Thank you all for joining us today. I am Adrienne Coteen, and I work in the curatorial department of public programs here at the Brooklyn Museum. It's a pleasure to have worked with David Levine on a series of programs in relation to his exhibition, Some of the People All of the Time. The exhibition is only open for another week, so please make sure that you go down and see it today or sometime before it closes on the 8th of July. Before I introduce our speakers, and David, who will be moderating today's conversation, I'd like to take a moment to thank our partners at the Onassis Cultural Center, New York, with whom we are co-presenting this exhibition as part of their birds, a festival inspired by Aristophanes. I'm thrilled to be able to introduce our speakers, L.F. Batuman, Carrie Lambert Beatty, Adrienne Chen, Virginia Heffernan, and, of course, David Levine, who together offer an unparalleled level of courage, rigor, dedication, and wit to their crafts. L.F. Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010, from 2010 to 2013. She lived in Istanbul, Turkey, where she was a writer-in-residence at Coke University. Coach. Thank you. Her first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Her first book of comical, interconnected essays about Russian literature, The Possessed, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Credits Circle Award. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, and the Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, and holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University. Carrie Lambert Beatty is an art historian at Harvard University and the editor of October Magazine. She is the author of the book Being Watched, the Von Reiner and the 1960s from MIT Press in 2008, and the essay Make Believe, Performance and Plausibility, published in 2009. Adrienne Chen is a writer and journalist who has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and many other publications. And Virginia Heffernan is a journalist, critic, and author. Her most recent book is Magic and Lost, The Internet as Art, published by Simon and Schuster.  She is also a co-host of Slate's Trump Cast and a frequent contributor to MSNBC. She has a PhD in English from Harvard. So with that, please join me in welcoming a truly powerhouse panel. We're so delighted to have you here today. It's really an honor. I want to thank this microphone. Brooklyn Museum, the NASA Foundation. I especially want to thank Adrienne Coutin, who is indefatigably indefatigable in putting this together and all the events associated with this exhibition. So thank you, Adrienne, wherever you went. OK, just a little bit of introduction about what this is about and how it's going to go. My own work was always really, and I'm reading from notes, my own work was always really caught up with the idea of being an actor as a kind of condition produced by economic or social or emotional forces. And when Virginia and I were in grad school together, my thesis was supposed to be on whether or not characters were real and had rights. And along with these questions of what kind of condition acting is, how we're supposed to go about figuring out when or how people are being real and how appropriate and ask that even is since spectatorship itself involves all sorts of performances that are produced by exactly the same economic or social or emotional forces. And also how difficult it is to distinguish between the two states and whether or not that's even a pernicious question to begin with. So all of these artistic questions went from being formal or existential concerns to being political concerns, for me, right around the inauguration and the endless squabbling over crowd sizes and applause and accusations of crisis acting and the discovery of actual fake crowd agencies. And that gave rise to this exhibition at the center of which is an actor who may or may not have lost their mind. So in the context of the exhibition, I was lucky enough to be able to invite writers who's thinking about these matters across various disciplines was actually really influential on the exhibition itself. Particularly, Elif's work on rent-to-families and Virginia's writing about social media bots and amplification. Adrian's work on the internet anonymity and troll farms and Carrie Lambert Beatty's work on para-fiction and contemporary art. So I thought I would ask each of them to sort of discuss those things a bit, just to lay out the terrain that we're in. And then we'll talk for a while, and then we'll open it up to questions. So I think that one, at least for me, obviously I think we'd all say that these questions of these kind of half-real, half-fake kind of issues of persona have been around for a really long time and toyed with for a really long time. We were just talking backstage about the various ways in which they've been managed practically since the invention of the novel, but you could probably go further back. But in its contemporary articulation, something definitely seems to have happened with, kicked into gear for this era with social media. And so I thought something about electronic persona seems to have been the new ingredient to at least lead to this articulation. So I thought that maybe as a way of introducing that or starting with that, Adrian could talk about this piece he wrote for The New York Times in 2015 called The Agency about a troll farm in Russia. Sure. And first off, thank you for having me. Very honored to be with such a distinguished panel. I do not have a PhD, so I'm feeling a little insecure up here. Give a PhD in life. Yes. So yeah, in I think 2013 or 2014, I read an article in BuzzFeed about a leak of documents from this agency in Russia called the Internet Research Agency. And there were all of these documents about it creating this sort of social media army of fake accounts, basically trying to pretend to be Americans in order to influence sort of the informational sphere around discussions around Russia. And so they were creating these fake personas. And they had been doing this in Russia for a while, but they had just launched a pilot program to try to do this in the English language website. And I just thought it was a really interesting phenomenon. It was sort of tracked with a lot of my interests in anonymity and sort of the ability of people to sort of adapt different identities through the internet. But then sort of paired it with this very serious way of doing it. I had written a lot about trolls who were sort of harassing people for personal vendettas or trying to kind of get their own way on these little petty things. And this was like trying to do that on the geopolitical scale. And I was just fascinated by that. There weren't a lot of details in the article. And so I wanted to look into that and see just how it was working on a day-to-day basis. How did they actually create this content? Who was writing it? Like just the idea of a building full of people leaving comments was really amazing to me. And also the question of how effective it would be. And I think I'm also very interested in sort of the invisible labor behind a lot of the internet. So I had written about these content moderation operations where people have to sort of look at all the worst stuff on the internet and judge whether or not it should be on the internet or not. And they outsource it a lot in the Philippines and other developing countries. So I saw that as this is sort of like a corollary to that, but trying to do something different, not just moderating it, but creating new content. And so yeah, I didn't really know anything about Russia going into it. I read a lot of books and realized sort of how complicated the sort of like Russian approach to geopolitics was. This was in the middle of the Ukraine conflict. So they were all focused on Ukraine. And then I went over there. Basically, my plan was just to try to get as close to the actual operations as I could. It had been covered a lot in the Russian press. So there was a lot of sort of former disgruntled workers who had been giving interviews. I think one of the things as this story has become a bigger story and the agency was indicted by Mueller and became a sort of fixation on a lot of the US, it was lost that this was a pretty well-known phenomenon in Russia. And so really what my work was doing was building a lot on these Russian investigations. People had been infiltrating it, exposing it for many months. And one of the people I wanted to meet there was a former troll, now I forgot her name, but she had sort of started an anti-troll movement called Information Peace, because they were trying to wage information war. She wanted to make information peace. And I met up with her, sort of stuck, staked out the place, watched the workers go in and out of this building and eventually made my way in there and was able to get a meeting with a guy who all these documents said was working for it. Of course he denied it, said he was just running a website for some unnamed investors. And in the end, what happened to me was that I became a target of the troll farm. It had turned out that I was being trailed by somebody from there the whole time I was in St. Petersburg, I was there for about a week. And during my reporting, I met with a woman who worked at the agency whose name was in some leaked documents and she said, I'll only meet you if I can bring my brother. I'm scared of meeting you alone. And so I said, sure, that's fine. It was a little odd, but we met at this restaurant, this Chinese restaurant, and she's there, you know, this little very stylish young Russian woman who was unremarkable looking and then her brother was this hulking guy with a shaved head and I could see the like SS tattoo poking out from his sleeve on his like Totenkopf T-shirt. He was just like a neo-Nazi and I just sat across from them from him for oddly, she wanted to sit next to me and he was right across from me. So I conducted the interview sort of like turning to her and then when she had to go to the bathroom, I just sat across from this guy standing there. What does your shirt mean? Totenkopf. That's complete war, right? Yeah, it was also like a famous SS division and he had the skull, it's like that famous skull, but... Oh, I have that. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I thought it was a very odd experience but then a lot of odd things that happened to me when I was in Russia and then I get back and I see all of the accounts that I had followed. I created a list of accounts that I had determined belonged to the agency and they all started tweeting the story about me and it included photos that had me with the neo-Nazi and because of the angle, it looked like I was just talking to him like sitting right across from him and there was a photo of us outside the restaurant where it had been edited so the woman was not there and there were also photos of me leaving my hotel room which was my hotel where I was staying. So yeah, I got a pretty firsthand look at how that operated and wrote it up. At the time, it was sort of, I don't know, I was looking at it more from a sort of novelty of technology, what could happen with the internet and sort of looking at it as the most extreme and amusing example of Putin's crackdown on the internet and expression in Russia and also the sort of topsy-turvy media landscape there where you never know what's true or fake and who's got different motives for what but then obviously it sort of two years later became a huge part of the narrative around Trump. One of the really eerie things about this article, if you read it, is the first two pages are about a trolling campaign about a toxic spill in Louisiana but it reads the reporting of it and the tracing genre-wise, structurally, it reads any number of articles from the past year to trace, and we can come back to this but you read it now and you're like, whoa, this is exactly the same, this is, it just seems, well, it's odd impression but then the next step in that, and this comes up in that Louisiana thing too, is the way that the trolling, a fake toxic spill that then gets amplified through Twitter because people really think this might be happening. So it begins