Artificial Intelligence or a Neoliberal Marketing Scheme? The Performative Nature of Lil Miquela’s Racialized Design and Politics on Instagram

Virtual influencers are a trending media curiosity, given that they can easily blur racial boundaries, as well as boundaries between authenticity and falsehood. One of the most popular stars of the virtual influencer world is Lil Miquela (@lilmiquela), a virtual avatar of ambiguous ethnicity who follows both popular fashion and politics to boost sponsored brands. This article situates Miquela within the performative ecology of Instagram, blurring the lines of her racial identity and authenticity as an emerging form of commodity activism online. As a 3-D Computer-Generated Image (CGI), Miquela’s racialized design poses questions about the representations of the Instagram category for ‘Black/Brown women,’ which are undermined by the appropriation of mixed-race features in her racially ambiguous design. Miquela is also a virtual influencer, and her creators at the technology and media company Brud label her as an “artificially created robot,” further blurring the boundaries between authenticity and falsehood in Miquela’s posts. These boundaries are further informed by the political economy of influencers on Instagram, which engages with the platform affordances of Instagram, namely the platform’s environment of commodity activism and its neoliberal logic. Pulling from André Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), this article examines how the platform affordances of Instagram and the political economy of influencers have significantly shaped the performative nature of Miquela’s racialized design, as well as her racial identity politics online. This article concludes with the potential empowerment of Black/Brown women in charge of art technology (e.g., Miquela), as well as the demand for government and platform regulations to significantly distinguish virtual influencers like Lil Miquela from human influencers