Ostensible Projected Forms

How an Obscure Short Story by David Foster Wallace Almost Predicted Our Imminent Deepfakes Hellscape

by Owen Morawitz

Throughout much of its history as a form of genre storytelling, science fiction has consistently explored the tensions and contours that exist between the possibility of radical futures and the power of utopian imagination. Using tried-and-true tools like character exposition and narrative world-building, a screenwriter, director, or author takes it upon themselves to shape a new world into being, fleshing out the physical, cultural, and political characteristics of their fictional reality.

However, the rapid pace of technological innovation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has ensured that these predictions of possible future worlds are often quickly dated by very real developments in the present.

In the world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Phillip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, flying cars and sentient synthetic life are contrasted with pay phones and MS-DOS computer interfaces in the megacity Los Angeles of 2019. Back to the Future Part II (1989), written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, transports its protagonists to a then-distant 2015 filled with “Mr. Fusion” energy converters, hoverboards, dehydrated Pizza Hut, and holographic advertisements, alongside anachronisms like fax machines and newspapers. Meanwhile, James Cameron and William Wisher’s script for Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) took chances on a near-future 1997 where hyper-aware artificial intelligence is given control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and ushers in an age of machine supremacy forged through atomic hellfire—a far cry from the eventual use of unmanned drones in the Forever Wars of the 2000s and the defense investment in AI research that followed.

The best examples of sci-fi tech coming to fruition in real life often seem wholly unintentional or the product of mere coincidence.  

All of this underlies the unfortunate catch-22 that results from attempts at science fiction prophecy: prediction can only be vindicated in retrospect. The best examples of sci-fi tech coming to fruition in real life often seem wholly unintentional or, perhaps most curiously, the product of mere coincidence.

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Which brings us to an obscure short story by the acclaimed (yet also deeply troubled) author David Foster Wallace. In his short fiction collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Wallace includes a brief five-page story entitled “Datum Centurio,” which acts as an etymological entry from the far-flung future of 2096.

This excerpt from an overly-wordy fictional dictionary—“Leckie & Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage”—begins by expounding on the differences between the informal and vulgar uses of the word ‘date.’ The former, we are told, describes the process of “voluntarily submitting one’s nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neurogenetic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface,” while the latter defines the “creation and/or use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array… for the purposes of Simulated Genital Interface… to which proper names and various sexual and/or personality characteristics are sometimes applied by overwrought male users.”

In a contextual note labelled “USAGE/HISTORICAL,” the fictional Leckie & Webster of the text explain that the point of divergence in definition, association, and colloquial usage of ‘date’ occurred in the mid-2000s, with the “A.D. 2006 patent and 2008 commercial introduction of Digitally Manipulable Video” in which “video pornography could be home-edited to allow the simulated introduction of the viewer into filmed images of explicit genital interface.”

The note continues by adding that, subject a 2009 civil action, “the availability to U.S. male consumers of wholly depersonalized simulacra of genital interface could reasonably be expected to palliate the 86.5% semioemotional conflict that attended genuine interpersonal dating,” an example of technology “which has all but forced today’s modificatory split into the bivocal ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ denotations for date.”

While Wallace’s brief foray into sci-fi storytelling functions as an obvious postmodern parody of twentieth-century dating conventions, the prescience and accuracy of this firmly tongue-in-cheek observation from the neoliberal heart of the late-90s and supposed ‘End of History’ is particularly striking. As it turns out, we now live in an age of “Digitally Manipulable Video,” where one of the primary ethical conundrums of the 2020s revolves around the proliferation and potentially nefarious application of Deepfakes.

“Datum Centurio” is described as a one-way transaction, with the viewer simulating their own insertion into video of “explicit genital interface.”  

According to Nina Schick, author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse (2020), the taxonomy is nowhere near as well-defined or articulate as Leckie & Webster’s futuristic lexicon would have you believe. Deepfakes—a portmanteau of ‘fake’ and ‘deep learning’—are a form of synthetic media: that is, images, audio, and video that are “either manipulated or wholly generated by AI.” Popular everyday examples of old-school synthetic media include advertising models having blemishes airbrushed away in Photoshop, or teenagers adding cat ears and Vin Diesel hugs through Instagram and Snapchat filters.

However, with the introduction of powerful AI to the equation, the creation of advanced synthetic media is already having huge implications on how online content is produced and how we interpret the world around us. Examples range from the amusing and harmless, such as comedian and director Jordan Peele’s Obama PSA or the Trump-mocking web series Sassy Justice from South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, to the cruel and concerning, like the “cheapfake” that purported to show a confused or possibly ill Nancy Pelosi with slurred, muddled speech.

When combined with malicious or nefarious intent to deceive or harm others, deepfakes can be easily used for mis- and disinformation purposes, becoming part of a looming existential crisis that Schick describes as “monumental and unprecedented.” It is but one more element, Schick writes, of our imminent “fucked-up dystopia.”

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Despite including specific key references to “DYSPHORIA, HYPERORGASMIC,” “SYNDROME, NARCISSISTIC GRATIFICATION OVERLOAD,” and “SOLIPSISM, TECHNOSEXUAL,” the fictional use of “Digitally Manipulable Video” in “Datum Centurio” is described as a one-way transaction, with the viewer simulating their own insertion into video of “explicit genital interface,” i.e. porn. But for deepfakes, the real-world applications move decidedly in the opposite direction—often with far more sinister and destructive consequences.

As a culture, we’ve come to understand ‘revenge porn’ as encompassing the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent. In most cases, the illegality of revenge porn centers on the distribution aspect rather than its creation—the underlying assumption here being that the persons involved in the sex act were at least known to each other during their interaction and had consented to the creation of the image or video in question (unless procured through illegal means like theft or blackmail).

In 2017, Motherboard broke the news about content that had surfaced on r/deepfakes, detailing how machine deep-learning algorithms were being utilized to super-impose the faces of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza, Emma Watson, and Gal Gadot into hardcore pornography without their consent. Eventually, this technology would make its way into heavily commodified applications like Faceswap and Deepnude, often popping up in new guises just as quickly as they were reported and removed. Platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and PornHub moved to publicly ban deepfakes, while lawmakers in both Australia and the U.S. proposed legislative changes to ban non-consensual deepfakes.

“Datum Centurio” ends by noting that the rise of “Digitally Manipulable Video” generated a shift in the sexual zeitgeist.  

Right now, however, deepfakes are still ruining the lives of women. As Rolling Stone reported just last year, not even underage Tik Tok stars are safe. “While the deepfake porn phenomenon has so far been almost exclusively targeted at women,” Schick explains, “homosexual deepfake porn could, for example, cost someone their life or liberty in certain parts of the world.” 

The grim reality is this: soon, anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone will be able to generate realistic deepfake porn of virtually anyone else—gender be damned.

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This part, at least, Wallace got exactly right. “Datum Centurio” ends by noting that the rise of “Digitally Manipulable Video” in the early 2000s generated a cultural shift in the gender-specific sexual zeitgeist: “Most contemporary-usage authorities observe a marked shift, for 21C males, in the ‘romantic’ or ‘emotional’ connotations of date³…, affective connotations which, for most males, have now been removed altogether.”

It’s clear now that the radical futures and utopian imagination of sci-fi storytelling cut both ways. Deepfakes didn’t create our imminent “fucked-up dystopia,” but they’re certainly adding to it, helping to shape a new world where it’s profoundly easier to be a total creep, stay completely anonymous, and ruin someone’s life in the process.

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