with a pretty self-aware form of insincerity where it's like, I am not really this person, I am just issuing content as this person but then somehow, right around, I mean, in this case it seemed like a natural disaster so it's panicked, so okay, but then sometime, during the election and post-election, you wind up getting into situations where these tweets are getting amplified by people who do believe them and then what the status of someone who's amplifying is between a persona and a believer and a non-believer is something that Virginia has written about a bunch that particularly in a piece in Wired from a few months ago called Bots aren't the enemy in the information war, we are, where she has this line that says, trolled people, trolled people and so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that particular state of belief in the chain. So Wired had a theme issue on hybrids and lots of people were talking about mechanics and cars and airplanes, flying cars and just at that time, it was soon after the IRA indictments and maybe backstage or another time we can talk about Mueller's indictment of the internet research agency as a very interesting document and it's the only one he himself signed and it's when he lays out what the charge is, the general charge that he's investigating which is conspiracy to defraud the United States and with witting and unwitting co-conspirators known and unknown to the grand jury. So that's, you know, whenever anyone asks whether we're looking at collusion or whatever, we're no, we're looking at fraud and it wasn't, or at least the Department of Justice does not see whatever this attack on the United States was as a tantamount to a military attack, info war kind of attack, cyber attack but as a kind of fraud and so that brings us very much to the topic of today is that passing as other people, employing fictions, appearing places under false pretense, this is traditionally known as fraud but fraud is almost impossible to police online.  Virginia said on Twitter is when my Twitter handle has some words after it, that's me talking. So anyway, just that indictment is actually well worth reading because it sort of is the case against the internet if such a thing exists and it's really where Robert Mueller seems to want to make his stand. So we have this hybrid thing, the IRA and Dyches had just come down in February and journalists at CNN and other places had identified some of the people who, some of the flesh and blood have beating hearts people who had been conned by various sites and been employed to, you know, host rallies. In one case, a guy was signed up to cage of all people, Hillary Clinton in effigy, like a little whatever, and trot her around like a kind of effigy lynching in a Southern town in Florida. And then another woman was organized a rally with, you know, prompted by bots and a fake kind of system that at least passed as American. It wasn't that there were no individuals involved, it's just that they were Russian individuals. All right, so I was interested in how people get involved in these things and both of them were activists. They were convinced, I mean, they took the money but they also were true believers. And so that was one case. But there were other cases where people who in particular someone in South Carolina who came to really interest me who had enlisted as basically a human bot. And it's worth as a sideline to say that bot is obviously short for robot. Robot comes from a Czech word meaning slave. So this is a slave system where people will do work without getting people. Entities will do work like machines or animals without getting paid for it. So the payment is for the system, the bot net. But the individual work is done for no compensation and no wonder there are labor problems at troll farms because talk about the denial of your humanity.  There's a weird, I mean, no one's sure how prevalent it was but there's some evidence that under some phases of Roman law slaves were referred to as tools that speak. So there's tools that speak and there's tools that don't speak. Like a hammer is a tool that doesn't speak, a human is a tool that speaks. Well that's, I mean, that's richly suggestive because of course bots distribute language and it's sort of the first thing they do. They're not enough, they're not so sophisticated now that they are very good at trafficking and images although they do that or they can't even thread on Twitter so like write stacked bits of text and they don't write very long but they write little phrases and hashtags and they're sort of produced by shuffling together words and phrases and what interested me about this woman in South Carolina is that she had enlisted, there's no, now her Twitter account has lots of MAGA stuff on it but it didn't when she started. Her main work if you look at her on LinkedIn is like a phyto, what is it called, phyto cannabinoid? She does one of these new quasi pot things that the organization is shaped like Amway so it's like a pyramid scheme basically and you push the virtues of this particular cream or whatever it is to give you a new rebirth and you basically turn over your social media to all kinds of videos plugging this kind of snake oil stuff, nothing against marijuana fans or whatever even though I'm for recriminalization but anyway the gray market of phyto cannabinoids is a perfect place for a troll to be found and it's exactly that demi-monde that we're only now discovering that can pay the bills for people including another one would be actors are traditionally drawn from the like scoundrels of the earth, the prostitutes and so forth and that's a little bit what this is so she's like dealing drugs and dealing in bot language so her role in this is farther along than the IRA indictments is in this hashtag campaign called hashtag release the memo. Does anyone remember this? Wow, okay. Yeah, okay so what's fantastic is you don't remember it because it was a flash mob that was conjured out of nowhere like it doesn't fit in to our narrative of these horrible last year and months because it was an uncanny invention of bots so it didn't have an emotional arc to it and yet it was incredibly important actually in the effort by Republicans to discredit the Mueller investigation. So as we don't really know who started the bot campaign it's really hard to figure out the nodes but Molly McHugh and a group at Oxford that at Balliol College that sort of regresses does genealogies for some bot campaigns did determine that these were coming from Russian sources and Adrian and I can probably go back and forth about this. I will say I don't do the original research so I can't say with 100% confidence about the tracking of the origins. In any case, first one thing that humans can do that bots yet can't yet do is dispel the sheen of the uncanny that like nauseating feeling that the language isn't quite right so one of the things that Masha Gessen at the New Yorkers picked up on is a lot of language saying Hillary is the Satan, right? So we for whatever reason say the devil and not the Satan in American English and people I think who we give ourselves too much credit for being able to identify those things as false because they're not quite false they're just not quite right. You guys are probably familiar with the uncanny valley just a simple idea that as a copy approaches perfect verisimilitude with what it's copying the more lifelike something is, the more we're drawn to it. We have like a factional relationship with it like a teddy bear like has eyes at whatever even a car with headlights something kind of cute and intriguing and human but not too human about it and then right before something looks like something a human would do or be or a statement that an American would make like Hillary Clinton is the Satan right before when it's just wrong enough right when you have a thee boom like there's a certain nausea that overtakes I mean the Japanese theorist of uncanny valley really does identify this in particular with nausea. So if you can think of like Polar Express the one of the early CGI movies where they just didn't look good it didn't look wholesome it creeped you out right so it's that creepy skin crawly feeling. Some of us are able to like recognize in the skin crawly feeling I shouldn't be here like Hillary Clinton is the Satan or something really slightly off in a video of Hillary Clinton's health problems or whatever some of us are able to notice that in any case humans are very, very good at dispelling the uncanny you like even a baseline literacy if you look at all of us I think who native speakers of English or people with good English as a second language can read Hillary Clinton as the Satan and be like that's not written by an American. This woman couldn't. No this woman could. So that's what the use of human brains and affectional systems are to botnets. They are able to retweet things well okay so I'll just tell you release the memo I don't wanna go on too long. So there was some idea that certain I'm trying to remember all of it Devin Nunes and the House of Representatives believed that there was some kind of memo detailing Carter Pages FISA it doesn't even matter but something that they thought that the Justice Department had done in an untoward way and he believed or had decided to pretend that there was a smoking gun that showed that the Mueller investigation was out of control and that they had trespassed in a thousand ways. So some one either seeded or it organically appeared on Twitter that people wanted to see this thing that Devin Nunes was talking about. So they would say show the letter we must see the document let's get the document and then all of a sudden someone came up with a release the memo and hashtagged it. Now people saying show the letter and stuff they were like sort of amplified by bots. So like it would be a sort of far right account that had a lot of bot followers and they would try to show the letter or whatever but someone and maybe possibly this woman decided that release the memo in English release. It was like it just seemed sort of chain breaking and they were whole caging up this memo and that was part of the evil of the Mueller investigation. Whatever reason release the memo had this kind of limbic appeal. I mean, I'll say that in a second and this woman was part of giving it credibility. So she had built up because of her pot work because of her whatever work. She had a lot of, she had real followers but she also had botnets that followed her and she seized on release the memo either because she's on a constant payroll from some intermediary with Russians who were according to other things pushing this release the memo thing or because she naturally gravitated toward this particular expression. In any case, she amplified it, released the memo, went all over Twitter. It started trending on Twitter. It was pushed mostly by bots but when she retweeted it with like a bot thing with like yes, this has gotten out of control, hashtag maga, just something that sounded really American that is when it totally broke out like a kind of tipping point, epidemic thing. I think there's something, I mean there's a couple things that are interesting about that because I mean one of the things that I'm really interested in is this state of, you know, renting your subjectivity out.  Do you guys know that David hires people to be among you in the audience? Sometimes, we don't know if it's today or not. And so if we get a standing ovation, there's no chance without your dollars. Anyway. Because, you know, artists really like to spread the money around. But I think that, so this guy Davey Rothbard embedded with Crowds on Demand and what he said was the crazy thing was that, you know, well I was getting, so they, he wound up embedding with a protest, embedding with a protest outside of, outside I think a Mormon lodge because they were, some Mormon in California was really objecting to his chapter's support for Proposition 8. And he was like, this is crazy. This is completely homophobic. I don't even know if most people in my chapter, you know, even know about this. So this guy hired Crowds on Demand to protest outside a meeting basically to raise awareness among Mormons that their chapter was supporting this. And Davey was like, yeah, I thought this was really insidious, but you know, I was totally again.  