This Isn’t the Future We Asked For: Deepfakes and Digital Colonization

Plus: Stop Congress from giving away our future. For real.

Hey friends,

We’ve made it through another week of the collapse of the world we’ve known and the construction of the one yet to be decided. In our most recent episode, I get very personal with

Rich Roll

, with whom we launched this entire Life With Machines journey. He was victimized by people using A.I. to profit off his name and likeness fraudulently, and that same future is not only likely but being actively pursued by major tech platforms. In this edition of the newsletter, I offer my most rant-y take yet along with some calls to action to stop the U.S. Congress from doing a very stupid thing. If you’re anti-stupid, keep reading and share!

Also, watch the full episode here. It’s quite good and I made a creepy deepfake of myself just to see how hard (or easy actually) it is:

You can also listen on your favorite podcast platform. This is an Apple Podcast link obviously, so there may be some hints about my favorite platform in that choice.

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And speaking of support, thank you Notion for sponsoring this episode. This is a use of A.I. that doesn’t tear at the fabric of reality itself woohoo!

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Baratunde’s Take. Buckle up.

Baratunde and Rich on the Life With Machines set

Rich got rolled. Sorry, hard to avoid puns and I need any amount of entertainment these trying times can offer up. I want to approach this week’s newsletter differently because I’ve been activated by this deepfake moment differently.

ICYMI, Rich and Arielle Lorre were both deepfaked in a bullshit social clip to promote a real skincare product. What happened to Rich wasn’t just unsettling because I know and respect the man. Yes, I have experienced his care for authentic human conversation as a guest on his show and a conversation partner at SXSW. But this struck deeper. Many of us have been raising flags about the direction of tech for a long time, but not enough has changed, and we are running out of time. The stakes are higher now, the manipulation more seamless, the consequences more invisible.

Yes “the technology” is moving fast, but at every opportunity I want to choose better, clearer, more accurate language. This is power moving recklessly, and to get even more clear: certain people are choosing to wield power, through technology, to affect all of us, and not in a good way. (Thanks to Dr. Rumman Chowdhury for reminding us that “A.I. is not stealing jobs. People are.”) This is about incentives being so misaligned that companies like Meta are happy to let fake versions of us roam free—as long as someone’s making money. And it sure as hell isn’t us.

The Business Model is Exploitation

The part of Rich’s experience that feels most important is when Meta told him that the obviously fraudulent deepfake did not violate their community standards. Translation? “Go f*ck yourself.” Meta is siding with bots over humans, because the bots generate profit. That’s the game now, and it’s always been.

This isn’t a new playbook. It’s exploitation—an ancient way of doing business dressed up in tech-speak and pushed through algorithms. Extract from Earth. Extract from people. Now? Extract from the very idea of you. I called it “the colonization of us” for a reason. That’s what this is. Not metaphorically. Not theoretically. But functionally, economically, and even spiritually.

They’re mining our likenesses, our voices, our photos, and turning them into content machines that never sleep. These companies don’t need a real version of me looking at a real tree or talking to a real human—they just need a virtual Baratunde staring at a virtual forest hanging out with virtual friends. Same ad revenue, less mess. If we all consent to create an uber-being out of our activity, and if we collectively decide how to use that resource and how to distribute the benefits, that’s one thing. But this is not that. This is a different thing.

Digital Fracking

The worst part of what’s happening with A.I. is fracking, but for people instead of oil. It’s identity-mining. They’re drilling deeper into the human experience to extract value—every glance, every thought, every memory turned into data they can sell. They see Black Mirror as a business plan. The future for them, in this version of capitalism, requires growth. And now that they’ve strip-mined the physical world, they are going to create a New World in digital, to do the same. That digital New World could be a thousand times the size of the one we inhabit now. Imagine 500 Baratundes talking to 500 versions of you, all monitored, all monetized.

They have a word for this: innovation.

It feels familiar, doesn’t it? The kind of economic expansion that early colonizers must’ve felt arriving in the so-called New World of the Americas. When the land was “empty,” and the people already here? They didn’t count. Neither did the ones kidnapped and forced to work it. Stolen land and stolen people. You know the story (unless your state has outlawed teaching it).

