The macabre interview with a dead teenager

"A show you won't want to miss. I'll be doing a rare interview with Joaquin Oliver. He died in 2018 in the Parkland High School shooting. But his parents have created an artificially intelligent version to deliver a powerful message about gun violence." This was how former CNN journalist Jim Acosta announced his latest endeavor on his Substack channel. This avatar had been fed all of the young man's social media posts, with the hope that his speech would be a compendium of the interests and concerns he expressed during his lifetime. Grieving for the loss of a child—the cruelest subversion of the laws of nature—is unimaginable to me, so I'll hold back on judging the family who created this avatar and who, as they explained, spent hours talking to him, while the boat kept repeating how much they loved them. But turning it into a television spectacle is a point or two of emotional pornography. Even if the goal of raising awareness about gun ownership in the country is laudable.

All of this brings us dangerously close to a chapter of the magnificent series Black Mirror and its disturbing dystopias. The boy's portrayal was technically clumsy, with a monotonous voice and a rigid visual appearance. But there are already models that would be capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of the untrained eye. When Kubrick imagined the final frontier of resurrection, he did so through an epic journey to the confines of the Universe. The reality is much more sordid and perhaps based on lifeless squints, our appearance forever regurgitating all the things we have said and published. As if we weren't enough of a slave to the words spoken in life, now they will also haunt us for all eternity. Or until someone types "delete" and "intro".