So what was the problem? Any, which sort of seems like related to Queen Caffeve or wherever this person was. Yes. Queen Caffeve. Because the idea that you're already sympathetic. So what is happening to your subjectivity when you're kind of renting it out, but you kind of believe it and are you getting compensated or not? And on that note. Yes.  It seems like a weak, you know, a weak point in a social structure that often gets exploited that, you know, by certain kinds of conceptual art interventions, which is what, you know, I mean, it's a weak point, like for a yes man or, you know, Virginia referred to like a kind of flash mob. And one of the odd things, I think this is in the wall text of the exhibition, is that these kind of interventions are really celebrated as critical incursions when they come from the context of conceptual art. And they're really, really denigrated when they're from a political practice or not otherwise framed. And, you know, we have one that isn't in your essay, but there's a check from, there's a little collection show that goes with the exhibition, and there's a check from a woman named Roberta Breidmore, who does not, in fact, exist. She's an invention of an artist named Lynn Hirschman-Leeson, who basically lived in, this fake person lived in San Francisco and had a checking account and a shrink and a rim made and all this kind of stuff in the early 70s. It's in the early 70s, yeah. And a better credit rating than Lynn had. You couldn't do this project anymore. So, anyway, so I was wondering if you could talk a bit about this tradition from an art situation. Sure. I think that's really interesting that there's already a kind of ethical split that happens once it's been framed as art. The stuff, I brought in some images to show because I'm an art historian and if there's not an image, you'd be looking at me and it would just feel weird. So, what I have here are just some quick pictures of the first of the works that I've been writing about that got me really interested in a phenomenon that's related to the fake people thing. So, what you're looking at here is a plaque on a building and two historical photographs and here is like a historical museum installation and I'll give a really quick version of the story. The artist, Michael Bloom, was invited to the Istanbul Biennial. He's one of those complicated, hyphenated nationalities but was living in Austria, born in Israel, raised in the US and France. So, but he's invited like a lot of artists to come and be in Istanbul for several weeks to kind of, and then to make a work that somehow is more connected to the culture than if he just brought in a piece he had done before. And he hears about this building that is going to be destroyed and that it has some kind of historical significance. It is the building where Safiye Bihar lived and the bar that was at the bottom of the building which her family owned was actually one of the early gathering places for the revolutionaries who would lead to the Turkish Republic and there, Safiye Bihar, the daughter of the owner of the pub, meets Mustafa Kemal and their relationship has been lost to history. It's been pretty much suppressed but he knows that it's this building. And so, he got really interested in her, discovers that she, oh, I should mention Michael actually has an MA in history. He's another one of these kind of hybrid artists, so it's interesting. So, he starts doing research on Safiye. He finds out that she was a Marxist and a feminist. She's Jewish and so the bar was owned by Jews and so the whole story starts to him to really resonate in terms of, particularly at that time, people in Europe and their perception of Turkey. And so, reminding everybody about the cosmopolitan milieu that created this modern republic. So, he is fascinated by Safiye. He finds Safiye's grandson, who's now living in Chicago. And he makes this house museum as his contribution to the Istanbul Biennial. And I didn't bring in a bunch of pictures but what you see here is sort of the entrance with wall text explaining the story and then a recreation of her house as it was when she lived there, when she was perhaps having a romantic relationship with Ataturk, with Mustafa Kemal. And he had letters between them and the letters showed that maybe some of the progressive politics regarding women in the early Turkish Republic or maybe her idea, super fascinating. And he laid all of this out in vitrines and in a house museum setting and people were fascinated. So, for Europeans or Americans maybe who were going there, this was a whole aspect of the history of Turkey that didn't fit with some of their exoticized Orientalist fantasies about Turkey or the idea of an Islamic country. And this was at a time when Turkey had a chance of joining the EU. So, this was an important kind of moment for this. So, it had that kind of meaning. And then there were, for Turkish audiences, really interesting resonances with the state suppression of history and the suppression of information about Kemal and sort of state control of history. And so, they were really interested in this outsider who was able to come in and get this information about a society that they hadn't been able to get. And Safiye is completely fictional. So, there were tiny tells in the exhibition. And I think that's really interesting in relation to the Unkenny Valley thing. So, for instance, she was a translator and was supposed to have translated a volume of important poetry and that he had created a fake book cover that looked like the real book cover but had her name written as translator. And it was glued on like poorly. So that if you really looked, there were a few of these little things. If you really read the language carefully, there were some intimations. But people mostly don't read that carefully. There were also tips that only Turkish people who really were familiar with Adatürk's biography would catch or would notice that something was an anachronism. And I think it's this bit about the Unkenny Valley and these the tells, because to me, one of the things I've learned looking at work like this is how easily we explain away little anomalies like that, right? So that when I've had this kind of experience where I didn't know if it was fictional or not, there's often these little moments where you think something isn't quite right, but that can't be. So you sort of explain it to yourself, right? I had that experience reading your article. I was like, I've never heard of this woman. We've heard of the Bulgarian. We know all of these other, and then yeah, I Googled it and there it is. Before I got to that part of your article. Because you and Adriana- I didn't know that, yeah, yeah. I think that's actually really, like I find that really important. Unfortunately, you can't do it too many times. So now I'm trying to write a book about this stuff and I'm like, I can't do it every chapter. That would be weird. Yeah, in fact, artists who work in this way often have a problem in that then when they try to do work that is not fictional, nobody takes it seriously, right? So this is something that Willi Rad, for example, has been dealing with in really interesting ways. Okay, so this is one example of a phenomenon and I was also, I started, there wasn't a name for it that I could find. So I started calling it para-fiction and it was artists who were creating fictions and sort of letting them loose in the world. So it was sort of to the side of fiction and outside it, outside the boundaries of what kept fiction safely fictional, right? So that, and that is the same as saying people believed it. So I'll just show you a couple more examples that are all about people. This is a piece earlier, so that we can talk about the dates, by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Daigne and some of you may have just seen it at The Whitney where in Zoe Leonard's amazing show, which is a huge and beautiful collection of photographs documenting the life of a woman who was a star in the Negro film industry, which is the term, right? Because it was a historical thing. So when theaters were segregated, there's this whole fascinating film history about movies that were for black audiences. And she was a major star in that system who of course has been, her life has been forgotten with the passing of that history and the way that race plays into what is preserved for history and what isn't. And what you have in these photographs is this meticulous material recreation of photographs of different kinds and from different periods that makes her completely convincing in the images. But an interesting difference between Safie and Faye is that when Zoe Leonard publishes this work with Cheryl Daigne or when Zoe Leonard who made all the photographs exhibits it, it's usually pretty clearly stated that she's a fictional character. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that people don't fall for it because one of the things I've learned in this work is that we are unbelievably susceptible to, we assume things are true before we suspect them of being false and there's a whole evolutionary argument for why that's the case. So a lot of the artists I've spoken to who do this kind of work never expected people to take it as literally as they did. Never expected the illusion to last as long as it did. Which raises some interesting questions about art too and the kind of attention people give art and whether it's the same as what artists think people will do with their work. Okay so but with this piece I think there was a real importance to letting it be known that it was a fiction and this is common in a lot of artworks that create a historical figure who is missing because the archives are incomplete because the story of people who are black lesbian actresses in a black film industry, their history wasn't as valued and so those documents aren't saved and so to create a character like that is to let us know all about her to get us really interested in this person and this life and then to find out it's fiction is to take it away. So that the gap, the absence has to be marked as much as the presence is performed. And that's a phenomenon that comes around a lot with these historical figures that if it were a totally seamless fiction then it wouldn't do the same work. Another example that I'll do really quickly because it's another historical figure and I don't wanna spend too long but a wonderful project by a German Canadian artist so who lives now in Toronto and this was at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Art Gallery of Ontario has this huge relatively new addition of Frank Gehry design and but it was its first original building was this house which was a sort of a state house during the colonial period in Canada and I'm so tempted to tell the whole long story but I won't. There were objects found during the excavations for the renovation and they were strange and no one could sort of figure out what they were but in ways that I won't go into even though I really want to it became known that there had been a maid in the house in the early 19th century who was a new immigrant from Ireland and who while working in the house had been observed by a butler apparently taking little bits of wax like the drippings from candles and making them into little objects and he didn't turn her in though maybe he should have and as it turns out when they do this excavation they start finding them they hire an archeologist to come out and many of these objects are found all over the building in the walls, in the floors and what happened when the artist was able to do is to open up the excavation in progress when the museum reopened so that you could go on a tour and she had docents who would take you on the tour of the house showing you the archeological site and showing you these objects and telling you the story of Mary O'Shea and speculating about her relatives who by the end of her life would have or later in her life would have probably died in the famine thinking about