We’re doing it again. Dehumanization as an intentional strategy of economic growth. We look at humans and see data to extract. Those doing the exploitation have to dehumanize themselves, severing their connection to what’s right in order to pursue what’s profitable. And we are invoking a new population of beings that aren’t human and can’t resist (at least not yet). This is all in service of infinite growth. All in service of data flows to be monetized.

The Organized Crime of Innovation

Mark Zuckerberg got on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast recently and talked about the crisis of loneliness. He said:

There's the stat that I always think is crazy. The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something.

So much wrong. First, seeing friendship and human connection as a matter of supply and demand reveals just how much market-based thinking has colonized his own mind and many of ours as well. Second, this is so very rich coming from the man who did more than most to destroy the meaning of the world “friend” with his Facebook product. That platform distorted and flattened all human connection into a single on/off status: friends or not friends. Whether it’s your boss or a long lost classmate from kindergarten or your spouse or someone you met at an event that one time… It’s binary. It’s digital thinking and limitation applied to an analog world where true relationality exists on a spectrum. Plus there’s the fracturing of those human connections with algorithms that sort and divide us based on propensity to engage or click or buy rather than to empathize and feel. How many relatives have you stopped talking to because of social media? How many friends have you lost over online posts? Where’s that metric in the quarterly reports?

So the guy who broke real friendship wants to offer up fake friends as the solution. Because he can sell them to you. How very organized crime of him. You break the store window, then sell protection to the owners. Create the illness, then sell the cure. Monetize the loneliness you helped cause. It’s brilliant. It’s terrifying. It should be criminal. It at least should be just one option among many in a competitive landscape. But monopolies tend toward organized crime-like behavior, so here we are.

And while we’re at it, let’s export all this AI infrastructure to Saudi Arabia. Because if you’re going to build the next phase of human civilization, why not build it in a place that’s famously chill about labor rights, free speech, and democracy?

We Can’t Let This Slide

Look, this isn’t just about Mark Zuckerberg. This is about the system that allows—rewards—this kind of behavior. It’s about a government so out of touch that it might pass legislation preventing states from regulating AI. Let me expand briefly. In the mega-bill making its way through Congress right now, Republicans have inserted a measure to prevent states from enforcing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” for 10 years! That’s not innovation. That’s abdication.

In 10 years, it will be too late to meaningfully affect our trajectory with this technology. And that’s why I’m raising the alarm. Also if you are into state’s rights, or just… rights at all, you can work to oppose that nonsense rule. Call. Write. Tell your friends. Seriously.

Because this future—where bots replace people, where virtual selves outcompete real ones, where value is extracted from a hologram of you—is not inevitable. But it is possible. And it’s coming fast. We don’t have decades, and we cannot afford to repeat our past in this way. We must do better. How we choose to use this emerging power is a matter for all of us to decide. That’s literally why we are making Life With Machines, to ask the hard questions and point the way toward a better future.

Thank you to Rich for sharing your story. Thank you to all the folks working in opposition to this trajectory and creating a more beautiful world. Let’s lift them up. Let’s build something different.

—Baratunde

Life With BLAIR

We had BLAIR spin up a mock ad skewering tech bros and their calls to abolish IP law. BLAIR did not hold back.

Check it out here.

Team Recommendations

Want to go deeper? Here are some fresh picks inspired by this episode:

• Rich Roll’s personal account of being targeted by a deepfake scam. Beyond the personal impact, the piece raises broader concerns about the preparedness of legal and technological systems to address such threats, highlighting the urgent need for robust safeguards against AI-driven identity manipulation

• This award-winning documentary about a college student’s harrowing journey to seek justice after discovering deepfake pornography of herself online.

• This article on a legislative proposal by House Republicans to ban all state and local AI regulations for a decade. Because nothing says “we believe in federalism” like a blanket ban on state and local regulation. The good news: there are meaningful steps concerned citizens can take to help resist this ludicrous provision.

• For scathing look at how profit motives have ruined the internet, this episode of Understood with Cory Doctorow is worth a listen. He gave us the beautiful term “enshittification” and it’s perfect for these times.

Thanks for being part of this convo.

Peace,
Baratunde