Alice, an ambitious camgirl, wakes up one day to discover she’s been replaced on her show with an exact replica of herself. (source: IMDB)

Not being a great fan of the “streaming generation”, I was afraid to get bored with this movie. Also, I was very prejudiced toward the sexy cam girls and websites like onlyfans.

Watching this movie made me change my mind completely. So, let me be clear: if I was a sexy girl and I would look good on camera, I would be a cam girl!

Clearly, it isn’t as easy as many people think. You have to build a fan base and keep people engaged with your content. You also have to deal with the hate and hypocrisy. But, in the end, you do your own thing, following your own rules. A great Vice documentary to watch after this movie is Making $1.5M/month on OnlyFans and Twitch: Amouranth.

Now, as a 47-year-old happily married dude, I couldn’t possibly imagine sacrificing 10 minutes of my already too busy day to watch a girl riding a banana in an inflatable pool. However, the movie and the documentary opened my eyes on another reality.

Another topic tackled by Cam is the rise of AI in online video content. There is a deleted scene that suggest the mysterious figure that has taken over Alice’s online persona, is in fact an algorithm. Taking over hundreds of hours from Lola’s past videos to create content that would attract abundance of viewers. Hence the AI or the algorithm could produce content without any physical or moral restriction set by Alice.

With the rise of the Metaverse and our future identity being reduced to 3D avatars, will we be so easily replaced by an AI? Sometimes, it makes me wanna live in a cabin in the woods with my wife, befriending grizzlies, at least they are real!

This TV-show brought me back to the time I’ve played “Detroit: become Human”, I remember going crazy by the way humans were treating the androids in this game. Westworld does the exact same thing, all I wanted was for the robots to have their revenge.

Imagine being stuck in a park where rich creeps can play out their rapist and murder fantasies on you over and over again, this is downright atrocious. I strongly believe that from the moment you create a life, whether it’s a robot, AI, or android, this very being needs to be treated with respect. Humans tend to treat everything that is different from them as a threat, an enemy. They are so afraid to loose control, that they would rather destroy anything that is different from them than learning to coexist.

This is such a deep and philosophical subject, Chris and I can talk for hours about this, but I’m not going to go there because this post would become an insanely long rant. The true plot of the story is that they uploaded “reveries” which means that the robots can have memories, these memories create emotions, and because of these emotions, they can deviate from the paths that were coded and uploaded in their system. An intricate topic with tons of plot twists that I didn’t see coming.

The casting is excellent, Anthony Hopkins (Dr. Robert Ford), Evan Rachel Wood (Dolores Abernathy), and especially Thandie Newton, a complete badass in her role as Maeve Millay. Here’s one of her quotes:

Maeve Millay: [to Sylvester and Lutz] All my life, I’ve prided myself on being a survivor. But surviving is just another loop. I’m getting out of here. You two are going to help me.

Sylvester: No. Do, do you know how far these people will go to protect their IP? Every part of this building, including the skin on your back, is made to keep you here. It, it’d be a suicide mission.

Maeve Millay: At first, I thought you and the others were gods. Then I realized you’re just men. And I know men. You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million times. I’m fucking great at it. How many times have you died? Because if you don’t help me I’ll kill you.

The show reminds me somehow of a real life MMORPG, where NPC’s relive their same fate over and over again. Humans are just guests in the NPC’s home world which is nothing more than an amusement park that provides an escapism from those guests’ real life.

On another note, I also absolutely loved the music and the player piano rolls used throughout the entire season. Some of the instrumental covers include songs of The Cure, Soundgarden, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead,… I’ve read on IMDb that the repetitive three-chord phrase, often heard in the background music, comes from Westworld (1973), where it underscored the Gunslinger’s slow but relentless pursuit of the hero. I really like this tune, it reminds me a lot of Carpenters’ music. It makes me wonder if season 2 will be as musical as the first one!

There is so much more that I could elaborate and mention about this topic, but I need to draw a line somewhere so, I’ll end this post with one more quote that is mentioned repeatedly throughout this season:

“These violent delights have violent ends” – Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Yesterday, while watching an episode of Westworld, I thought about how cool it would be if point-and-click games would use an AI… Instead of scripted characters who are always at the same place, saying the same things, we could find them speaking to each other, wander around, have different dialog lines following their moods.

For example, we would enter Thimbleweed Park and Delores could be home but she could also be at the arcade or at the dinner, living her own life.

Of course, there would be boundaries, for the sake of the story, but everything else would be left to the AI. I could spend days looking at game characters interact with the environment and with each other in a completely unpredictable and unscripted way.