this new immigrant who didn't know anybody and was somehow sort of making the space her own with these little objects speculating about whether they are charm some kind of, you know, Celtic magic and it's just totally engrossing and fascinating to people and they have tons of questions they write letters to the archeologist but the whole thing is fictional and made, physically made by the artist and this was a huge scandal in Toronto like really debated a lot in Canada and I think it's really amazing. Super meticulous like to an extreme this, the way the fiction is created although there are also tells once you know. So people went through the house and they, what? This is just reinforcing people's preconceptions about Canadians and their general uprightness. Yes, they were very upright. I won't go, one of the things that was great about this project for me as a researcher is that there were all these letters and the artists had kept them and so I got to read people's responses at least the people who were moved to write and most of them are extraordinarily angry and as you can imagine and we have all this conversation about creating an environment of mistrust. What's gonna be the social cost of artists rupturing the contract that says that fiction stays in the realm of the fictional and doesn't cross like that and then there's a lot of just anger about being duped and deceived. This is one of the things I loved in your piece. And this is one of the things about this kind of work that absolutely fascinates me is how do people react and I feel like this is a real important thing for the conversation now that these artists were doing this in the early 2000s pre-social media really but maybe sort of allowing us to start to work through some of the issues that then become so important later on and I think one of them is the way that we were, that the people who see this kind of work are taken through a variety of states, what everyone will have them in their own order, everyone will sort of experience it differently but I think of it like playing scales, like the artwork is practicing all the things in between I believe and I was duped, right? And that being able to actually name and talk about those different ways of knowing, those different states of knowledge is I think something that looks really important to me now. I should probably stop, I can maybe bring in other examples if they seem relevant when we're talking. Yeah, we can circle back around to it, yeah. I think just, there's a lot of things to say about that but I think just to bridge to Elif's piece on rental families or rental fans, sorry, not rental families, but rental families is just, I mean the primary distinction, I mean there's one way in which all those projects that you're talking about are they're in some way redemptive, right? They're about forgotten histories, they're about, you know, and to that extent, these fakes have a more utopian kind of aim and yet they promote this, they prompt this kind of bad reaction. I think in that light one of the things that's really interesting about your piece is which is also fairly redemptive. There's a line in this essay which I read over and over again which is I'd started off assuming that the rental scheme has somehow undercut the idea of unconditional love. Now I found myself wondering whether it was even possible to get unconditional love without paying. And I think, but part of it is because it's also explicit, right? There is no, I mean the arrangements are totally on the surface to begin with and that's what allows for the possibility of, I don't know. Yeah, it's kind of playing on that that people will believe more than you think they're going to so it's kind of like let's all start out with the open consensus and don't worry it's gonna catch on eventually. So yeah, I got this assignment too. So there's a few businesses in Japan. It's like a giant thing but it is sort of a thing that you can rent relatives for different purposes. And it's the most common purposes for as wedding guests because weddings are super formal and anyway. So there's like a crowd angle of it but the cases that I found the most interesting were the sort of one-on-one renting a particular relative for a situation. And so the article is in the, it's called a theory of relativity and it's in the New Yorker from this past April, I think April 30th or end of April. So yeah, so I won't go into the whole thing but to two of the people who I talked to who had rented relatives. One was a widow who was, what was this man who was in his 60s? His daughter ran away from home in her 20s and didn't speak to him because they had a family fight. And then suddenly his wife died and he found himself alone and he started renting a replacement wife and a replacement daughter to have dinner with him every few months. And this brought him a huge amount of comfort. And by talking to the rental daughter, he eventually started telling them, at first he was pretending that they were the actual wife and daughter and he continued throughout their relationship to call them by the names of the wife and daughter. But at a certain point he started telling them about his real daughter and his real wife and the rental wife would complain about her husband and he would give her advice. And then the rental daughter was like, oh, you know, you were really wrong. You said the wrong thing to your real daughter. Here's what your daughter is thinking. And he was like, oh, maybe that's true. So then he called up his real daughter and made up with her and now he doesn't need the rental family anymore. So that was one story. And then another story was a woman, a single mother whose daughter was being bullied at school which is something that happens to children with one parent in Japan. There's this whole bullying phenomenon. Anyway, so she, and then the girl became, started to become a recluse which is another kind of common thing. Like she was just locking herself up in her room and the mother had tried therapy. She tried everything and she was at her wits end.  This is your dad. He came over for dinner. And then the daughter was 10 at this point and it took a long time but she, I mean, it took a few months but eventually she accepted that this guy was her father and that they had a story to, I mean, there were all kinds of uncanny slippages but they had an explanation for everything that he works night shift at an old people's home and he has another family so he can't come except at these particular times. And he, and I met him and he has, I was like, what are you gonna do if she finds out? And he's like, well, I'll just tell her that he just had a story for everything. Anyway, and there were moments while reporting the story where I was thinking this is the most dark and sad and sinister thing I've ever heard. And then there were moments where I was like, this is great. These people haven't figured it out. Like they've found this whole solution. They all had tried, like the widow had tried going to hostess clubs and he tried all these different things and this thing really made him feel better. And then I was like, how is this even different from psychotherapy? And then I started looking into psychotherapy in Japan and apparently there's this big stigma against it. So one way of thinking of the rental relatives is it's a sort of like replacement industry that arose to fill that need because they don't have therapists who's also a person who you pay to reenact some kind of family dynamic that you're not having with your real relative. And then at some point I got really stressed out. I rented some guy who was supposed to make me cry and then I couldn't cry and then I got really stressed out. So I just like, I hired an in-room massage at the hotel and I was getting this massage and I was like, oh, thank God I'm just paying this woman so I don't have to give her a massage. I don't have to listen to her problems. I don't have to like cry. And then I was like, oh my God, this is like, this is what unconditional love is. Then I start thinking about like capitalism and neoliberalism and how the unconditional love, particularly of women, but also of people and families, is this idea that really benefits the capital holders because they can pay people less because they're getting unconditional love and care at home and actually it's never unconditional. And then I started looking at representations of rental relatives in Japanese murder mystery. There's a lot of murder mysteries where the rental relatives get murdered or the rental relative murders someone. And a lot of them are about people with old parents who they can't visit so the parents start renting replacement children and then there's like drama about the will. You know, like does the will favor the real children or the rental children? And it kind of exposes that this idea of unconditional love of parents for children, I mean, at a certain point like the bill falls due and there was a way of looking at it that's kind of dark but then there's another way that's like, of course we all, we love and we all want to be loved and if we weren't gonna be loved and we were loving like that, that wouldn't work. So maybe this is like not just natural but kind of helpful phenomenon and that it draws our attention to something that we sweep under the rug and used to make people feel guilty that we used to make mothers feel guilty for if they don't sacrifice their whole being to their children. Yeah, so that was where I ended up thinking about it. I didn't pay for that though. But that does go back to that whole issue. Somewhere along the line it feels like sincerity or authenticity got articulated as being distinct from compensation and that you couldn't have both, right? And like they define each other mutually, like if you're the housework, the housework, the like, why couldn't you pay members of your community to make people feel loved? Like, I mean, and like what is so disqualifying about? Yeah, that's what I thought about the guy with the single father, the single mother who rented this guy, he showed up every two weeks, he spent eight hours with that girl, he took her to Disneyland, he like showed up and like sure he was getting paid but there's plenty of like people in the world who no matter how much you paid them they wouldn't show up every two weeks and be nice to a person. And he, it's said on the order form you have to respond to everything that she says with kindness no matter what she says if it's unreasonable, whatever. And he did that and they all, you know the mother said like, yeah, he really did that. And I mean, that's a skill, why is it? And if he wasn't paid for it, he couldn't do it. It's like, we don't write for just, you know to share our wisdom with the world you get paid for what you do. And you also said there was one, there was one moment when the, where somebody rented, somebody rented a family just for his wedding that he hadn't told his spouse.  It's gonna like really bum out my fiance if I have to tell her my parents died and they're not gonna be there, huge hassle. I'm just gonna rent some people.  And then he tells her this and she's not angry.  