The Memory Hole Eats While You Watch

We're entering a "post-truth" era, and it's more than a little disconcerting.

The following is a TSF free post. If you want access to our comment box & community, subscribers-only posts, The Friday Roundup, and the full post archives including this one, you can grab all of that for just $5 a month (or even less on an annual plan) by subscribing right here:

---

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

— George Orwell, 1984

During the Superbowl halftime show, Alicia Keys performed “Nothing At All.” It’s a great song, and she’s a phenomenal vocalist and musician, but it was live, and her voice cracked a bit on the opening verse. A very human error, and no big deal. Here’s the original clip (sorry about the compression, but I had to screengrab it from Twitter):

Now, here’s where things get weird. According to T. Becket Adams, a journalist and commentator for a number of publications, “the version of the show hosted on the NFL's official YouTube page has the audio cleaned up to remove Keys's sour notes…Bootleg clips containing the original, authentic audio are being scrubbed from YouTube at a breakneck pace.”

Below is the “fixed” version. You can hear a slightly different level of audio gain in the first few words, especially noticeable on the word “want” in “want it all.” The level dips ever-so-slightly, which tells me they cut and pasted the audio from another Alicia Keys performance into this one to replace the flubbed audio in the Super Bowl track.

Mind you, this is the version on the NFL’s official YouTube account. You can see it here.

Adams continues:

In 5-10 years, we'll all be fighting over whether Keyes actually flubbed the opening notes of her Superbowl performance because our memories will be at odds with the “official” record.

For all the recent discussion re: the post-truth world, we need to talk more about what record-keeping should look like in the Internet era. Because things like this audio swap – with no explanation or heads up given – is crazy-making.

How are we ever supposed to return to something approximating a consensual reality when even the trivial things we experience as a nation undergo stealth edits?

Doesn't help that this was the same weekend that I showed my kids Monsters Inc. and was like, "Stick around for the credits! There's a surprise!" … Turn out Disney removed the blooper reel. But **I** didn't know that, so now I'm frisking my own memory, feeling like I'm nuts.

Why did they remove the bloopers? To pump up some stupid "special features" section elsewhere. Meanwhile, I'm left feeling like an insane person, swearing before God and all eternity there was a blooper reel during the end credits.

The point isn’t the blooper reel or Keys's performance (honestly, good on her for going live). The point is that the CONSTANT unannounced tweaks and edits are an unnecessary strain on our memories & recollections. Keep it up and soon people won't trust *anything* they see online.

Keep going and pretty soon they won't trust ... anything.

And that’s the long and short of it. We don’t even know if Alicia Keys signed off on the “correction.” Maybe she was as surprised by it as we are.

Now imagine using this technique, along with deepfake and other AI tech, to turn a dissenting voice into a propagandist. To censor the message some controversial commentator like Tucker Carlson, say, is making on an episode of his show, and to change the message to say something else completely.

What’s in place that could stop something like that from happening? The tech exists, right now, to do such things.

We are watching as the memory hole eat popular, mass experiences in real time. It’s generating a sort of Mandela Effect for those who saw one thing and are presented with a different version after the fact. And without noting the changes, there’s no record of the edit. It just happens, and they hope you won’t notice.

But if you do notice, there’s not much you can do.

This kind of thing will only grow more common, and be applied to things of greater and greater gravity. You cannot simply accept sensory data when taking in any form of recorded media.

I hate saying that. As a writer and podcaster and video-maker, I want you to be able to be confident that what I give you is what you receive. That there is message fidelity from sender to recipient.

But I can’t ensure that.

I can already use tools like NVIDIA broadcast, which makes it look like I’m looking at the camera, whether I’m recording or doing a live broadcast, even if I’m looking down to read something from my screen. I’ve tried it. It works, really well. Here’s a demo of how that works:

But where do such useful tools cross the line? When do they go from maintaining a helpful illusion — like keeping eye contact with the camera when you need to read a script — to something deceptive and manipulative?

And when you can no longer trust that what you’re seeing or hearing is real, what epistemological tools do you bring to bear to determine fact from falsehood?

Personally, I’m working on honing my intuition, through a series of meditative exercises my wife introduced me to. I have no idea if that will be enough, but it’s important, I think, to listen to your deeper, more primal sensibilities when it comes to such things. If something feels off, listen to that.

The problem is that things likely won’t feel off, as technology makes it easier and easier to surpass the uncanny valley and make convincing (but false) facsimiles of reality.

“Fake news” was nothing compared to this.

We’re in for one hell of a ride, and “trust no one” is becoming the operative slogan.