(Dear Sydette) VaUDEViLLE
Note: I wrote this letter to you about 2 weeks ago, but haven’t been able to get it typed up partially because of my schedule but also because the old Black lady in me doesn’t like to speak bad things into existence. However, since the time I actually wrote you this letter and posting it now there has already been AI social media accounts making fake videos of Black women yelling about being unable to use their EBT cards. So I guess my abundance of caution, cultural superstitions and general weariness of the world is for naught, since the bad things are happening anyway. However I’m making this note to make it clear that the context of when I wrote this letter and when I’m sharing this letter is wildly different in such a short time. Anyway, I’m sorry this is late (as per usual) but at least the good news is that I will hopefully get a response from you soon.
Dear Sydette
It seems silly to start a letter like this but I am tired. I’ve had many conversations with you about the major dissociation that has been keeping me afloat in these wild times but I’ve owed you a letter for weeks now and having only recently pulled myself from the depths of merely existing, I think I finally CAN write to you about something.
But first, thank you for your previous letter. Normally, all my letters from friends I keep in a keepsake box, so I’m going to have to figure out an equivalent for digital letters now too!
I feel like that is a uniquely interesting problem for us Millenials, and maybe late GenXers, having to have storage or space for both analogue and digital things. For us, digital was supposed to be the future, a way for us to be able to keep everything we need with a minimal amount of space, all at our fingertips. However, moving our lives from physical to digital meant that everything about us was being moved, including some of the bad behaviors of some of our white counterparts.
We never met there, but both of us were LiveJournal girlies back in the aughts, and one of the places to be on LiveJournal was for Black people back in the day was the Blackfolks LiveJournal group. I absolutely loved it, as a late teen going into her twenties because it was one of the few online spaces where I felt completely comfortable as a Black girl. We talked about everything there, from news to media, to music to one another. It was proto Black Twitter, pre-short-form posting and mass social media usage, where those of us who dared brave being online would go to digitally cut up. There were memes, there were villains, there was jumbotron after jumbotron after jumbotron of mess, and of course there were imposters.
I don’t need to walk you through the history of appropriation, the history of Blackface or the definition of Black Cool, but I will say that Blackfolks was a case study in both Black Cool and the things non-Black people will do to obtain it. Almost regularly, someone not Black (usually a white man) would assume that you HAD to be Black to join the group and would come up with a negrosona, only to eventually be exposed and mocked for their weird behavior. At the time I thought the exclusive nature of the group (at one point I believe it was invite-only to join because of the usual racists spamming the group) that made “outsiders” act that way, however Twitter quickly proved me wrong. Even in a public space, non-Black people were quick to make fake accounts, pretend to be Black people in order to influence petty arguments, pop culture and even politics (woo, that last one…).
However in hindsight I should have known better which is why right now, I’m stuck on this idea; Vaudeville is about to make a weird comeback.
The internet thrives off of Black Cool, whether folks want to admit it or not. It's why a few years ago, when Black people on TikTok recognized that their dance videos were being copied by white influencers without credit and collectively stopped making dances. There is a long history of Black people making our own art and culture only to have it taken from us and us removed from it. If you look at the history of rock’n’roll music and look at hip-hop in the past 20+ years you can tell where things are going. And if you look at social media and how it has evolved, you can see how it’s falling down a Generative AI hole, which unfortunately makes it easier for it to go down a clear and direct path to Vaudeville.
Full disclosure, I don’t like Generative AI. I’ve seen it called many things, from a plagiarism machine to a lack of consent machine (shout out to you for that one) and I believe both are true. What is plagiarism if not using your work without consent? So I don’t really have much nice to say about these programs, but my feelings aside, we are about to see a LOT of content that in a very vaudevillian way are going to try and mimic Blackness and use AI to try and pass it off as authentic.
I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen one instance of a makeup influencer being exposed for pretending to be a Black woman because he thought he’d get more followers that way. And since AI, like any other technology, takes on the biases of it’s creators, we’re about to see some really racist imagery popping up soon.
I imagine it will be a lot like the rise of fake Black account bots that were on Twitter in the 2010s, except it will be mainly in short form video (TikTok, Reelz, etc) where the filters will be easy to edit. In the beginning, I”m sure people will be called out but the problem is mostly going to come from when the calling out stops and it starts to just be seen as a form of entertainment. If it ever gets to that point, I expect it to get truly vaudevillian, with people pretending to be Black not just to mimic Black Cool, but to define what Blackness is without the input of Black people. But most of all, it’ll be used as a means of ridicule and because people are sold on the idea of AI having the answers, many people will believe these things are true.
And just like with history it’s not going to stop with us. Misinformation and minstrelsy is about to be digitized for any and all marginalized groups all for the low cost of all of our potable water.
So I guess I see now why I was dissociating so hard.
Anyway, let me know what you think. I’ll try and be better about being more consistent with these.
With love,
De Ana
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