She's like, oh, I appreciate that you did this. This was very considerate of you. Thank you for doing that. I'm sorry that you had to carry this burden for so long and for that reason, I wish that you told me sooner but I really appreciate that you wanted our wedding to go well and that you made this effort for us. It shows you really care. I think then going back to the issue of exclusiveness and then I wanna go to something Virginia said and see where you all see what everyone thinks of it but when I was researching the exhibition, I was like, first fake crowd, my first clack ever on record is from his Furniera who suborned 5,000 of his soldiers to like clap for his harp recitals and things like that because at that point in Rome, it was still kind of a scandal for an emperor to be a performer and he liked certain kinds of applause and he made his soldiers applaud and they were the first clack and of course once these clearly marked soldiers start applauding, if you're in the audience too, you're being watched and so you have to start, and the whole insidious dark thing starts there but then you realize pretty quickly that we have this from two historians, Tacitus and Sertones, who are really, really anti-Nero and have their own vested interest in claiming that the people who were applauding for Nero didn't really want to because they didn't really like him and one of the really odd things about this moment and it actually started on the left with the Tea Party is, as pervasive and true as dark money accusations kind of are, I know I had a real investment in thinking that a lot of those guys were paid off, like a lot of these protesters were just, I couldn't credit their sincerity, right? So it was easier to say that they're fake and now the counter-accusation coming from the right with crisis actors and so what's weird about the fake crowd isn't just that it's possible but what's also weird is that the accusation is so invigorating or, I mean, there's something about the accusation that's actually probably even more interesting than the phenomenon itself and the impulse to just discredit people's commitment so because they're hiding something, it's really a fiction and so Virginia was saying to me earlier that you had this point about like, we actually just need a different relation to fiction and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and then you guys can... Well, you know, this, we keep talking about truth and lies and obviously it's a point of pride on Twitter and some places in the media that we call a lie, a lie, that's the name of it and there's a really brilliant MIT study from I think March about how fake news gets disseminated and it made the argument that while bots have equanimity about truth and falsity, they'll spread something if it's true or false equally. Good old bots, you know, they're so level headed but humans have a distinct preference for falsehoods, for lies so we usually think of confirmation bias as the thing determining what rumors people will spread but there is a true incident where Donald Trump saved or put a suffering sick boy on his plane to get to the hospital, like so there's a great thing about Donald Trump and his magnanimity and it really happened, people didn't spread it at all. You literally, there is something in fiction that's just by nature of it being untrue that is more appealing and I'm not sure what that is. The other thing that we know about fake news that spreads is if it's disgusting or shocking so and disgust and shock is registered in the body because we are creatures who crave sensation and this was part of the reason that humans I think are part of the botnet because it's our nervous system and our biology that registers the thing that makes it so addictive and craveable. But so that means that there's a mechanism in us that knows when something is true or false that we're, I mean that's what that study shows, right? Well it's hard to say because they didn't go to, they didn't say, I mean fiction could be more interesting, it could simply be more interesting. Like it might be better. Could they not make up good enough lies? Of fiction might, all of them are not good enough lies? Of fiction might also have more of a force behind it trying to propagate it, right? Because it's already created, somebody has. It's made for a purpose. Yeah. It's made, custom made. Right, so it has, it's written with ritual genre and maybe all the- And like novels sell better than a transcript of reality. Yes, yes. Yes, but a fake transcript of reality may sell the best, right? Or- I keep wondering, is there something? Because sometimes I've been thinking a lot about writing fiction and writing non-fiction and sometimes when you're reading a work of fiction you can tell that parts of it are true and parts of it aren't and parts of it have like a ring of truth.  Like the things that to me I'm like, oh that definitely happened to Tolstoy, like his wife totally said that. Is that right? Is that not? And then you can go and look up every individual one but I don't know, is there, like do we have some visceral truth meter? The stories where like a fraudulent writer like the author of Thousand Million Little Pieces, what was his name? James Fry. Right, yeah. It's switched or also Stephen Glass. Like they switched to fiction but the fiction doesn't sell. It's always really interesting to me. Like it's better that they write passing as non-fiction. Like their work is brilliant if it passes as non-fiction but once they call it fiction. In any case, what David was referencing is that I then went on to think about the only other thing apart from Twitter and news that I've consumed this year like a lot of middle-aged women are mystery stories usually said in England and with female detectives. And I've apparently gotten down to the bottom of the barrel because there's one called Rosemary and Time about two women, Rosemary and Time. One's the smart one, one's the pretty one. And every episode starts, they're gardeners and every episode starts with them like planting poppies or something and then, a body! And then they solve the mystery. Anyway, so the ritual of it appeals to me so much and when I was thinking of trolled people, trolled people nobody wants to be told they've been trolled, witnessed this angry observer of the para-fictions and nobody wants to be told they're trolling. Adrian who's active on Twitter probably gets this. Sometimes I've said something that I think is provocative and I'm told that it's trolling and I need to quickly defend myself against that.  And the one that I like the most, Broadchurch has incest and lots of molestation. I mean it couldn't have been cooked up, it could have been cooked up by the same person that said Obama pimped out his daughter to Harvey Weinstein to knowing he would rape her or whatever which was a trolling script. I was like, when you read that in a political context it's horrible but when Rosemary and Time run into that story it's compelling. And there's something in the ritual of those detective stories that is so soothing to my nervous system in a way that the uncanny news isn't because it's so clearly labeled as fiction. I mean detective fiction is like one of the most ritualized kinds of fiction. It's English, it's native to our language and it's just bliss to me. I was thinking about ritual reading, Aleph's piece, because ritual is not authentic spontaneous expression either but it works, right, it has these kind of functions. It has genre and form. And it has, exactly. And yeah, I wanted to show, there's, in addition to those two really angry letters, I think I have, okay, nevermind, I'm gonna tell you what that fascinating looking one is. This is this artist named Camille Turner who decided to make herself a beauty queen and she basically became Miss Canadiana which is not a beauty contest that actually exists and she goes on tour around Canada. She like makes, you know, maple sugar cookies with the girl guides and totally challenges, of course everybody's assumptions about what looks Canadian, who looks Canadian, sorry. The third letter I was gonna show is from somebody who says, I was really angry when I realized it was a fiction. This is for the hoist there. And then in the next moment, I thought that's amazing. Like what an experience I just had that you gave me and how interesting it is to then look back at the whole thing as a fiction and relive it and rethink about it. So suddenly it seemed to me that it's like there's a choice in how we respond. Like I think there's this limbic response of shame and anger but then we have a choice about how we're gonna interpret that experience and in different historical moments. Like you can look at the history of Trump-Loy in my field, Trump-Loy painting, you know, that fools the eye and see that at different historical periods that experience gets coded differently, processed differently.  When I'm... Virginia had that in the story with the two people in Florida, right? One of them, they both were told they were trolled and one was like, no, I wasn't and the other seemed to... Yeah, one of them thought like, we have such a beautiful website. Like he just was like, wow, they really tricked me into doing the cage and the other thing and they... I heard that guy on the radio and the guy was like, does this make you rethink your political ideas at all? And I think he said, yeah, I am thinking, I am more skeptical now and I'm... Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wanna bring it just very, very quickly something. David and I, when we were in graduate school, one of our professors had a course on Hamlet speech. The Player King. I think it was like, it was Phil Fisher. I think it was like, he says, I won't remember it or be able to do it in Shakespearean way but it was like, this is so terrible that the Player King can simulate emotion when he doesn't really feel it and it's just a dream of sorrow or something. And our professor kept saying, let's not think of this as lies, bad, truth, good when it comes to theater. Theater's a better model for this as a game. And I will say, I do feel, count myself lucky that I joined the internet in the 70s as a part of a Dungeons and Dragons kind of thing because Dungeons and Dragons, we were always being warned that we were gonna start believing we were clerics and trolls or whatever and that we were gonna pass into this crazy world where we would never go back like an LSD trip or something. But it had rules and on the internet and there were very strict rules and we were like, are you in that right now? Kind of, kind of, it's cool.   And I also thought, and I made this mistake in my book, Magic and Lost, of thinking that most of us had understood we were having the experience of a game player when we got on the internet and it turns out that a lot of us weren't, that a lot of us were kind of through the looking glass. Well, I wanted to go back to your comment about a different way of looking at fiction. What was the exact phrase he said? We need a different way of looking at fiction now and I guess that sort of triggered me to think about one of the, you mentioned fake news a few times and everybody's extremely tired of that debate and everything and I think one of the things that always frustrated me about that was sort of not really grasping social media and specifically Facebook as like a genre and what is it actually, everybody knows when you're sitting down to read a detective novel, you're not saying, oh, this is the truth, right? And I feel like when people think about Facebook for some reason, because I don't think it's true, they think that when people go to Facebook, they're like, well, tell me what's true in the world, and that's not really what Facebook is about. Who can say what, when somebody's posting something like 90% of the time, there's no real truth or fiction to it, it's somebody's expressing their opinion or their belief or their point of view and I think I was thinking a lot about this with the sort of obsession with tracking numbers of shares and likes on Facebook as a sort of sign that people were following for this and I think that if you look at anybody's Facebook feed, when somebody posts something, you never know a lot of times they might be like, I don't know about this, what about you or do you, this seems really weird, right? That seems like a very, I feel like it would be interesting to look at the fake news and see how many were some sort of expression of like, huh, this seems weird, right? Sort of a cautious feeling it out and I feel like what I'm interested in is in the future of somebody really taking a look at Facebook as a genre and be like, okay, this is, when people sat down to read the paper, they had this expectation and this interaction with it and the people producing it had these impulses and norms and everything and it seems to me that the people who are producing content on Facebook, even though it's these fake news people who are very clearly wanted to see even prevalent lies, people who are really producing Facebook are the users who are sharing these things and the people reading it and that seems like a sort of genre unto itself of like a mix between fiction, personal