Stalin's Photoshop

Stalin was a patron comrade of the arts.

Specifically, Stalin mastered the art of historical revision through photography long before Photoshop existed.

Before the Georgian robber baron left nations barren, he found inspiration in the innocent photo editing of Calvert Richard Jones — a pioneer who once retouched a monk’s eyes open, or erased him altogether. 

Where Jones corrected nature’s small mistakes, Stalin rewrote history itself. 

Consider his immaculate (mis)conception: a 1922 photo seating him beside Lenin. 

Stalin’s darkroom photo technicians smoothed his pockmarks, lengthened his withered arm, stretched his height (one imagines he dreamed of lengthening another limb), and pushed him a little closer to Lenin before flooding the picture in the state’s newspapers.

Why? 

To pose as heir to the very Lenin who had begged the Party to remove this “intolerably rude” understudy.

Stalin went from promoting himself with pixels to purging rivals with them.

Trotsky, hero of 1917, was airbrushed into oblivion. The old Bolsheviks vanished from photographs as predictably as they vanished from their beds at midnight. 

Like all demonic totalitarians, the Georgian grave digger of communism knew: truth isn’t discovered, it’s manufactured. As Orwell foresaw, whoever controls the past controls the future. 

Fast forward a century, and Stalin’s darkroom is in everyone’s pocket.

Yesteryear’s Ministry of Truth, Google, released Nano Banana, the photoshop-killer that’s become a viral success praised for its "uncanny character consistency" using nothing but natural language and an internet connection.

It marks yet another inflection point: deepfakes going from requiring technical skill to requiring a pulse and a prompt.

What took Stalin's technicians days in darkrooms, then Photoshop experts hours at desktops, now takes anyone seconds on mobile.

Consider the above picture which took… 8 words and 9.5 seconds.

The deepfake problem just went from possible to pervasive, “democratized” to all corners of the world, toddlers and tyrants included.

Think of it as Chernobyl for the (mis)information supply: invisible contamination that knows no borders, spreading lies that kids absorb with every infinite scroll.

It calls for a mass reconsideration of where we allocate capital — financial and intellectual — toward protecting a generation already pregnant with the radiation of misinformation, amongst other perils Jonathan Haidt has dutifully and diligently carved into the public discourse, warnings we scroll past today but cannot ignore forever.

The future of fiction in the information age is at risk of becoming the unwanted present of addiction in the (mis)information age.

The damage is cumulative, brain-warping, and (even more) generational.

The infinite deepfake era presents a paradox: maximum verification is required in an age of minimum trust.

There's 3 contenders:

First, let's rule out governments...

Even if the folk that brought you Stalin's (re)visionary history could resist temptation (they can't) and had the technical competence (they don't), they're geography-bound against a borderless problem.

Now let’s rule out companies...

Even Jack Dorsey (a bitcoin maximalist, and decentralization prophet) couldn't stop Twitter from becoming a state censorship subsidiary. Meta got the same treatment until Zuck discovered 'masculine energy' on Rogan.

Moreover, their third party fact checkers are no match for the infinite bananas, as my friend Jason so grotesquely meme’d.

Which leaves networks: no geography, no CEO having midlife epiphanies about testosterone, no male tampon budgets.

Just math.

If that sounds like networks eating another historically state function, trust your private keys.

Yours in superagency,

Daniel