I don’t spend much time on Instagram, but I like what the algorithm there sends me. My “dream world” is one where aesthetics and history merge, and that is definitely what I see on my Instagram feed.
While most of what I see is more focused on retro vibes, I recently saw an AI video on Instagram that had a historical focus that I found extremely interesting. It is called “An Entrustment from Heroes” (Titipan Pahlawan).
The video is by an Indonesian creator named Brillian Fairiandi. What he did was to create a video of an imagined event where key figures from the founding of the modern nation of Indonesia were present. We see these famous people “looking at the camera” while the song “Tanah Airku” (My Homeland) plays.
“Tanah Airku” is a patriotic song written by Ibu Sud in 1927, but the version in the video is a recent recording by a young singer named Shanna Shannon, whose version has become a popular post-match song among Indonesian national-team supporters.
The people who appear in the video are the following:
Sukarno — Indonesia’s first president, who read the independence proclamation aloud on 17 August 1945 and led the country until 1967.
Mohammad Hatta — Sukarno’s co-proclaimer that same day and Indonesia’s first vice president, an economist by training and, unlike Sukarno, famously austere and allergic to self-mythologizing.
Sutan Sjahrir — Indonesia’s first prime minister (1945–1947), a socialist intellectual who had refused to collaborate with the Japanese occupation and later led negotiations with the returning Dutch on the young republic’s behalf; he eventually broke with Sukarno and died in exile.
Jenderal Soedirman — the republic’s first commander-in-chief, who led a seven-month guerrilla campaign against the returning Dutch military from a stretcher, already dying of tuberculosis, having sworn to defend the republic “until his last drop of blood.”
Fatmawati — Sukarno’s wife, remembered above all for having sewn the original red-and-white flag raised at the 1945 proclamation.
Sayuti Melik — the man who actually typed the proclamation text, on a borrowed German typewriter in the early hours of 17 August.
Bung Tomo (Sutomo) — a fiery radio orator whose broadcasts helped mobilize and sustain the Indonesian resistance in the Battle of Surabaya in November 1945, commemorated ever since as Indonesia’s Heroes’ Day.
Ki Hadjar Dewantara — founder of the Taman Siswa school movement and Indonesia’s first minister of education, still honored as the “Father of National Education,” his birthday now marked as National Education Day.
Teuku Umar — the chronological outlier of the group: an Acehnese guerrilla commander who spent the 1880s and 1890s twice feigning surrender to the Dutch in order to be armed and trusted by them, then turning those weapons back against them, before he was finally killed in 1899 — nearly half a century before anyone else in this video was proclaiming anything.
The caption of the video reads:
“If they were really here with us today, what do you think they’d feel? But whatever the circumstances, believe this: they will always live on with us. Forever. Indonesia.”
And the video closes with the message:
“Today, some of us have lost half of their life. But we have not lost Indonesia. Because as long as there are still those who care, that legacy will keep on living. Forever.”
For some reason, I cannot link directly to the video, so to view it, you need to go to the page below and then scroll down to the video (posted on
The Comments
I’ve gone through some of the comments on this video (perhaps 600+ out of 6,900), translating them and looking for patterns.
Some of the comments are exactly what you’d expect from a video like this — people saying they cried, that they got chills, that seeing these faces “alive” again moved them in a way old photographs never could.
I agree. I’m not Indonesian, but I started tearing up when I saw Fatmawati emotionally touching the flag that she sewed. . .
That reaction, on its own, is interesting. Black-and-white portraits have been sitting in books for eighty years without producing this kind of response. Animate them, and suddenly someone on Instagram is typing “I’m bawling” in the replies.
Meanwhile, roughly another set of comments turn into a genuine historiographical argument. Here the biggest issue is that the video did not include Marxist revolutionary Tan Malaka, and many people commented on that.
In those comments is a real debate about historical legitimacy, namely over whether Sukarno was the indispensable founder, or if Tan Malaka was the true architect of the nation?
That said, by far the largest number of comments is not about 1945 at all. It is a running, bitter argument about the current Indonesian government, kicked off by a single comment: “They struggled so hard to build this nation, only for it to be destroyed in an instant by the ‘gemoy’ dance” (Susah payah mereka membangun negeri ini, hancur sekejap oleh joget gemoy 😢).
“Gemoy” is Indonesian slang for “cute” or “adorable.” During the 2024 campaign, candidate (and now President) Prabowo Subianto adopted a signature lighthearted, cute dance style. It became a massive viral sensation on social media, especially among younger voters (Gen Z and Millennials).
That comment alone garnered over 400 replies.
Then there is a smaller discussion that addresses something I did not expect: a sincere, largely respectful debate about whether AI itself is a sign of the Dajjal, the Islamic “Deceitful Messiah” who will appear before Judgement Day, precisely because it can now “resurrect” the dead and make them move and speak.
Finally, there is a sub-thread of jokes about Sayuti Melik needing a typewriter to type the proclamation (“today’s version is the guy who brings his laptop everywhere”).
Two days after this video was posted, a Part 2, “Heirloom of the Nation” (Pusaka Bangsa), was posted. That one adds Tan Malaka and many other members of the nationalist pantheon going back to the nineteenth century.
This video did not gain as much attention (151K likes), and the comments express a mixture of admiration for Indonesia’s heroes and criticism of the current government.
I find this second video to be much more formulaic. In the first video, we see the various people reveal different facial expressions. This is interesting because it conveys the idea that the various people who came together to carry out the Indonesian Revolution had different interests, and as a result, would perhaps view the present in different ways. By portraying different facial expressions, the video opens up a space for the viewer to think/imagine about what each person might be thinking.
By contrast, in the second video, most of the people are seen shedding tears, but then they each turn to the camera and smile. What does that mean? I don’t know, but it feels more forced and generic than the first video.
AI Video is the Future of History
I’ve written before on this blog about how little the analog-age archive-to-article/monograph model of historical scholarship still connects with anyone outside the profession, and that even within the profession, I think historians read less and less of each other’s work.
The first video, with its 1.2 million likes and 6,900+ comments, generated far more direct, felt, argued-over engagement with Indonesian national memory in one week than any academic book on Indonesian independence will generate in an eternity.
Yes, some of that engagement is superficial and meaningless. But a large amount of it is real: people nominating which other heroes deserve a “Part 2,” people correcting each other’s history, people crying, people genuinely asking what the founders would think of them now.
Academic history cannot produce this kind of reaction. The primary encounter with the past, the one that actually moves people to feel something and then go argue about it, is going to keep happening in videos like this one.
“Academic history cannot produce this kind of reaction. The primary encounter with the past, the one that actually moves people to feel something and then go argue about it, is going to keep happening in videos like this one.”
Yes, but I thought the point of Academia dry, linear prose is for accuracy or scientific consensus over emotional and political propaganda arguments. I’ve been seeing too many AI slops and emotional reactions everytime I was in Facebook, that I primarily used reddit because it is 90% pure texts.
Personally, I search for works by academics because they are generally more trustworthy than random people in the internet. That’s came to mind, do you ever think of going to Askhistorians subreddit. That’s seem to be the best place for non-academic such as myself to see more nuanced and updated historical findings without the usual regurgitated pop history.