ABSTRACT
In 2024, Google promoted the AI image manipulation on its Pixel 9 phone as a means to create “authentic” memories. This echoed similar language used nearly a decade previously to justify image manipulation on the basis of “feelings.” Such arguments make individual feeling the basis of whether something is “real” or “true.” I call this “affective realism,” by which I mean a solipsistic concept that breaks the historic association of photography with indexical realism. It roots truth, authenticity, and realism in the individual self. The individual's affective experience, without reference to external objects, becomes the measure of all things. At the same time as the Pixel 9 promotional discourse emphasizes human feelings, its video advertising articulates a radical decentering of the self, emphasizing the disposability of people, and suggesting that a close relationship with the phone might come at the expense of social relations with others. While reviewers of the Google Pixel 9 phone anticipate a loss of trust in photographic “truth,” I argue that more important is this move toward feelings as the arbiter of authenticity, a solipsistic world view that is inseparable from a new authoritarianism rooted in technological fetishism and an anti-humanism that glorifies alienation.
