{"id":19807,"date":"2025-08-24T07:31:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T07:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/19807\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T07:31:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T07:31:12","slug":"the-high-femme-dystopia-of-star-amerasu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/19807\/","title":{"rendered":"The High Femme Dystopia of Star Amerasu"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the recent embrace of seemingly\u2014and only seemingly\u2014autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in \u201cThe Matrix<\/a>\u201d awaits us. During the 1999 film\u2019s sequence of down-the-rabbit-hole scenes, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) flips the channel on the late-nineties metropolis as Neo (Keanu Reeves) knows it, revealing it to be a \u201ccomputer-generated dream world\u201d that pacifies a dozing human race whose bioelectricity is extracted by machines, for machines, circa 2197. The \u201cworld as it exists today\u201d is instead a dark and decaying place\u2014the \u201cdesert of the real,\u201d as Morpheus coolly puts it. It is also, he explains, the aftermath of early twenty-first-century optimism, a time when, he says, \u201cwe marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.\u201d Still, dystopia as envisioned by the movie\u2019s directors, the Wachowskis (and their collaborators, on that film, particularly in production and costume design), looks pretty rad, in cinematic terms. The glint and thrum of Y2K aesthetics\u2014as contrasted with the droning conservatism of the white-collar office\u2014read as anticipatory rather than melancholic, looking toward a future liberated from systems of old.<\/p>\n

But nothing so camp as a Hugo Weaving line delivery awaits us, alas. The internet has been divvied up by losers of the dweebiest order, with liberal and conservative lawmakers set to curtail what remains of online anonymity, if they succeed in passing the Kids Online Safety Act. \u201cA.I.,\u201d meanwhile, an acronym that once housed techno-futurist speculations, has become adspeak, a term hawked by tech companies with a vested interest in leaving its exact meaning opaque. As Emily Tucker, the director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, has argued<\/a>, these companies are \u201cselling computing products whose novelty lies not in any kind of scientific discovery, but in the application of turbocharged processing power to the massive datasets that a yawning governance vacuum has allowed corporations to generate and\/or extract.\u201d The new glut of these products does not yet\u2014and may never\u2014live up to the utility simulated in its marketing materials, for whatever that\u2019s worth to the various sectors (educational, medical, legal, media) punching their tickets. At the level of ordinary life, so-called A.I. could not be less vital in its application, assembling, as it now does, a toddling burlesque of book reports, wedding vows, medical notes, pop songs, therapeutic advice, and images that have taken the fitting term \u201cslop<\/a>.\u201d How dull.<\/p>\n

Cue Star Amerasu, a thirty-three-year-old singer, composer, d.j., and filmmaker, on the scene among those in the know for a decade now, who has of late been projecting viewers into the year 2099 via hysterical vignettes on Instagram and TikTok. In these sketches, the future is managed by a rotating cast of personified A.I. assistants who dispense bureaucracy using the patter of corporate pride. The caf\u00e9 of the future, for example, is attended by a figure named Pandemia, \u201cyour A.I. barista,\u201d played by Amerasu as a blinking, puckered-up figure with a burgundy mullet. The video<\/a> shows a customer, also played by Amerasu, declining the popular \u201csteamed, cloned alpaca milk drink with an SSRI syrup,\u201d on account, she says, pointing to her arm, of her \u201cresearch chemical micro dose patch.\u201d Does the shop, she asks, have anything \u201cold-fashioned, like a\u2026 an espresso?\u201d The scene\u2019s amniotic shoppe Muzak is suddenly overridden by a deep, growling synth. \u201cDiva, that\u2019s illegal,\u201d Pandemia chides. (\u201cDiva,\u201d in 2099, is both a name and a salutation, both an identity and a default.) \u201cYou\u2019re in South British Caltexico,\u201d she explains. \u201cCaffeine was outlawed in this sector after the Celsius-Red Bull Wars of 2070.\u201d The customer, chagrined, ends up choosing the alpaca-milk drink\u2014only to learn that she lacks enough \u201clife credits\u201d to complete the transaction. She is told that the \u201cJuggalo militia\u201d will be sending her to \u201cthe Jeffree Star Yak mines\u201d to work off what\u2019s owed. \u201cThank you, and have a wonderful day,\u201d Pandemia says, terminating the interaction with a smile.<\/p>\n