essay, you know, news reporting and I don't think we have like a concept for what that really is. I totally agree and that what's missing is not so much like some system that will allow us to definitively know whether what we're reading is gonna be true or what we're reading is gonna be false. What we need is non-binary ways of responding. There should be like a button for like. Yeah, why aren't there more buttons? I always think that's right, like why is it binary? Why is it like, not like? Well, it's part of the whole economy of the way that the system was set up for profit, I imagine. A lot of math things. Like we were just talking about. A Mac could work, a Mac could work. But you guys talked to this thing about, I think the idea of media literacy is always about skepticism but I don't think that's it anymore. I think it's about having language for all these in-between states so that we could know like what level of belief is someone at when they're liking. Well, yeah, Virginia was comparing it to reading a, like she was in one of the wired articles, it was like, oh, there were those people who they saw a movie of a train and they all ran out of the auditorium and there were people who read novels and were like, ah, morality and like reality are over. And then people learned how to read those things as texts and not take them as reality. And I guess part of that is like we learned this idea of fiction as a willing suspension of belief, of, yeah, willing suspension of disbelief, disbelief. And that we could learn some way of reading Facebook as a text that has its own rules and there would be some sort of suspended, I guess that would be a non-binary state. Although, yeah, I've also been thinking about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction and how other languages don't seem to have it as much as English and what that's about. Well, can I ask, and just ask you and Adrienne one question about more ambivalent cases and then I'll turn it over to you guys, but these are from, the page is upside down. These are from earlier works and just to bring it back, I-R-L, or I-R-L for a second. So Adrienne wrote a piece in 2012 about a professional, more or less professional, writer troll named Michael Bruch. Bruch, is it? Yeah, who entered the name of Violent Acres.  And the weird and disorienting thing about this guy is he turned out to basically love child porn on one level of intensity in real life and then love child porn with another level of intensity online, but that there actually wasn't, it was a much more ambivalent relationship to his online persona. And then I was thinking about that in terms of your experience wearing a headscarf and how you were like, oh, where you weren't exactly infiltrating, it wasn't exactly kind of body snatchers kind of thing, but you weren't exactly all there either. And I was wondering if you guys could talk about these kind of non-binary, lived out states as you kind of perceived or experienced them yourself, where it's kind of a fake, but it's kind of not. Yeah, so this, the story that David mentioned was, sorry I wrote for Gawker in 2012, where I basically uncovered the identity of a notorious troll on Reddit who was very well known for sort of spreading all sorts of horrible content and moderating all of the worst parts of the site. And he had this persona that was kind of a celebrity among the community. He had t-shirts and he was on podcasts. So he wasn't really anonymous, he just had this persona. And I found out that his real name was Michael Bruch and he lived in Texas and was a programmer at a bank or something. And yeah, I guess I was very curious about who he was in real life. And as David mentioned, he was sort of like this similar deviant, like not nice guy who, like his family members all knew about his online life.  And it was, yeah, it was sort of like Adam's family of the internet troll. And I guess, yeah, I think there's this conventional wisdom about the internet and about the way that anonymity works to sort of let us become this different person when we get behind a screen. And we, yeah, it's a very like binary thing. What it seemed to me was going on in his case was that he had all these characteristics in him. He wasn't really able to do it in the real world because he wouldn't have to job or anything. But on Reddit, for all these different reasons, it was set up to sort of precisely reward those parts of him and to give it a platform. There was an audience for it. So it was really more of a platform for these things that he had in himself. And so I think that seems to me to be more a lot of the way that I've thought about when people sort of get online and do bad things. It's not this Jekyll and Hyde, it gives them a platform. And how the platform is shaped and what the incentives are will incentivize different parts of them or make it more easily accessible to express them, reward it. And yeah, I think that that's for the, for a large majority of people who go online, it's about like how the technologies are lines up with their inclinations. And then for a smaller part, I think there are a lot of people, and I think this was maybe a motivation in the earlier days of the internet with people who were sort of self-consciously experimenting with identity. And obviously that is a different group of people. And there are similar things going on, but I think I always look at like, okay, is this person going in there being like, I'm gonna create a new identity? He might be a different person, sort of role play in this game, or am I just using this as a sort of platform for these desires and thoughts that I can't get out otherwise? Yeah, that's so interesting. I think identity, it can be sort of a total fabrication, but often, or it's never just one thing, right? At best, it's a curated choice. So the piece with the headscarf, it was I had gone to a conservative, so I was born in America, but my family is from Turkey, and I would go back every summer, so I speak kind of crappy Turkish, and then I moved back there for a while, and the first question anyone asks you in Turkey is where are you from? And I would always think like, I have to give a short answer. What's less misleading? Is it less misleading if I act like I'm from Turkey, or is it less misleading if I act like I'm from America, if I don't wanna go into the whole story? So it's already, there's kind of like a selection that goes on. So then I was in this conservative city, Urfa, where there happened to be an archeological discovery there, but it was also a pilgrimage place, and there was the kind of most pleasant part of town was this garden that was a religious site, and to go into the place where Abraham was supposed to have been born, you had to wear, women had to cover their heads. So I had a headscarf in my back, so I wanted to go to the garden, I put it on, and then one day I just didn't take it off, I left and I walked in the garden, and I kind of made eye contact with some girls who were also covered, and I felt like I had a completely different experience, like they looked at me and smiled in a way that I hadn't felt connected, I realized that I hadn't felt connected to anyone the whole time I'd been in that city, like people had been kind of slamming door, like no one would hold the door when I was walking in somewhere, they were kind of mean to me in the hotel, like every day I went to the hotel, they were like, how many days are you staying here? Like all by yourself?  And then, and then when I was wearing that headscarf, it was kind of reminded me of like there was an Eddie Murphy sketch from SNL where he's like white for a day and he goes on the bus and like the people give a party for him because he got on the bus, it just felt like that, like I was late for a bus and they stopped the bus and a guy reached his hand down and was like, come on sister, let me help you on the bus. And I was like, really? This is what it is? But it was like, it did feel like play acting in a way, but in another way it felt like, I mean this is what people do here, so actually by not wearing the thing, I'm making like a statement that is, I don't really, it's like I'm going there and making a deliberate statement that I don't want to make, but if I put it on, I'm also making some kind of statement.  And I had partly felt like by not wearing it, I was defending my mother as a secularist and as someone who was really a supporter of the reforms and she was like, no, are you kidding? It's like, it's polite, like just it's the nice thing to do, just wear the thing when you're there. And I was like, oh, I don't know what reality is anymore, man. But also, because then it raises the question, because I would think it's like, maybe they're just being, maybe the headscarf doesn't mean to them that you're super religious, maybe it just means you're nice and that you're polite enough to wear the headscarf. Yeah, because I was still wearing my like running shoes that nobody there was wearing and I had, I was putting it on wrong because I didn't know how to do it right. Like, so I think, I don't even know when they saw me, what did they think? Did they think I was an American wearing it? Or, yeah, I would be kind of interested to know that.  Always tricky.  Mike's, there's Michael. So it's not just, it's not a question, just more of a thought. I have not read the, you said there's something in the study in MIT about, or done by MIT about people being kind of more drawn to lies than the truth. And what I was wondering is it maybe more that the lies are very often a little more simplistic and the truth may have more tendency towards complexity? That was just, I was wondering if they looked at that. And it's a hard thing to piece out. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Yeah, I think there goes, there's something about lies that are, they're neat. Oh, sorry. They're neat. I mean, for instance, in the fiction about the Marxist in Turkey, I mean, like what could be more satisfying than she's not just like someone who had some secular leanings, but also was kind of a meanie or whatever. There's like, she's just exactly what you want. And it could be, I think you're right, that simplicity, the elegance of fiction, as opposed to the gnarly mundanity of mundaneness of reality, I think is right. Yeah, more than confirmation bias. Just that, you just wanna hear, Obama I think just said, don't wait for someone that makes your spine tingle to vote for them. He meant like himself, because he's a perfect person, like that it was a fictional creation. But just vote for the work of day Joe, who's imperfect, and I thought the spine tingling was really interesting. Most candidates, you're not gonna have like a physical reaction to their... Oh, and Trump, we all do have a physical reaction. Right, that's true. That's probably why he is so compelling, and we keep talking about him, because he's so revolting. What's that? He's so close to being a person, but he's not. He's totally, he's almost a shade of hair that's been seen in nature.  