Teenage Fantasy
My little sister just started middle school. In an attempt to connect with this eleven-year-old thousands of miles away, I do my best to keep up with the kids via TikTok and Youtubers’ confessional videos (ask me about James Charles and Sugar Bear Hair Care). In middle school, I remember going on Tumblr and scouring the internet for friends and deep quotes and Lana gifs. I used social media to post awkward selfies doing the fierce hand sign thing with my friends. Nowadays, in lieu of those angsty Tumblr posts, we have Instagram influencers. But I was surprised to find there are influencers like @lilmiquela that followers can actually talk to — that faithfully respond to their comments, that post photos of themselves ugly crying after a breakup — , an influencer complaining about not having “real” friends, and at the same time writing “who I am on here IS me.”
@lilmiquela is a CGI influencer with over a million followers, five hit singles on Spotify, a Calvin Klein ad featuring a make-out with Bella Hadid, and a Burberry promo, among dozens of others. She’s the face of Club 404, a clothing brand and website where “outsiders can find a home.” She’s a queer activist, and travels across the world to hang out with fellow influencers and artists. She’s 100% open about her friends, lovelife, feelings, etc. And she has her own problems, just like everyone else. As a digitally-rendered robot, she struggles with fitting in, but also short-circuits with robot pride! Her bio reads “Musician, change-seeker, and robot with the drip 💧.”
@lilmiquela is the ultimate teenage fantasy. She’s got the trendy space buns, plaid pants, buckets hats, crop tops, and flashy music videos. She loves to meditate, sip on iced coffee, give us lil storytimes on her Youtube. If you’re @lilmiquela’s #1 fan, she’s your #1 fan too‒going live on comments after dropping every new music vid, encouraging followers to call her with their craziest party stories, and giving paragraph-long responses to comments on her Instagram.
When I first learned about @lilmiquela, and then found out my little sister followed her, I was spooked. My sister is fully addicted to the internet, bragging to me about how she FaceTimed her friends for 48 hours straight. With an influencer like @lilmiquela, I was a lil afraid she believed in technological determinism. But people remind us all the time that images of models and internet personas aren’t real. In a follower’s eyes, how much more real is a human influencer than @lilmiquela? An influencer’s online presence is the only “them” we know. @lilmiquaela’s Instagram is the real her, and every influencer’s Instagram is the real them for their followers.
I wonder what it would (will?) look like for us all to have digital renderings — for social media to be another fully-fleshed reality. That sounds far away, but at this point, posting on Instagram is like adding to your wardrobe, putting on a new pair of shoes.
While the perception of our fellow online robots isn’t concrete, it’s easy for corporations to create influencers who are their biggest friends. There’s an activist side to @lilmiquela’s brand. Though it only features a few so far, Club 404 has a “heroes” page with black womxn and queer activists. How does this refuge in the online translate to the tangible world we live in? What does it mean when @lilmiquela has an “Abolish ICE” poster hanging on her wall? If @lilmiquela dates girls, guys, all people alike, is that queer representation? And to what extent is this representation just a way to bring in fans and followers?
If creating digitally-rendered people to push our political agendas and advertise our retail lines becomes popular, I wonder how the validity of these online personas might alter. How might we come to tackle the right of AI representation? For now though, @lilmiquela remains the ultimate teenage fantasy. She’s here for everyone feeling a lil lonely. She only exists online, but who’s to say that makes her any less real?
