Justin Bieber If He Was Born in Other Countries
The slop that broke me
Hi! It’s been a while, forgive me— I spent much of February in a catatonic state. I did spend some time at my aunt’s on Miami Beach, where I woke up to watch the sunrise and go for a run every morning, but save for that inspired semana, my brainwaves have barely registered on the monitor. I can’t be blamed, I can’t be tamed. Now we wait for spring. I’m always reminded during this time of year of a saying my kindergarten teacher taught us: March goes in like a lion, and out like a lamb. A pleasing phrase that has stuck with me through the years, though I’ve often wondered if the sentiment is better suited for April…
I am rather embarrassed to announce that this entire post is about AI— I feel very Boomer lady in red glasses ranting at a Thai restaurant. But sometimes a certain internet psychosis wraps itself around my throat and I can’t stop thinking about it, and I need to exorcise! It was this, or 5K words on “White Feather Hawk Tailed Deer Hunter” (might still write that because whoopsy daisy deposition cocaine may be the greatest line my brain has ever heard). I also have a bone to pick with adult Hilary Duff’s dispirited housewife pop album, so be on the lookout for a Blonde Affairs about that coming soon. But first—
I’m drowning in slop and I need help! My feed has been flooded by AI-generated face-morphing videos for the past month or so.
Each video is its own endless loop within the endless scroll, with Animorph-like transitions that just keep morphing into the next face. It’s hell! The first video of this style that really caught my attention was “EVOLUTION OF PANAMA: from Ancient Roots to Modern Innovation,” from the “verified” Instagram account @historyforeveryone100. I’m on the Panama algo but if you click on the account, you can watch a minute-long history video of the country of your choosing:
There is something so eerie and flattening about watching history rendered this way: as an ancient pre-Columbian Coclé chief morphing into the Spanish explorer Balboa, who enslaved Indigenous people to build Darién, the first Spanish settlement in the Americas… morphing into a woman holding a baby during Morgan’s Sack of Panama, when the pirate Henry Morgan raped and pillaged villages… then into Black Caribbean laborers building the Panama Canal, who were shipped in and paid in silver while Americans and Europeans doing the same job were paid in gold. The experience is of watching time and eras collapse into each other, smoothed of any real consequence, or cause and effect. The videos hint at historical disaster and/or suffering, but in a way that appears feels random and misplaced. For example, when the video reaches the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties—when Jimmy Carter agreed that control of the canal would return to Panama by 2000, a historic moment widely celebrated by Panamanians—the video shows a randomista civilian crying alone in front of her television. Okay?!
As the account’s name suggests, this is history for “everyone,” videos designed to make you feel as though you’re experiencing the past alongside ordinary people, at their eye level. They create an illusion of encountering these individuals while they are living through these eras or periods of time. But obviously, none of them are real historical figures. They are simply approximations of a random person from that time.
These AI-morphing memes are powered by “diffusion models” which generate images by refining visual noise— a phrase I find haunting— into a coherent face or scene. Meaning these ubiquitous models are grasping at straws—forming composite hallucinations of internet detritus, or of whatever data the model was trained on. DALL-E and Midjourney, for example, rely on this process. (I request an honorary PhD in Computer Science from MIT for this paragraph, thank you.)
These videos remind me a bit of those educational Civil War reenactments, or going to Waterloo Village, where actors recreate 1800s settler life along the Morris Canal in New Jersey. In one memory I have of a field trip to Waterloo Village, this kid Tommy’s bright blue ice pack explodes all over a few girls, and the teachers freak out because the neon ammonium nitrate is on one of the girls’ hands, and if the girl puts her fingers in her mouth and poisons herself, the school will be liable. These videos remind me of the reenactments combined with that memory… like, approximated history tinged with neon poison. :)
I didn’t dive too deeply into the other videos, but I did watch Israel’s and the United States’ out of curiosity:
As you’d expect, Israel’s mentions “the High-Tech Boom” of 1999 (?) but not the Nakba of 1948, America’s highlights Woodstock ’99 (but not ‘69— silly AI) and includes the Civil Rights movement, but skips 1619 and the entire slave trade.
Doesn’t it freak you out that much of the media consumed these days is several layers removed from any primary source? These supposedly “educational” clips feel so detached from anything accountable, it’s hard for me to imagine the images they’re trained on are even Wikipedia-level legitimate. I know these are stupid videos made for entertainment purposes only, but still—I think they deserve critique!
(I also guarantee you that somewhere in this country, some overworked public school teacher will show one of these videos to her students because she was too exhausted to put together a lesson on the history of X country. I don’t blame her I blame the world.)
