Meet Miquela – the Instagram cyborg with 900k followers
This is Lil Miquela.
Shes a 19-year-old Brazilian American influencer, model and pop star whos Instagram is chock-full of photos of her sporting Chanel, Supreme and Prada.
Among all the candid selfies, her feed also shows her hanging out with other models and musicians.
And although shes got 900,000 followers, shes not actually real.
Miquela is a computer-generated cyborg and no one knows who has created her.
Once you realise that shes basically a Sim, she starts to look less genuine. Although loads of her followers have clocked, some are still confused – and some just dont seem to care. They still comment on how much they love her hair or clothes.
So maybe were at a post-fake-news stage, when it comes to aspirational content.
After all, Miquela does use her platform for good. Shes a Black Lives Matter advocate, as well as working for trans rights. In fact, she claims to have written loads of letter to Congress in support of the trans community. Suddenly the line between fiction and truth becomes incredibly blurry.
Essentially, Lil Miquela is everything we know Instagram to be; unrealistic, highly stylised content that tries to masquerade as reality.
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She, like all these Instagrammers, looks incredibly cool and stylish thanks to a hefty dose of filtering (or in this case, computer generation). The person behind her account is irrelevant – its who we see on the feed that counts.
And although we know most of the stuff we see online isnt real, we still cant help but be drawn in – comparing our miserable, humdrum lives to other peoples curated reality.
Expect to see more accounts like Miquelas in the future…and to fully lose grip on reality.
H/T Refinery29
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