The New Yorker:

In a series of comic videos set in 2099, the multitalented artist imagines our petty future.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

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.

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