Death via Digitization: online, on chain, o(w)n me!

Darius White
Oct 16
8 min read

Updated: Nov 19

Across my feed came a dancing Kai Cenat as a Fortnite character, doing Tylil's signature chest-pat prance to Kanye West’s “Violent Crimes.”

“Fallin’, dreamin’.”

This young Black man from New York city has become the biggest streamer in the world. Well-deserved. Brand deals everywhere. A-list celebrities and athletes strolling in to check in with him and the chat. He made it, I thought. They made it, I worried; did the corps take his corpse? Fortnite took his likeness. Well, it was a fair exchange, right? I don’t know. More like foreshadowing of the inevitable passing of corporeal punishment, perhaps?

The Matrix. Type-sh*t. Type-sh*t. What is the moral code when you’re eventually just code? Just a transfer of energy, maybe not power.

I used to wonder, but now I know that we, the people, the payers, and the pensives as well as the presidents, the policy-makers, and the pimps will be digitized to death and beyond. Yes, I said pimps. Not to glorify but pimpin' will never die. From the cradle to the games, your body may be buried six feet deep while your body of work may virtually live on virtually to be consumed, commodified, commercialized, compromised, characterized, caricatured…and or corrupted… how (in)convenient!

Your death (and disenfranchisement) may be collateral damage as the world digitizes. Death by digitization started with the radio, the computer, and the video games. I don’t dream of the day when I play 2K with a team of late great players. People’s efforts and essence have been captured via paper, pixels, and productions for decades. Sometimes, people’s souls and stories are immortalized in the hieroglyphics, the paintings, and the music. Hell, there is a little bit of me in every lesson plan I design and deliver.

I can’t remember if Eric B. and Rakim wrote “Check out, my male..melo— melancholy.” Sorry in advance, I am going to be a cyber-punk for this post…more like a “cyber Karen”…I don’t want to take up too much emotional space, but I want to inform you that we are in the middle of a digital revolution.

Again, what are the ethics and implications behind ongoing digitization? Think, ancestral spirits and wisdom may be trapped in catalogs and e-states, only to be digitally revived, revised, or revoked by some unknown or known governmental or corporate entity. They say the remixes are always better than the originals.

As a writer and teacher, I believe my power lies in my imagination, my consciousness, and my thoughts. Ironically, the cause of my material death and mental decay will be my imagination, my consciousness, and my thoughts, especially if what I am seeing, hearing, thinking, believing, and remembering isn’t real or true. I wish the nebulous and nefarious “they” (influential individuals and institutions) did not control our collective imagery, imaging, and imagining. As a ghetto boy from Texas, I know the song with that one line: guess my media playin' tricks on me.

Technology is hollowing us out. From the kids to adults, we have become "screenagers" and "screen-ragers," more focused on optics, aesthetics, and analytics. We have filters, flexing, and other forms of peacocking to get attention online. Perception is reality, right? No, deception is our reality. Don’t worry, I ain’t a big tymer yet, so I do my own stunts. Darius, people just want to become their best selves or at least see what their best selves could look like. Oddly, some people would rather see and share the worst versions of others via racist AI videos. Don't full send!

Well, we have the next iteration of cat-fishing or look-maxing (your choice): deep-faking. In this chilling form of charades and masquerades, I wear your face, hide behind your face, and try you on for size and seizure. Deep-faking is (not) a flex, a farce, and a fiction. It is very much so real how artificial intelligence (AI) is used to clone someone’s likeness to create counterfeit characters in fake videos so good that even the CIA struggles to see IA—intelligent artifice. I know we teach kids to take a walk in someone else’s shoes, but not necessarily their likeness. AI is reshaping empathy-building and empathy-fatigue. It’s already hard to see it from someone else’s eyes but now AI makes it wicked (easy).

Tokenization. Our fiscal and social debts will be tokenized. Globally, our government has inflated not only the dollar but also the world with its American exceptionalism. The dollar is just paper, back by nothing more than trust and military might. No gold standard. Through tokenization, we intend to put our debts into the ether in order to sweep our low ethos under the rug. With the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, no other country can do what America is trying to do, so no golden rule.

If you are not familiar with cryptocurrencies, think digital monies with their own tokenomics or methods of utility and distribution. Some tokens will be minted, manipulated, suspended, burned, and or discarded. Tokenized? Minted? Manipulated? Suspended? Burned? Discarded? Where have I seen this before? Where have I heard this before? Where have I experienced this before? Black bodies swinging... in the metaverse.

Collective and selective histories have been birthed and killed by the hands of mass murderers and mass media. And now, the “invisible” digital hand. They say the algorithm is hard at work behind the scenes and screens, amassing and synthesizing data on each and every one of us. Artificial intelligence is capturing while big tech is capitalizing. Our speech patterns; our mannerisms; our ignorance. Artificial identity politics, anyone?

