JORDAN PEELE'S TAKE OBAMA'.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: VIDEO - Brief article

Comedian and Academy Award winner Jordan Peele in April released a video that seemed to portray Barack Obama calling President Donald Trump "a total and complete dipshit." It was created by new software that allows for the generation of a novel variant of realistic fake news. Motherboard and others promptly hyperventilated over the possibility that such forgeries could have "society-changing impacts" and erode "our ability to discern truth."

The control and manipulation of images and events has been with us forever, though. Not only that, but the fact that more of us now have the ability to detach words and images from the specific time and place of their instantiation is actually incredibly liberating. Reappropriating, misappropriating, decontextualizing, recontextualizing--as all that has become simpler to pull off, the result has been a well-spring of media that let the relatively powerless speak, from Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the left to Sabo on the...