Welcome to GR Online, a new series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
In 2023, we’re delighted to be publishing three regular online contributors: Jumaana Abdu, Sam Elkin and Amber Gwynne. In addition to work by these three stellar writers, we’ll also be publishing occasional pieces by other contributors throughout the year. Stay tuned!
The future is hackable
Deepfakes point to a future that is simultaneously euphoric and apocalyptic: philosophers have positioned them as ‘an epistemic threat to democracy’, journalists have called them ‘the place where truth goes to die’, futurists have portrayed them as the digital harbinger of a mass ‘reality apathy’ in which even video will be a lie.
From Russia with love
The 'socialisation of women' narrative arose from journalistic innovations associated with the First World War. In response to an unprecedented demand for up-to-date news, the Australian press had embarked on rapid technological change. Editors installed steam- and rotary-powered printing machines, established distribution fleets of automobiles and trucks, and hooked up their newsrooms to telephone lines.
Rogues’ gallery
In the age of technological optimisation, we are equally as preoccupied with entertainment as we are with devoting leisure time to projects of self-actualisation. The contemporary success of art museums rests on their ability to compound the entertainment value of an amusement park with the promise of an educational experience.
Detachable penis
Three years into my transition during the 2021 lockdowns, my online shopping habit became a full-blown addiction. One of the weirder things that I purchased was a petite crocheted penis and testicles, hand-stitched by a crafty ‘bear’ called Devon. Each package was made-to-order, so I could choose everything from the shaft length to colour and testicle size. I could’ve even added ball hair.
The trick that tells the truth
As subjects of late capitalism, we’ve become inured to the amoral cynicism inherent in relentless corporate marketing; yet both the good faith of our human nature and the susceptibility of our lizard brains ensure that we also remain receptive... In 2020, the disjunction between AGL’s public relations and the truth of the company’s business practices was highlighted and ridiculed in the public realm, ending in a court case of profound significance on Australia’s twisted road to belated action on climate change.
About face
A medical student can...graduate with an undergraduate degree and put up a shingle proclaiming themself a cosmetic surgeon the very next day. ... Why wouldn’t a consumer assume that a surgeon is a surgeon is a surgeon?
The future of art fraud
Over lunch with the international art auctioneer, I told him the art dealer – a mutual acquaintance – said she would ‘support’ my work at auction. She explained that if an artwork didn’t receive enough bids during an auction, she would bid to buy it for a higher amount. Then there would be a public record of my work being sold for the value assigned by her, which she would show people when reselling it privately.
No name for the country
For the past thirty-odd years, Hideo has worked exclusively in Japanese, publishing several novels and collections of criticism and essays. Why Japanese? is a question he is often asked. It harbours a kind of suspicion: why would a native speaker of the English language, the language of power and prestige and capital ... give it all up in favour of a comparatively minor language, a marked and ethnicised tongue?
Will we dance when it’s over?
On New Year’s Day 2022, protesting Victoria’s vaccine mandate…a man in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond set himself on fire in his car. Onlookers who came to his rescue described him as ‘off his face, yelling about the mandate’. For a few days afterwards, he was reported as fighting for his life from injuries sustained in the blaze. Months later, when writing this essay, I went back to find out if he survived. There were no reported updates. [Such] protests, however you feel about their motivation, are…desperate, extreme acts of communication. But their deaths may as well be Fortnite deaths, may as well be part of a simulation, for their surreal absence of effect. These men are simply lost to the storm, no longer spoken about. But why does the response to the loss of human life, and a reckoning with their intentions, feel just as detached as the reaction to the disappearance of a cartoonish avatar? The stakes in our real world have reached a point so high, so close to apocalypse, that they’ve disappeared entirely. We are gripped by a nihilism and unnerving sense of unreality, and so we don’t receive the messages others are trying to send to us.
Art, AI and figuring the future
There is an eeriness in the anonymous way DALL-E and Midjourney create art... The artist is nowhere and everywhere, like a ghost inside the machine. We see the rendering of images, but nothing that makes the design process more relatable.
The money shot
Pornography challenges our very constructions of what is ‘real’. It complicates questions about how we understand ‘real’ consent, for example. There may not be anyone forcing young people to follow the pornographic script. But with so much influence on young people’s sexual imaginations, pornography is setting the cultural context within which they do sex and gender.
Outside, Mona Lisa
Where bushwalking is concerned, Tasmanian maps are not an authentic picture of the landscape. They’re fine if you want to stick to well-known trails, but if the track has been assigned a T4 rating it won’t be on the map. Sometimes that’s because the route is so rough it would be misleading to mark it as a track, but sometimes it’s that for a range of management and environmental purposes, the PWS just doesn’t want many walkers going there.
