not the mask. The concern here lies in the person behind the screen. Underneath the masks of both The Riddler and the Batman, are real people, with real feelings, real desires, real psychological needs. In Legacy Russell’s ideal internet, one can discover the “variance of selfdom,” necessary to “hold mirrors up for one another.” There will always be bad people in this world, but perhaps we can utilize the power of digital anonymity to create an environment in which we can listen to and learn from each other; real people with real feelings.
Meanwhile, social media has produced the attention economy, one in which the face and image reigns king. Influencer culture’s prevalence in advertising has resulted in an economic structure that relies on the persona to sell a product, blurring the lines of what is really being sold: the person or the product. Photography has shifted, with the help of technology, from portraying the real world to creating a new one. The selfie becomes the symbol. The symbol becomes real. The real permeates. Facetune (free) makes Photoshop (paid) accessible to the masses, to alter their faces and bodies into more acceptable (beauty standards) forms. Face Swap apps (fun and silly!) turn Deep Fakes (“scary” Machine Learning!) into harmless ways to play with selfies. CGI, once strictly used in movies and television, has become an attainable tool with free softwares to create fake influencers such as Lil’ Miquela. “Born” in 2016, Lil Miquela is still “hired” by countless brands and, as of April 2022, has an Instagram following of three million. Her “net worth” is estimated to be sixteen million dollars. Fake or not, people connected to the pixelated model. She “has'' human friends and boyfriends. We feel like we know who she is; she is her mask. In a way, Lil’ Miquela is not so different from the world’s most famous influencer, Kim Kardashian. The Royal Family of celebrity, the Kardashians are just an example of the irrefutable existence of parasocial relationships. They have billions of social media followers, a reality show that follows their every move, a multi-hyphenate business empire, and are subject to equal amounts of love and hate. We know that they are personaes, made up and fabricated, yet just as we do with Lil’ Miquela, we feel like we know who they are. We see the birth and growth of the sisters’ children, some were even televised. They are masters of the persona in that they somehow are able to maintain a brand, yet change their masks as the surrounding culture changes. Kim especially; We’ve seen Kim’s transformation from a buxom assistant to celebrities to a mother, lawyer and business woman. She reinvents herself in front of us, and for the most part, we accept it. For example, at the 2021 Met Gala, themed “American Independence,” Kim arrived completely concealed by an all black, head to toe bodysuit from Balenciaga. The outfit was an executive decision made by Balenciaga’s creative director, Demna Gvasalia, which she apparently “fought against.” Despite her objections, the look was a brilliant allegory, among others, for her magical ability to be known, yet unknown. The writer, artist and curator Ruby Justice Thelot posited that Kim’s look was the best representation of the “quintessential American characteristic, her Individual Freedom,” or the right to anonymity. Don’t worry, the Kardashians are not going to disappear, but what is culture if it is not to be interpreted? We do not actually know who these celebrities and influencers are, but who they present themselves to be. And just like that of any person besides ourselves, we might never know the machinations of their mind, their needs, their feelings, their desires.
In a corner of the internet, a community of untethered figures has sprouted. These figures are, for lack of a better term, content creators who express themselves primarily through blogs, Tweets, undercover meme accounts and podcasts. One of these characters is the online entity, Angelicism01, who primarily publishes their musings via a Substack blog that was once public, and up until very recently, is “invite only.” Angelicism01 is a mysterious writer who pontificates on topics such as politics, the “culture war”, NFTs, God, NYC downtown subcultures and philosophy. At once cohesive and undecipherable, Angelicism01 holds a strong hold on its followers. Look up “angelicism01” on Twitter and countless tweets come up. Most of the tweets are inquiries into the writer’s identity, quotations posted in admiration and declarations of Angelicism01’s intellectual importance. The Ion Pack, an Instagram account turned podcast, run by an anonymous self proclaimed “Instagram troll of the downtown film world.” The podcast is hosted by two individuals who interview a variety of public figures. The podcasts are presented as videos, in which we watch and listen to the interviewee basically just hang out with the off camera, voice distorted Ion Pack. Once again, we are presented with irony—two anonymous figures creating content by way of the likeness of someone else’s persona. Of course, both Angelicism01 and the Ion Pack have their respective brands, but their hidden identities keep them untethered from the consequences of what would happen if they “changed'' their brand. This is parallel to Kim Kardashian’s transformative abilities. In her case, however, it is her level of celebrity that allows her to remain unattached.
Angelicism01 wrote, “The key contribution of angelicism01 is not artistic anonymity but artistic anonymity as a delivery system for extinction qua extinction into the cultural algorithm.” A main proponent of today’s cultural algorithm is the brand of self. It feeds into our desire to be heard and to be seen. Perhaps Angelicism01’s anonymity, Kanye’s masking, Kim’s contradictory malleability are all objections, in their own ways, to the promulgation of the branded self. They are all on their way to becoming transparent.
There is a Big Bang of sorts occuring, as the “real” and the “virtual” collide and create a new way of life. The internet has exposed us to countless new ways of relating. Late capitalism has left us confused and unsure of the future. How do we find truth in this world? It may be that, eventually, we will all live in VR, or Elon Musk will succeed in developing a functional Neuralink, but it seems like we are already entering a post-human world. Is this post-humanism? The post-human who yearns for transparency via anonymity. If to be a person is to be a human being, is a post-human post-persona? Following this logic (not strongly held by actual logical thought, but bear with me here), the post-human person is post-mask? If we all wear a mask, will we still be wearing masks, floating through the world without a face and a name? Will this anonymity permit us the freedom to be transparent?