Uncanny Valley Ranch
On Doppelgangland Massacres, Great Replacements, and Halloween
Happy Halloween.
In horror movies, nothing scares you quite like a monster that wears your face. There are the Hannibal Lecters, the Leatherfaces — killers of the deranged variety who wear the skin of their victims. There are the clones, the shapeshifters, the pod people, the body snatchers.
And then there’s the worst kind. The one with no explanation in alien biology or violent psychosis. The mistake in reality; a cosmic, accidental copy and paste.
The doppelganger.
Spooky.
The idea of being replaced is one of the most disturbing of all — that your life could be taken up in the night, lifted by a chill October breeze, and blown into someone else’s yard. Someone who knows your secrets, your fantasies, your friends. Someone who makes you redundant.
I suppose it fits in a grotesque, monstrous sort of way that this animal anxiety would be propagandized into the great racist myth of our time. The Great Replacement, as it’s called by the Racist Tinfoil Dipshit Industrial Complex. “New York can’t be Europe,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said recently after endorsing disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo — a man Adams called “a snake and a liar” in the press just weeks ago — to be his successor.
Or should I say, his replacement.
We all know what “Europe” means, in Adams’ usage, of course. Heaven forbid such a sacred place as Manhattan have halal carts.
Oh wait.
The replacement of Eric Adams with Andrew Cuomo would of course be the kind of replacement that the slobbering White Replacement conspiracy theorists yearn for. That is to say, the replacement of a Black man in a position of power with a white man accused by 13 different women of sexual misconduct. In January 2024, the Department of Justice found those allegations credible, calling Cuomo’s behavior while in office “especially egregious.”
New York can’t be Europe, of course. What would happen to our womenfolk?
As the most powerful hurricane ever to strike Jamaica leaves devastation in its wake, it’s the displacement caused by an eviscerated climate — the result of an agented, conscious series of decisions from the sort of “great” men supposedly being replaced — that feels more credible.
“That thing wanted to be us,” Blair says in John Carpenter’s The Thing, referring to the alien shapeshifter. And who wouldn’t? What alien drifter wouldn’t want to land on a melting planet, wildlife refuges opened up for more drilling, more burning, when a solar panel the size of New Mexico could power the entire planet? What climate-displaced migrant wouldn’t want to be us, the nation of secret police, indefinite detainments, suspended due process?
They hate us for our freedom, of course. They want to replace us.
It’s always a hiveminded they, in the movies. The pod people move zombie-like, lurching and foaming at the mouth. Representative, in the science fiction tradition, of the overarching Fear of the Mob.
They’re eating the cats, the pod people, I hear.
No, sorry, it appears that they’re only fleeing the hurricanes.
And how dare they?
With a solar panel the size of New Mexico, we could replace an $8 trillion fossil fuel industry, predicted to reach $13 trillion by 2034. But we’re not building solar panels in New Mexico, because that wouldn’t be progress. It wouldn’t be the future.
The future, I’m told, is a different sort of replacement — the kind born in the facilities they’re actually building in New Mexico. The real invaders of Roswell. The eldritch, horror movie spawn of the data center, which a solar panel the size of New Mexico would be unable to sate.
That’s right, I got you again: This is actually another essay about AI.
I find it horrifying in a Golden Age of Hollywood kind of way that the technocrats who run the world now dump their money into political campaigns for the bigots of the Great Replacement theory, yet at the same time, they continue to erect a new-age digital infrastructure designed to replace the soul of humanity with an uncanny valley facsimile.
Extreme language, perhaps. Spiritual, even, but then they’re the ones who keep invoking the Antichrist.
Now you’re thinking of robots and superintelligence — the pyramid scheme so massive ancient aliens must have built it. That great, ever fleeing goal line. The point where all of our feeds full of AI slop make good on the utopian promise of…
…uh…
…something.
I’m not talking about being replaced by an AI that’s just so smart, oh my goodness lil’ guy, look how smart you are! Yes you ARE. Yes. You. Are.
That Great Replacement theory seems as believable to me as the other one.
No, I’m talking about the self-inflicted replacement. The one where we allocate any percentage of our lives, our consciousness, to a mindless amalgam of mush, fed on criminal theft, channeling our literal life force into a growing surveillance state bent on sucking every resource out of the core of the Earth until, hollow, it collapses under the weight of our own waste.
I’m talking about the Sora app, Meta Vibes, and those goddamn AI Kalshi ads polluting every YouTube video, where digital human replacements implore me to bet money on world collapse.
I read a piece not long ago about how “selling out” isn’t seen as a sin anymore, but we have rocketed far beyond that, to a place where they can simulate our enthusiasm to stoke our neurons without paying off a single real human to do it for them. And if you think that this latest, most grotesque enterprise — colonizing your life with ocean-melting piles of absolute nothing — is doomed to fail, I’m afraid to say that you have woefully underestimated our collective capacity to replace our very life with anti-life.
OOooOoOoohh, spOOOooOkyyyy.
Yes, I am deeply frightened (boo!) of the macro decline of our society into psycho-digital enslavement, but that’s a topic for a much longer day. My real point is, even the most micro instance of this very real replacement is too far. A single second of your life, a single dendrite in your cosmically crafted brain, is too much ground to cede to a shapeshifting body snatcher that keeps asking children for nudes.
In The Thing, there’s only one way to kill the interloper that wears your face: You burn it. And while the sun will cleanse us all in holy fire at the rate the “tech” industry is pumping carbon into the sky, it would be oh so sweet to find a few tanks of acetylene first and replace these goddamn AI skin-walkers with a scorched hole in the ground.
Happy Halloween.