I teach a writing workshop at a high school, and the other day we read “The Pedestrian,” a Ray Bradbury story from 1951 set in 2053, in which a man gets arrested for taking a walk at night instead of being glued to his television screen. My students didn’t realize the gray lights glowing in the houses Mead passed were televisions—they also, shockingly, didn’t know what a “channel” was—but they did muse on how Bradbury predicted the modern-day reality of getting arrested for minding your own business.
In the story, the protagonist calls into the dim caves of other people’s homes:
“What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?”
Imagine, if you will, introducing Bradbury to what’s capturing our attention now.
Introducing Level 2 of Diffusion Model Brain Rot: “Justin Bieber if he was born in other countries.”
Now for a level up on the chaos ladder. In the above video, Bieber, in portrait, smizes for the camera. Then he turns his head to his left, and the camera pans to the next Justin Bieber.
Only this Justin Bieber is Japanese, and his name is Jasuten Biba.
Jasuten turns to Justin van der Biebaar, who is Justin Bieber if he were “born in the Netherlands,” and van der Biebaar turns to Jashwin Bivaria, who is Justin Bieber if he is “born in India” … and so on.
You can find a video like this for any celebrity— everywhere you look there are Trinidadian Taylor Swifts, Irish Bad Bunnys, Icelandic LeBron Jameses, Canadian Kim Kardashians. This one, of Michael Jackson, really takes the psychosis to new levels:
“FAMOUS PERSON as different races” has been photo slop on X for at least a few years, before these diffusion model morphing videos sprang up everywhere. To the human lizard-brain, clearly there is something pleasing about seeing a familiar face rendered through a different frame—because it gives you a flicker of recognition, while showing you something you’ve never quite seen before. Like, for example, a Cuban Justin Bieber.
These videos are predicated on an amusing “what if”: what if a person could exist separate from their body or likeness? What if there were some core essence of us that might survive such a swap? Racism is rampant online, but on that same internet, people seem to really enjoy watching beloved celebrities rendered in different ethnicities, or “being born in another country.” The phrasing itself is completely unhinged; an arbitrary national border has zero to do with race.
Even though this slop feels vaguely global (“It’s giving China,” said Dusty), there’s a fantasy of equality running through it that feels soo very American.
There’s a warping of reality happening in all these videos, that both simplifies and misunderstands a very complicated world—while strangely democratizes it at the same time. Or gestures towards democratization, at least: making race interchangeable, for example, or representing a colonizer as equally as a day laborer.
This gesturing comes from the continuous looping structure of the videos. In the celebrity videos, all the “Justin Biebers” are standing in a circle, while the camera pans from the center. The motion rotates around the ring of Biebers until the original Justin Bieber appears again, giving the illusion of completeness. It reminds me of those ’90s diversity posters, with human hands of every skin tones forming a circle. That circling—the camera positioned in the middle of a ring of diverse Biebers—suggests harmony, some pseudo-version of DEI.
Posting “We Are The World” here, it’s on topic…
In all this slop, I see the American experiment at its most delusional.
American idealism, as it’s practiced right now, is literally underwriting the killing of civilians abroad, while the AI that combs internet detritus continues to “read” America as this La-La land of equality and harmony. Sometimes I wonder if the good parts of the American experiment—tolerance, coexistence, community—will only survive as AI fantasy, unless real things are done to dismantle the war machine this country has become abroad.
While I have you here in the gutter (right where I want you 😈), below is another slop fantasy trend that I find worth mentioning.
Do you remember when RBG and John Lewis died in 2020, and people started posting corny memes of them linking up in heaven?
Lmao
These memes used to crop up whenever two celebrities died within a week of each other. Now “celebrity in heaven” slop seems to exist on its own schedule— this video (and the Instagram account behind it) was brought to my attention while drafting this post:
Much like the @historyforeveryone100 videos, and the “born in a different country” videos, this “celebs in heaven” slop broadcasts a nonsensical utopia, a world where heaven exists and we all meet up there once we are dead to shoot the shit. Who cares if Bob Ross and Amy Winehouse have nothing to do with each another except that they happened to be alive and famous at overlapping moments in time, and are now both dead?!
Meanwhile, in reality, the US has unleashed “Operation Epic Fury” on the rest of the world. The American project of “spreading democracy” is dismantling the structures of the modern world as we know it, and no one seems to have any real plan for what comes after, save for profiting from the wreckage. Governments carry out violence abroad, with civilians—children—as collateral, and here we are at home, scrolling through psycho AI fantasies in which Julius Caesar meets Jimi Hendrix in heaven and says to him, “You came, you saw, you conquered that guitar.” And Hendrix says back, “They named a salad after you!” Consider me perturbed, nay, disturbed, by it all. I didn’t even get into how much water this all wastes…
Thanks for holding space for me while I boomer the f out <3 My mock duck pad kee mow medium spicy is getting cold… ✪
The next level will be when we actually get to hear what a Jausten Biba song sounds like
Remind me to never get a pair of red specs.