My friends who visit San Francisco always comment on how different our advertising is. Step off the plane at SFO and you’re immediately surrounded by billboards promising AI solutions. They say it feels like traveling to the future, but really it’s because this jargon isn’t meant for them—the targets are enterprise buyers, other companies. The non-tech residents of the Bay have been swept aside from the ads and from the city; our paychecks are not big enough for what is being sold. Our public spaces have been claimed by companies selling tools we may never use but will certainly be used on us.
I have been documenting the city’s transformation unintentionally. My séance video took inspiration from the background of my personal photos and videos: taxis giving way to Ubers, then autonomous vehicles, changing ads, the loss of art spaces, and the growth of poverty in front of AI offices. The narratives and images of AI circulate both online and off. AI aesthetics is not relegated to generative art slop. It’s everywhere.
Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics, turning domination into spectacle. AI operates similarly. We are trapped, engaging with the different varieties of AI spectacle instead of engaging with political urgency. Magicians call these kinds of options a “forced choice.” While we pick between topics of varying importance on the future of AI or a sector impacted by AI, these systems hide under the veneer of magic as they are deployed daily in ways that determine who gets to live or die. This misdirection is central to how AI operates as a political vision and not just as a tool. It’s a belief system.
Magicians are belief workers. I’ve spent a lot of time watching magic tricks – I’m married to a professional magician. Some of his magician friends have former careers in marketing. Watch AI CEOs speak about how their products will change the world. They may sound like knowledge workers, but they function as belief workers.
The 7 Billion Dollar Séance reveals how AI culture functions as technological spiritualism that channels our collective grief and suffering against our own interests. I position myself and the public as vulnerable due to different kinds of grief; personal and political. The séance metaphor examines how we’re made vulnerable to false hope – promises of avoiding superintelligence risk, uploading our minds, or solving climate change – while actual material violence goes unchecked.
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Şerife Wong