Oh, yeah, who on the nose? Like that's, it's much, yeah, I mean, it's a different, yeah. I shared that picture all over the place. So, there've been moments since the Enlightenment when sort of discoveries in science have impacted the role of literature and culture and the arts in terms of scientific discovery, kind of causing people to maybe realize that there is no God or there is no man is not at the center of the universe or various things like that. On the question of persona, reality, authenticity, do you think there's any connection between a lot of the work that's being done in quantum physics these days on metaverses and alternative definitions of reality and alternative realities and sort of going back to all the questions that many people in philosophy thought were settled questions about, yes, this is really the physical world and we know how the physical world operates and we can have some certainty about this and now scientists are telling us, well, maybe this is the way the physical world operates in this universe but there are other universes where it doesn't operate like this and maybe atoms really can be in two places at once and maybe there are interactions between atoms that are operating throughout the universe and pinging each other with different messages. Could you just anybody comment whether there's any interaction between that development in science? I would, I mean, I would, I bet there's an argument that could be made. That's really evasive about not so much that, oh, now we understand that the universe is more like fiction or something but that what scientists can imagine can see as a possibility what they get interested in. It's not always necessarily the internal functioning of scientific research so they are a part of culture as well. I mean, I'm not saying that the, I'm not saying it's not true, I'm saying that what science does isn't separate from what culture does. Well, I also think that, yeah, that there's this, since the Enlightenment, like people got very kind of smug and excited about materialism and the invisible hand and self-interest and all of these ideas, like the person who was really into debunking these things was Dostoevsky who has in notes from the underground, the underground man is like, well, you can explain to me as long as you want why people acting like rational actors for their self-interest is gonna be good for everyone and we're all gonna live in a crystal palace and two plus two always equals four but I insist that two plus two sometimes equals five which is basically, I mean, it's the same kind of thing that there was this Newtonian idea of the universe where if everyone did their part everything was gonna be fine and that just turned out not to be true so, I mean, I feel like that is kind of related to quantum. I think that's exactly true and I would actually think about climate change in relation to this, it's kind of weird but that we are really at a point where our understanding of some of the most basic things like the difference between nature and culture is really under pressure and this is one of those times when what we, like, maybe what was wrong is a sort of Western, a particular kind of modern European Western conception of things because it's not like every culture has always thought that he had to suffer. Yeah, we thought everything was done and was separate and we'd solved it and then it just turned out that we weren't and we were missing community and there was this kind of like soullessness in it and people were getting destroyed and slaves were being oppressed and we just sort of didn't notice. That's what Russian novels are about. I know, I read... Should I have another question? Two scientific books recently that compared Schrodinger's cat to me or not to me and that that very metaphor rises in physics. Thank you. Hi. Is he really using this? So I was talking with my friend the other day and he's very into politics and he wants to run for office when he grows up. He always tries out his new campaign slogans and his ideas on me. I don't know why, but... So he came to me a few weeks ago and he says, okay, so I've got the, here's my new idea. My new idea is that I'm gonna be super frank and super honest with all of my voters and whenever I make an appearance I'm just gonna tell them exactly the facts that I'm facing and every decision that I make. And I was like, okay. You understand why that might not be so appealing. And he was like, I don't know.  We're dealing with some very hard problems. And so I think, and so I thought about it and I feel like in a way almost sort of pendulum, almost in the spirit of the theory of the dialectic, we might actually sort of revert back to a place where the truth and somebody who speaks explicitly the truth might even be as exciting as somebody fabricating fiction. Or better still, like maybe less exciting. Like maybe it's all just too thrilling. Yeah. You know, it would just be chill. Would you be more excited? I mean, would you be into it? Or would you be bored? Maybe, yeah, perhaps. Mama has in mind when he says don't wait for your spine to tingle. Like you will feel like, you know, it's coming off an intoxicant to just try to experience a sunset.  And I was just like, you've gotta be kidding me. Like what the, like sunsets happen all the time and who cares? And then suddenly I was like, I've moved very, very far away from just being a human on earth that I have like contempt for sunset. I don't know when that happens. The sun itself is under threat. Right, maybe. Or like Trump lied and said they're two suns so we're going down to the bridge tonight. I don't know. Well, the honest pose is actually something that the David's work explores, right? I don't know. It's actually, oh, sorry. Well, this is, the question that you raised is actually a debate that people, I heard people having in Japan and I saw it on TV that there's, because people have been, there's been such a high value placed on, it's a little different from here, on preserving some kind of equilibrium and preserving saving face and on preserving form. But now there's some people saying, oh, isn't it better to express what you're actually like? And there they have a whole different way of conceptualizing it than we do because we have, I'm saying them and we, but like, so in the West there's this idea of romanticism and authenticity in the true self where you just like say whatever and that has its own intrinsic value. And in Japanese culture, they don't have that.  So like here we have diplomacy too, but we also have like authenticity points, but there you don't. And it's interesting to see that those things can be variable. And I think it's super interesting to think that in the future here they could be sort of tuned differently too. Yeah, I mean it's just, I mean what I will drop in is one, I occasionally have a friend of mine and I just know this woman, a scholar named Shani Enelo, we like sit around and like freak out and try to understand what method acting was as a kind of 20th century moment. And it underlies most assumptions of what acting is, but it's very much from like the chest beating white t-shirt era of like post-war artistic production. Like Judith Rodenbeck has this point about like everyone was always in white t-shirts, like Pollock's in a white t-shirt, painting and Brando's in this white t-shirt like screening. But the whole weird thing about method acting was that you really, it made no sense because I mean it's acting, right? Like you're just supposed to like go in and like do your part and leave. And somewhere in the mid century just in America it got articulated as this thing that you really had to believe. And when you were acting you really had to show your authentic self.  It's exactly the rental crowd though. It's like exactly the same thing. Is it? Well, I don't know, I read the audio book of my novel which apparently you're not supposed to do only if you write non-fiction or you're supposed to read it. So I was sent there with a director, like a theater director, who kept telling me the words don't matter. This is what I always tell actors and I'm like, that's a great thing to tell actors. Maybe you just keep that to yourself when you're dealing with a writer. But he was like, it's all the emotion that you feel.  That's like... Yeah, but wait, so which end is that on? That's on the method acting end, I think. Yeah, but the thing is about the crowds is that when you talk to people who are actually rental crowd people, they're just like, oh yeah, it's fucking, I mean like literally, I mean it's a joke in the monologue but they literally listen to audio books. Really? Like yeah, because you're just a body, you're just there for the camera. And this actually, this is another, can I ask you a question? Like, or were you? The rental wedding guests in Japan really cry. See, that's it, yeah. But really cry. So there's, no, there's a wonderful piece by an artist. Help me, Laurel Nakadate, who did a piece, it was early in Facebook, so maybe 2005 or six. But she was tired of seeing everybody smiling all the time on Facebook. People only are posting their happy moments. So she did a series of photographs of her self crying every single day for a year and exhibited this 365 images. And she's actually crying, right? Like, it's tears, but she made herself cry. She didn't fake it, but she made herself cry. So then it's not, is it authentic, right? And so I just wanted, I have this like very pedantic need to insert a term, which is the performative. Because, so just really quickly, we usually think about statements as being true or false. Performatives are statements like I do in a wedding, which aren't really, you can't judge whether it's true or false, you have to judge whether it's effective or ineffective. Wait 50 years. Right, yeah. So if I say I change the name of the Brooklyn Museum to the Lambert Museum, it doesn't work, right? And that that model is often really helpful for thinking about some of these problems around authenticity. Because it almost says it doesn't matter quite so much. It's a more pragmatist sort of way of thinking about it. Yeah, I also, I mean, totally, I also think in terms of flexibility in the way of thinking about it, which is, I think, but that sort of speaks to a different, your point about how they really cry at a Japanese wedding whereas they really get into girl on a train, like an American crowd when they're just listening to books. I think that speaks to your point about you can have a much more flexible ratio here of where if you're not thinking about, if you're not only thinking about being it or faking it, then yeah, it's part of my, I will cry, I mean, who knows why they cried around the wedding, but it's had something more to do with the more... One of the guys says that someone was talking about their parents and I thought about my parents and I started to cry. Yeah. So like everyone has parents, just like everyone has eyes and tears. Right, and they're performing. But I guess what I was gonna ask you all said, now you got into this other interesting thing, but before I forget, there was a real vote for this kind of work, especially in the 90s and the odds and it feels like, to the point where I had a whole, kind of body work about something that happened to my family a while ago and everybody thought I was making it up because I was on the tail end of this, oh, this is like a crypto fiction. But like, so I guess, and they were like, oh, it was so detailed, I really thought it was real, it was a really interesting genealogy. God. This is my soul.  Do you think it was a crest of a banger? I do, I mean, it's starting to look that way to me. I mean, sadly for me because I've been working on a book about the stuff since that time, and now it's become history, which is awesome. Now you can be definitive. And if it has, like I think that things have taken on a really different feeling right now. And I definitely, I haven't encountered a lot of artists working in quite the same way lately, although there's usually a delay before I hear about it because it doesn't get announced in advance that someone's gonna do something fake. But I, in the book, one of the things that I'm, I'm trying to talk about this work as helping us practice ways of knowing in a time when our ways of knowing are changing, our values about knowledge, sort of what we count as true or not true, what we're willing to sort of live with in terms of contradiction, right? All of these kind of cultural variables around knowledge are clearly in some kind of a weird state. And that this was a way of, a first way of dealing with it, but we still see a lot of work that is dealing with knowledge and ways of knowing. But it may have moments of this in it, but more complex, more ambivalent. Well, I think there's a lot of work like that now just outside of sort of contemporary art context, right?  