Tombstoned: Appendix D

Deep Fakes and the Democratization of Reality

“The albatross hanging around your neck? Sometimes it belongs to someone else. When that happens, you’ve got to find that rotten bastard and toss him overboard before the whole damn ship runs aground and you’re fighting for your life on Captain Cook’s Cannibal Island.”—Wyatt Duvall

The age of the deep fake is upon us. And while it frightens many, Wyatt Duvall would surely rejoice at its arrival.

After all, the noted prankster, bathroom stall philosopher, and provocateur launched what would ultimately become the deep fake era years ago while leading the team of creative ne’er do wells at the hoax-generating marketing company, Diversified Solutions, Inc.

Not that anyone knew that is what Duvall had done.

Alongside Jay Hamilton, the chief disruption officer at DSI and the head of the firm’s Hazardous Toys: Choking Division, Duvall experimented in the then-nascent form of computer mimicry known as “deep fakes.”

At the time, the goal Duvall and Hamilton had set before DSI’s Presidential Alert Team was ambitious: broadcast a series of announcements from the current president of the United States -- then Barack Obama.

Few recordings from that experiment exist since Duvall and Hamilton only targeted small media markets served by understaffed, underfunded television and often at hours when a skeleton crew, at best, and an intern, at worst, was at the helm.

Furthermore, the DSI team only targeted one location at a time and no location twice.

Fortunately, we now have a detailed synopsis of the campaign thanks to an interoffice report from DSI.

It’s a fascinating look at the nature of this dangerous campaign, one that targeted a staggering 45 media markets.

In hindsight, it’s amazing Duvall and Hamilton’s experiment didn’t have more real-world implications.

Make no mistake, the DSI duo fully intended to cause havoc.

Hamilton explains in a newly surfaced interoffice report:

“Wyatt believes that no two channels should be targeted at one time, since, he theorizes, the viewer of a false Presidential Alert will feel more anxiety if the message is only found on one channel.

As the viewer flips, first to the cable news network of their political inclinations and then to its competitors and finally through every channel, they will become increasingly agitated as they find the story left unreported.

Most will doubt their sanity.

But a few will feel personally chosen.

And from that point on, chaos reigns.

That individual is our target audience.”

Given Duvall’s passion for hoaxes, wily sleuths have attempted to come up with reasons for the Presidential Alert team’s dismantling. However, another recently discovered document sheds light on Duvall’s feelings.

Some scholars suggest the answers may be found in a 2015 interview. The circumstances under which the video was shot are unknown. Further investigation is certainly warranted.

Regardless, the Presidential Alert project was clearly on the prankster’s mind:

“Look, man, reality is what you make it, and if it was up to me, back in 2009 we would have had an entire season of “‘Real World: Key West’ with President Obama and Snooki as bunkmates.

But the rendering time was just too much for the hardware we had at Diversified Solutions.

All other work would have ground to a halt.

I mean, I’m glad we live in a world with Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

In fact, I don’t know what I’d do without it.

And yoni eggs, too.

It takes more bandwidth than you think to workshop those ideas.

But there was a philosophical reason as well: it was just too much power in one man’s hands.

My hands, man.

Or Jay’s hands.

Whoever else it may be at DSI.

We could deep-fake Goatse into every My Catheter commercial, but is that right?

Is it good?

Does society truly benefit?

Is it fair?

The answer is no, no, no, and no.

No one person should have that power.

It should everyone’s.”

These thoughts were on Duvall’s mind when he turned his attention to “Tombstoned,” his discarded second novel.

In email correspondence with Sally Field Ferguson, DSI director of disinformation, Duvall writes:

“The book [“Tombstoned”], if it’s about anything, it’s the democratization of reality.

Whatever anyone wants to be true becomes true.

The point is, reality is yours.

It’s mine.

It’s everyone’s.

To shape, to mold, to manipulate.

The narratives of our lives should be written by our own hands.

History is ours for the making.”

With this in mind, we are left to ask ourselves this: do we want to live in a world of ceaseless, never-ending individual interpretation and chicanery? The gradual death of consensus and a shared reality?

I don’t.

Unfortunately, that world may already be here.

—Candice Hertz

The following excerpt appeared in the August-September 2020 issue of the leading general interest tech mag Plugged In. All online traces of its existence have been deleted.