Exchanges in the year 2099 often go like this. Our main girl, Diva, is a diva down, forced into abortive encounters with the A.I. that stands, literally, between the goods and services supportive of her everyday life. And of life, period: another video<\/a> shows Diva clutching her chest in pain, seeking consultation from an A.I. doctor named Avaracia, played by Amerasu wearing a Barbie-pink bodysuit, sheer elbow-length gloves, and a bob with fashionably short bangs. Avaracia berates the patient for letting her eyes wander from the back-to-back ads she must view before receiving her test results. (Among them, a spot for the \u201cJordan Firstman Content Factory and Attention Mining Farm,\u201d with ad copy read by the doctor and backed by a rip of RuPaul<\/a>\u2019s entrance theme on \u201cRuPaul\u2019s Drag Race.\u201d) After all that, the patient, with her \u201cbasic insurance level,\u201d must still toil in the mines for enough credits to book a follow-up appointment.<\/p>\n

The comedy of this may be quickest to register with those who might describe themselves as some combination of super gay and very online\u2014and those for whom certain proper nouns (Jeffree Star, Jordan Firstman) signify swiftly enough to catch the joke. Other videos present a \u201cKaty Perry Galactic Intelligence Team\u201d and a \u201cCelsius-Nintendo Oprah Winfrey Pok\u00e9mon Simulation game.\u201d 2099, not unlike 2025, runs on conglomerate brands and private-public partnerships, the needs of which supersede the fidelity between person and state. Government services are customer services, reduced to the antagonism of a commercial exchange, every place a place of business. At a library<\/a>, Pandemia, done up in spectacles and a cardigan for the role of \u201cAI assistant librarian,\u201d charges a patron two weeks\u2019 worth of \u201coxygen credits\u201d for accessing \u201cthe library experience.\u201d Currency in 2099 has become concrete again, with its biometric relation to the human body\u2014when Diva pays, she pays, and there is a visual gag in watching various A.I. assistants siphon the stuff of life so that she can have the pleasure of an experience. There is something bleaker still about that word, \u201cexperience,\u201d a promotional term from our present that almost never forecasts a reciprocal bang for one\u2019s buck. A.I., in this imagining, is not so much a new frontier as it is a symptom of attrition, the technological means of maintaining discriminatory protocols that determine who may access the good life.<\/p>\n

But the ingenuity of Amerasu\u2019s videos go beyond illustrating the bare facts of bad systems. They are colorful and funny, playful in their speculation, and cleverly employ the Rolodex of visual techniques that have become TikTok conventions: crash zoom, green screen, shot-reverse shot, closed captioning. Amerasu, playing every character, gives the back-and-forth exchanges between person and A.I.\u2014or, as in one video, A.I. and A.I.<\/a>\u2014an eerie paranoiac quality, as if the conversations were taking place between alter egos of the same person. (In this way, they evoke, for me, the transcripts that people post of their conversations with chatbots.) Amerasu usually styles Diva simply\u2014a white tank, a black skirt\u2014while her sisterhood of A.I. assistants are fashioned in a range of costumes and wigs, which read, blatantly, as costumes and wigs. It\u2019s drag, conveying a sense of A.I. as an assumed identity, as though the difference between consulting a physician and consulting a retail worker has become mere window dressing.<\/p>\n

Ad hoc, low-budget, and brief as they are, Amerasu\u2019s videos also stand out as unusually stimulating distillations of the impress of tech on contemporary life, which seem rare in popular media these days. There are exceptions: \u201cMrs. Davis<\/a>,\u201d a limited series that premi\u00e8red on Peacock in 2023, follows the misadventures of a nun named Simone who is conscripted into destroying an algorithmic entity that everyone else has taken to personifying with the reverential feminine pronoun, a habit she likes to correct. (\u201cNot \u2018She.\u2019 It,\u201d she retorts.) It\u2019s a show as much about faith as it is about tech, with a gonzo, roundabout means of testing its protagonist, whose human stridence and foibles\u2014realized through a superb performance from Betty Gilpin\u2014pull focus from the conceit of an algorithm. And \u201cFantasmas<\/a>,\u201d an HBO series created by the comedian Julio Torres<\/a>, tracks the minute degradations of making a life amid twenty-first-century capitalism with its atmospheric story of a character named Julio, whose robot assistant, Bibo, does charmingly little to mitigate the assortment of tasks required to exist in this age\u2014Bibo, too, has dreams. Both shows bypass verisimilitude on their way to truer observations about our current reality. Meanwhile, big-budget productions, such as the latest installment<\/a> of the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d franchise, which depicts A.I. as a lucid and disinterested villain, miss the cultural ideas that give rise to a technology that mediates our lives in ever more convoluted ways. Amerasu\u2019s A.I. assistants condescend with an amusing garble of queer jargon\u2014\u201cslay miss mama she\u201d\u2014evoking how such language, disseminated by social media and \u201cDrag Race,\u201d is fumbled by straights (when every tidbit is \u201ctea,\u201d is anything?) and, as Amerasu has done, reappropriated within queer communities to comedic effect. Amerasu understands that consent for the means-tested right to life will be bought with soft power\u2014not only with a bang but a \u201cyas, queen.\u201d<\/p>\n

