A Fem-Bot holds Jimmy Fallon as Yoko held John Lennon

Date

2012

Description

Creator of the image: Peter Yang
Date of the image creation: 2012
Medium: Photograph
Person depicted: Jimmy Fallon

This photograph depicts American comedian Jimmy Fallon — best known for his work on Saturday Night Live — being held by a female android, a fem-bot. This image pays homage to the famous 1980 cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which depicted a naked John Lennon wrapped around Yoko Ono. That photograph was taken just hours before Lennon was murdered.

Beneath the one of the photos of Fallon and the fem-bot the caption reads: ‘Jimmy Fallon welcomes our new robot overlords’. The influential Wired magazine published the photographs. They were accompanied a story written by the magazine’s ‘senior maverick’, Kevin Kelly, under the title, ‘Better than Human: Why Robots Will — and Must — Take Our Jobs. Coated in a thick film of technological determinism, Kelly’s blithe, aggressive optimism paints an automated future without workers; a utopia of productivity, play and power. Beginning with a privileged present — sterilized by wilful ignorance of the negative aspects of automation — Kelly proceeds to project a glorious future scrubbed clean of unknowns and alternatives. Among other things, his article celebrates the waves of technologically induced joblessness, which he rides off with credulous statements such as: ‘Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!’

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