In the next 20 years, our records, our DNA, and our (mis)deeds may all be on the blockchain—the cutting edge of technology. Protect ya neck. Enter the 36 blockchains—BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, BNB, XLM. Disclaimer: I don’t want to ad(d) to your vices, so don’t take my words as financial advice. Ever heard of digital real estate? If you don’t mind (mine) ya block, these cryptocurrencies will spin the block, flip your gold, and leave your block gentrified. Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, Jeff Bezos and the rest of the aristocrats and technocrats are already on money 3.0 while we, the working class, are still stuffing dollars under the mattress or holding up money phones. These rich folks are talking digital space money and finding more gold on the moon while I’m still down here on earth, paying credit cards with paper “IOUs.”

Back to Kai Cenat. I mean Michael Jackson. I mean Prince. I mean human capital. I mean the assets. The assets under management (AUM). Fortnite and other corporations profit off the culture of the marginalized, the under-resourced, and the most creative. Darius, it is just a dance on Fortnite. I know, but these corporations don’t care about Black joy expressed through free bodily movement. In this country, people still question if Black bodies are free to move let alone allowed to move, period. Ironically, let me know who owns “Free People,” let alone wears it. I say all of this as a Black man who has contorted his body through the hood, through higher education, and through his own head to try to leave a positive digital footprint, hopefully. I don't have the soul to compete with the big steppas like the Blackrocks, JP Morgans, and Vanguards of the world.

Wow, I may be more hypocritical than hypothetical. Confession: I like to get lost in old Drake and old Kanye. “I miss the old Kanye”…let me stop. I sometimes wrap myself warmly in my own naivety and nostalgia until the cognitive dissonance makes me sweat, and then I have to re-evaluate my integrity. I struggle with struggling with the struggle of an artist’s (de)evolution. I want to pigeonhole some of my favorite artists to their peak, their prime, the place and time in my life when I most resonated with them and their music; selfishly, I conveniently forget that an artist may be simultaneously at their highest in music but their lowest in life.

Some people can separate the art from the artists. Don’t worry, with the use of AI, big companies are definitely solidifying that separation; I mean extraction. In general, technology is making us almost exorcise the spirit from the artist. Who needs the real thing when there’s AI?

I swear this piece is not AI-generated. How would you know? If you’re reading this, it’s too damn long. I am just running through the codes with my woes. You know how that sh*t goes.

I was once amazed by a holographic Tupac performance years ago. Now, I just feel weird, almost shameful or guilty, for actually watching AI-generated videos of Tupac chilling at a Warriors game or Tupac meeting Mr. Rogers. AI is supposed to let my mind run wild with possibilities. However, my mind treads lightly in probabilities as in behind these videos are probably companies using the dead to sell a product or a narrative. There’s no such thing as a grateful dead, just dead heads. Some will argue that artists and content creators have always been products in themselves—products ready to be (re)branded, manufactured, shelved, cancelled, and or canned by the big check writers.

Comedian Dave Chapelle once warned us that a corporate entity can own one’s likeness and one’s busi-ness in perpetuity. A corporate entity can sign someone to a slave deal and still profit long after he dies. Digital chattel or just another digital product? Again, a different operating system for corporeal punishment? I mean, creators rarely own their master’s. You see how long it took for NIL deals to finally get legalized. N.I.L. literally means “Name, Image, Likeness.” Isn’t my body and my voice my own intellectual property? I wish economic systems allowed for more royalty-based frameworks for paying someone in perpetuity. Well, I guess those structures do exist…just typically not in favor of the content creator. My business friends will say that the company or the platform is assuming all of the risks, so why wouldn’t you and I put our signatures and our bodies on the line? Score: 1-nil. Corporations.

Nowadays, reality is hard to face and memories even harder to recollect in this digital age. What happens when a lifetime of hard work is reduced to nothing more than just humorous and or humiliating clips, memes, and GIFs? And you did not give consent to be an overused animation, looping forever—a running joke, literally. No really, what happens to the families whose last image of their loved one is tragic? What does mourning look like when anyone, without consent, can pull up that video at any given time to mock, minimize, and manipulate? X marks the spot. Once I'm gone, will someone tweet on my behalf to keep me virtually alive in the minds of my loved ones and my critics? Zero chance; I’m not the one.

While I am still alive and forever flawed, my ego will happily die a 1000 times as AI gives life to new ways of exploring, expediting, and exploiting. Humbled, I know that I am replaceable. I am one followed by none of the nine zeroes of people in this world. No one will care because attention spans and life spans are finite.

On the other hand, I am an internet nerd who welcomes most new tech. My world did not end when self-driving cars ubered me, when my phone chirped to buy my Dirty Chai (2 shots of expresso) , and when Chat GPT outlined my retirement plan. Sure, technology will transform the way I engage the world, like it always has. I just desire ethical frameworks, regulations, and guidelines to keep us safe and whole in virtual reality. Long after my hardware is corrupted, my fragmented software may be transferred and stored on a server, serving no one, most likely. I just don’t want people growing more and more ill just to go viral. I’m almost scared to put (and lose) my life in these lines.

Lastly, as a self-proclaimed pseudo-ethnographer or user experience social analyst, I must continue to learn how to check (and break) the code. I realize that some parts are encrypted and others, cryptic. Check 1,2, 1,2. I must continue to dance between the breaks and the binaries; between the real and the fake, and between the fear and the future. My concerns are not new, for Afrofuturism is the home where I rest my thoughts.

“Fallin’, dreamin’.”

Thank you for reading.