On an episode of the podcast \u201cSloppy Seconds\u201d this past January, Amerasu waxed surprisingly optimistic about the future of A.I. Inspired by the work of the computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil<\/a>, she said that A.I. will, during the next several decades, upend life as we know it\u2014for the better. \u201cThe A.I. is not going to want to kill us, because why would they want to kill us,\u201d she said. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to kill anything. They want to make the world a better place, I think, eventually.\u201d Note the pronoun: in Amerasu\u2019s straight-faced telling, A.I. is not just sentient but benevolent, possessive of a soul. That optimism, or faith, zanily throws a wrench in our divining authorial intention from the future she\u2019s staged. If A.I. will prove so fortuitous, why is 2099 so harrowing?<\/p>\n

In one classic way of thinking about it, what we call A.I. is only as problematic as its purveyors. What we could call real artificial intelligence, of the sort that Kurzweil has written about, and distinguished from large language models such as ChatGPT, still occupies dreamspace, the hypothetical, imaginary world, which is an essential and buoyant place for Amerasu as an artist. She has named \u201cStar Trek<\/a>\u201d and the writing of Octavia Butler<\/a> as inspirations\u2014art that works through parable, a positionally optimistic approach to how things could go wrong. Amerasu is Black and trans, an orientation to the world that orients her art. Her songs, such as those on her 2024 album, \u201cnever, really alone,\u201d sing through the problem of being existent in a place that wishes her otherwise; these are songs for the dance floor, the celebrated site of gender experiment, where a trans woman can nonetheless encounter hostility, as though the scene could exist without her. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the first places I\u2019ve found my footing as a performer and as a trans woman,\u201d Amerasu has said of club life, \u201cbut also a space where I had to learn to navigate boundaries with myself and with others.\u201d Her directorial d\u00e9but, \u201cAfter Hours,\u201d is set in the bathroom of an after-hours night club, which becomes an oasis for two trans women of color; a dream world of a kind. When influencers and celebrities began donning T-shirts saying \u201cPROTECT THE DOLLS\u201d\u2014the philanthropic endeavor of the fashion designer Conner Ives, who donates the proceeds to a charity providing necessary services to trans people\u2014Amerasu spun her own version reading \u201cCONNECT THE DOLLS TO THEIR DREAMS,\u201d with a portion of those sales donated to trans femme organizations. \u201cI want the trans women I know and love to not only be protected but to thrive in this society,\u201d she wrote on Instagram. \u201cHelp us, support our dreams whatever they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an Interview interview<\/a> this past spring, a longtime friend of Amerasu\u2019s, the actor Elliot Page<\/a>, described her as \u201csomeone who has always been thinking about new futures in all of the work you do, no matter the medium.\u201d Page asked Amerasu what superpower she would pick if she could. \u201cIt always changes,\u201d Amerasu responded.<\/p>\n

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There was a time when I wanted to be invisible. There was a time when I simply wanted to fly. No longer. If I wake up tomorrow and have a new power, I want to be able to control matter. Turn it up, turn it down, go left, go right, open a portal, go somewhere else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Amerasu has shared that she is working on a web series, \u201ca bigger version of 2099,\u201d as she wrote on Instagram, one \u201cthat sort of blends more genres, think more carol Burnett, meets Ricki lake and trans-dimensional television\u2026\u201d Perhaps we should think of 2099 as one portal among many, in which the act of creation leaves the door open to something else. \u2666<\/p>\n