Unequal and Elon Musk's disobedient daughter

Barely two weeks ago, the Catalan clothing brand Desigual launched a campaign mocking the touristification, overcrowding, insecurity, and rising prices currently stifling Barcelona. A campaign that public opinion perceived as a misstep, due to playing with frivolity and without a defined critical purpose, with such a poignant social issue, simply to sell clothes. But little did we foresee that, in a matter of a few days, the brand would manage to completely turn its image around. The turnaround came with the new campaign, titled Born to disobey. A girl, with a defiant attitude in front of a robot, questions the infallibility of artificial intelligence, which collapses in the face of human singularity, and encourages standing up to the dictatorship of algorithms. And, staring directly at the camera, she says: “She was designed to obey. I was not.” The genius of the advertisement, however, lies in the fact that its protagonist is not just any model, but Vivian Jenna Wilson: Elon Musk’s trans daughter.

The robot is called DESI 84: “Desi”, both for Desigual and for disobedience, and “84”, because 1984 is the year the brand was founded. But it is difficult not to also think of George Orwell's novel, 1984, the great modern fiction about a society subjected to control, surveillance, standardization, and the suppression of individuality. We do not know if the reference is deliberate or casual, but, at the very least, it is significant in a campaign that precisely invites us to rebel against technological control systems.

An advertisement that borders on a Freudian joke when Wilson walks the robot on a leash, aesthetically inspired by the Optimus developed by Tesla. The machine, a symbol of the technological power that Musk represents, ends up reduced to an obedient pet that she leads wherever she wants. The charm of the advertisement stems, in large part, from the fact that Elon Musk is today one of the public figures who generates the most polarization and rejection. And seeing how precisely one of his daughters—the one who has escaped his control and has publicly built her identity in opposition to him—ridicules his technological universe and makes the psychoanalytic murder of her father public is, without a doubt, somewhat cathartic.

Oscar Wilde had already warned: there is only one thing worse than people talking about you, and that is them not talking about you. Desigual seems to have understood this perfectly. But it is, at the very least, suspicious that the brand has launched two such powerful campaigns with so little time in between. We cannot rule out that the second one has the intention of making us forget the first: if with the Barcelona advertisement they managed to get us talking for the wrong reasons, now they do it, apparently, for the right ones. But the fact that one appeals to us more than the other and aligns more with our interests does not mean that they have simply changed their skin, but not their nature.

If we analyze the piece as an advertising campaign, it is undoubtedly brilliant, but we would be wrong if the siren songs wanted to make us see a social commitment or a critical position on the part of Desigual. The advertisement is nothing more than an ingenious and superficial gimmick based on a subject of extreme gravity, if we pay attention to the most recent news about the risks of AI. All for the simple purpose of selling clothes. And, to top it all off, it encourages us to be disobedient, in line with slogans as puerile and worn-out as "Be yourself." As if the solution were so simple and depended solely on our individual decisions. What we should never forget is that few things are as useful to the system and work as much in favor of the establishment as advertising, nor as uncomfortable for companies as disobedience that ceases to be a slogan and becomes an action.