Antiviral (2012) and the future of human commodification

The experience economy and celebrity consumption.

Brandon Cronenberg’s 2012 debut feature, Antiviral, presents us with a world where people can opt to be infected with viruses from their celebrity of choice. For an appropriate fee, of course.

If we had the technology today, I have no doubt the industry of celebrity consumption would reflect that presented in the film. This post is primarily about the consumer options it presents rather than its plot, but expect to be spoiled nonetheless.

“From her body to your body, from her cells to your cells.”

I recently read the business book The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore. First published in 1999, for some reason I expected it to be an early critique of the cultural climate that was on the horizon. I couldn’t have been more wrong, as it was actually a business book arguing for experience peddling as the future of commerce. A promising new sector, supplementing commodities, goods, and services.

“In the full-fledged Experience Economy, instead of relying purely on our own wherewithal to experience the new and wondrous—as has been done for ages—we will increasingly pay companies to stage experiences for us.”

“Eventually, experience orchestration will become as much a part of doing business as product and process design are today.”

— The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage

There are already plenty of businesses capitalizing on the experience economy, in a sense, even the digital experiences we are presented with fit into this mould, but it’s barely scratching the surface of what is likely to come.

I can see the world of Antiviral being a guidepost for future industrial endeavours, much like Spike Jonze’s Her has influenced AI peddlers such as Sam Altman.

Antiviral’s world isn't a utopia, but it does present a very profitable framework and new expanded celebrity consumption sector. Better than licensing deals and private labelled consumer goods: here lies the prospect of direct consumption of organic matter.

Cronenberg, who wrote and directed Antiviral, came up with the idea when he himself was sick, saying, “the physicality of illness, that there was something in my cells and my body that came from someone else’s. There is a weird intimacy to that connection.”

The film opens with Edward Porris, a Hannah Geist superfan, visiting the Lucas Clinic to be infected with a herpes simplex strain that had been collected from Geist. In order to maximize the experience for this fan, the virus is injected on the left side of his mouth, mimicking what would’ve happened if Geist had kissed him and transmitted the infection herself.

This is framed as a euphoric experience for Porris; this is peak experience economy, resulting not only in emotional gratification but also a somatic, embodied experience that will persist in perpetuity. It is a permanent tie to Geist, connecting them beyond parasociality, at least technically, if not in reality.

In a deleted scene, Porris himself is courted by the same clinic he purchased the virus from. He has gained so much status within the Geist fan community that he himself is a fan object of his own, an idol worth seeking connection with; an object worth commoditizing and harvesting. “Most of my fans were fans of hers, first,” he says, and it echoes the way these things work in the real world. Geist’s charisma has spread to him, just like real life fan communities have so-called Big Name Fans (BNFs) who have status and command attention and worship. The human propensity to worship is neverending, which extends to the profit possibilities.

The primary celebrity consumption industry presented in the film is that of viruses packaged into “disease profiles” but there are also the “celebrity cell steaks” being sold at a specialty butcher shop, allowing the public to consume lab grown meat cultivated from the cells of their celebrity of choice.

The technology behind this artificially grown muscle tissue is used for a posthumous greenhouse wherein an organic system can be cultivated, and expanded if need be. An elaborate and profitable cellular immortality, akin to that of Henrietta Lacks’ HeLa cells.

Presumably, in this case, the subject would have consented to the perpetual harvesting of their biological material.

Geist becomes the first subject of this organic green house, her body encapsulated and maintained on the most basic cellular level. This way, it can be infected anew and harvested indefinitely.

This is her afterlife. Except it isn’t hers, not really. This isn’t stasis, nor cryogenics or anything that promises a future awakening centuries away. This… this is a promise to consumers of a physical tie with your fan object. It doesn’t matter how asymmetrical your relationship with them might be. This isn’t a social media follow that can be nuked in an instant. Physical distance, status, or even them being alive is irrelevant in this economic system.

This is many steps beyond the personalized AI chatbots and digital avatars, exclusive platforms, paid for DMs and social network connections. Those things may be emotionally gratifying, but they are fleeting, ethereal, tied to a digital non-corporeal landscape. Meanwhile, the disease profiles are a reminder of our objects’ humanity, their basic biological reality: these are not digital avatars, they are flesh and bone, and the viruses remind us of their real world limitations.

As the film later tells us, “From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant. What matters is the system that allows it to function,” in this case it’s about the actual technology maintaining an organic system, but it also applies to the industry that has risen around commodifying humans. Our present world already has an infrastructure set up to extract the most profit from audiences, it would be naive to think this type of expansion would be out of bounds. How long until we get there simply remains to be seen.