middleman

Possibly inspired by the SURROGATE willing to be an understudy for a wealthy man facing jail time as imagined a decade ago for in the television series Arrested Development, Super Punch introduces us to the ChameleonMask—billed as the Human Uber—from an emerging technologies showcase in Japan. A body-double takes a stint as an avatar for a tele-presence, scrapping a screen to their face. According to developers, their pilot studies confirm that that users are willing to suspend their disbelief and not see beyond the mask and accept the stand-in as the person that they are engaging with and not at all a dissociative nightmare. As the costume is refined, I wonder what repercussions that this might have for the gig economy with humans themselves as peripheral devices and what our standards become for communication and interaction.