The News Is A Camera

There’s no shortage of metaphors for our information crisis. 

Aziz Ansari summed it up with a swastika pizza. Last year, I compared it to a bucketful of crabs. But a few days ago, while watching a video about a breakthrough in virtual effects technology, I found my favourite one yet:

So this giant, 8K video wall is refreshing at 120 frames per second (fps). And so, as there are two different cameras pointed at it, each camera is shooting sixty fps (frames per second), but they’re synced up so that they’re actually shooting alternating frames […] 

So it’s almost as if one blinks while the other shoots a frame, and then the other blinks while the other shoots a frame, and they go back and forth. And so both cameras can be pointed at the same wall, at the same time, and see completely different things.

We literally had them light up the display behind us and it showed up as a perfectly blue bluescreen on one camera and a perfectly green greenscreen to a different camera at the same time.

Simply put, the video wall flickers between green and blue in perfect sync with the cameras. But as one camera takes a photo, the other one takes a break. And it all happens so seamlessly that the first camera only ever sees a blue screen, and the second camera only sees a green screen.

Each camera blinks while the other takes a picture. So they never see the same thing.

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It’s harder to get a picture of current events than ever before.

Depending on where you look, January 6th was either “legitimate political discourse” or an “attack on democracy itself.”

The COVID lab-leak theory is either a racist, MAGA conspiracy theory or plausible enough for the World Health Organisation to be calling for further investigation. 

The war in Ukraine is either an act of state-sanctioned terrorism or a "psyop" designed to…well, that’s not clear. But it’s undoubtedly a plot by “the left.”

We’re all looking at the same things, but what we see is very different.