She has an entire universe of other people around her. And I think that it wasn't so explicitly a prank, right? It was more, I mean, of a viral marketing thing. And it seems like people maybe are more willing to suspend disbelief that things are, that are obviously persona aren't. I mean, you think about like brands on Twitter pretending to be, you know, people's friends or I mean, the way that I think there are a lot of apps that sort of replicate like an authentic human emotion that is sort of upfront about that it's not real, but you're kind of like willing to invest it anyway. So maybe one of the things that is happening is that that thing that they're trying to interrogate has become kind of mainstreamed and you don't have to like hide it anymore. And it's not just in the art gallery for an art audience, but yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, please. Tom Crow has this great phrase who is talking more about like advertising and stuff, but that avant-garde art is like the R&D department of the culture industry, right? The artists will do it, will kind of come up with something that's shocking and new and different and then it will become saleable and regular and common. It's a little bit of a return to the question about the sciences. There are sort of left-brained disciplines in particular, the Pentagon and the Justice Department that also have a take on these things. And someone recently, a Pentagon person, introduced me to the phrase, I find infinitely evocative, cogsack, cognitive security. So when we're talking about, you know, parallels knapsack and op-sack and all those sort of spy world things, but there's some way that we can keep our brains from being impeached by lies.    And now it seems ridiculous, but I spread some fake news on that matter. And if someone had told, you know, if I had been foaming at the mouth and had a fever and someone said, you have anthrax poisoning, I would say, I'm a victim of anthrax poisoning. And now I'm going to, you know, secure my immune system and be angry at the force that put this on me. But because I have such a closer work, you know, a tighter relationship with my, and pride in my cognition, I hated being fooled. I was like your person. And I just tried to think of a thousand reasons that I couldn't have been tricked, that I had done my own research and that I knew my stuff and that I would ever, finally I had to like formally correct my mistake and, you know, take better care of my coccyx. And guess what you said publicly, I was wrong, right? Which is for some reason, something that is incredibly hard to do. I mean, this is why Katherine Schultz's book being wrong, I think is brilliant on this, but that what if we could change that about culture? You know, what if that's what some of this art is helping us learn to do? What if like our dignity isn't wrapped up in being right all the time? Like the Trump ploy pleasure that you might say, God, those lines really did look like they were the same distance. And now I see that they're not or whatever. I don't know. Do you guys have, I'm getting a signal which means we have time for a couple more questions. If questions there are, you're a question, yeah. I was so interested in this like kind of powerful violent moment after someone realizes that they've been defrauded and how usually they have a really violent, very negative reaction to it. And then in a couple of cases, they don't. Like, Elif in the case of the woman whose husband had lied. And in the case of Carrie, in your case, when they were talking about the museum and so many people were like, what was the point of this?  And then there was one person like, oh, this was actually kind of interesting and it made me learn something about myself. And I was thinking about, there was kind of an art project. I don't know if you guys remember this like in 2011, I think, where someone had a video account on YouTube and it was supposed to be a vlog of this girl's life. Does anyone remember this? It was called like Scribe Girl or something like that. You guys remember? And it was like, lonely, that was it. And she, and sorry? Oh, okay, it was, I'm sorry, 2006. But the basic premise of it was like, it was this really sort of boring girl just talking about her life. And then like weird things started happening in the background and like it became clear that like maybe she had like a bad ex-boyfriend or like a bad father, some nefarious person in her life just like making things worse and worse and worse. And it happened over a long period of time and then she like disappeared and everyone was like, oh my God. And then it turned out to just be like a fictionalized vlog. And I remember at that point, my reaction to it, and I think most people's reaction to it, although who remembers like how they reacted to things 10 years ago, was like, oh, wow, this is so exciting. I didn't feel, I don't think, I didn't feel like I'd been duped. And I'm just sort of curious what you guys think, like why you think sometimes people respond with such a violence and sometimes it really feels like this magical experience that you've been given instead. It's like augmenting our lives. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I keep thinking about the aesthetic running through some of these conversations and that sort of, that's an aesthetic appreciation for an epistemic issue, right? And maybe, maybe that's why this is something really interesting for an artist. I do think also that there's a certain aspect of, some people can afford to enjoy illusions and you know, like a lot of us probably, I was trained in the now disgraced post-structuralism and I like the play of surfaces and when someone is talking about an appreciator of child porn who also appreciated offline, we don't off-flinch and think someone needs to make a citizen's arrest because we're in a setting where we're not thinking about the election, we're not thinking about detentions at the border, we're not thinking about the gobbles like propaganda that has like sold that as a strategy of deterrence or how a Nazi just a valid Nazi, he's playing a Nazi or is he a Nazi? One, the Republican primary outside Chicago for the Congress. So once you start thinking that way, you can sort of see where the Pentagon intersects. You know, I'm not gonna explain to the Pentagon that like Derrida thinks it's a lot of fun to have your mind confused about what's real and not. You know, yeah. I think it depends so much on the individual person and the context and sort of the way that it goes about. I had, it just reminded me of sort of a firsthand experience with, I had some friends who are in this band yacht and they're sort of like an indie electronic duo and they wanted to do this sort of publicity stunt for their new single where they pretended that somebody had made a sex tape or like somebody had leaked a sex tape about them, right? And you know, they were like trying to get all their friends to like tweet about it and they were going to post a sort of, you know, apologetic email, their couple. And then they did it and it became this huge outrage sort of how could you make light of sort of the problem of revenge porn, right? How could you sort of trivialize the fact that these people are being abused and hurt by this kind of thing and you know, sort of a lot of people, you know, or like questioning their motives and questioning their, I think a lot of it is about like empathy, right?  Like don't you have any empathy for the people who will get all invested in this and worried about you or not. And to me, I think a lot of people are just like shocked that somebody could be so supposedly like callous or cruel and I think that level of judgment totally depends on the project, right? Because it's like, yeah. The framing of it too, because like we watch theater and we understand it as a gift. This deception was a gift for us and we can go and watch Hamlet. But if it was like actually some guy who was like, I can't decide whether to kill myself and you were like always worried about him and then afterwards he was like just kidding, just a show, you'd be like, annoyed. Also, one other, I was expecting that you would, on the, what is her name, Fay, the, right?  And then you create a fraudulent one that only says, see, we showed you. There are, you have to make one up. There's no Shakespeare sister. There's no secret hidden figures through all this. You can't think of a single one so you had to make one up entirely.  I don't know. I mean, did anyone say that? I haven't heard that about that piece, possibly because of how it's carefully framed. So that because it is an archive, and it's this, you know, you experience some material as an archive, it becomes a piece about what is saved, what's in the archive, which flips it. I think it's also because it's practically, it's practically a canonical piece at this point. I think it would have been a new piece. I mean, it was sort of, I mean, I think people were more like, oh yeah, that. Like, you know, there's newer fights to fight. Like that's from 93, like whatever. Like, I mean, I feel like if it had just come out now, it might have been much more controversial. I mean, I can't say I was happy that Time Magazine put someone on the cover to look and sit, you know, as if she'd been separated from her parents and it turned out factually, she was not separated from her parents. It makes you think, oh, there isn't this violence being done at the border and Time Magazine even couldn't find the right crying child to exemplify this argument. I mean, that's not a lot of fun, you know? Yeah. And on that note, I'm getting it. Sorry, there's not a lot of fun note we're getting a time signal. Is there a better way to wrap this up?  I have a prescription for how to like ease our brains, which is watch Rosemary and Time or Broadchurch or one of these fiction, one of these detective stories because they're clearly fiction and yet you have all these people with alibis saying they didn't do it, pretending where they were, but at the end you have someone come in and say, this is exactly what happened. The gift and payoff that we don't usually get in life. Re-detective fiction and watch C-SPAN only. World Cup soccer helps a lot too. And World Cup. All right, thank you guys for coming. Thank you guys for participating.


Hi, I'm Daniel Romery, a graduate student in biomedical engineering. I'm part of a team of students, faculty, and alumni running a 20.19 mile relay. This is just one of the many fun activities happening on Purdue Day of Giving. Over the last five years, we've raised more than $42 million, with 7,240 gifts from our loyal alumni and friends. We want 2019 to be another record year. Purdue Engineering's graduate program is consistently ranked in the top 10 in U.S. news, and we are honored to have alumni support for these programs, including transformational gifts like earnest and monocle gamborals to name the Graduate School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And also Chris and Susan Burke, establishing one of the nation's first named civil engineering graduate programs, granting opportunities for students like me through awarding scholarships, upgrading facilities, hiring professors, and more. Purdue Engineering's newest concept, the Gateway Complex, is purpose-driven, collaborative, and efficient. A place for our programs and for our people. There are plans, though, to even a student center. A perfect place to study for my engineering exams. Always looking ahead to re-envision our space, Engineering has already begun to transform the material science and electrical engineering building. The new Student Design Studio allows for collaborative design, and the EC Administrative Suite provides central access to faculty, staff, and students. Oh, and I can't forget to mention the new Starbucks, thanks to Latte Engineering. Help support us with your gift of 2019 and whatever form fits your lifestyle. Join us. Join us. Join us for Day of Giving on April 24th.


Purdue, I know, has a good reputation, so they attract many brilliant awesome students. So I was very happy that I will have the opportunity to work with those students. I believe like everyone is different. That's why I'm very interested in working with community houseworkers because they know their community very well. So we can make sure all of our education, our services we provide to support people from different backgrounds and a diverse population and to have better health equity. Being a part of this class higher, it will be amazing to learn different perspectives and how can we work together to improve the public health in Indiana.