Deepfakes are already setting off alarm bells. Digital manipulation to alter reality is and will be a problem for separating reality from fiction, fact from urban legend. David and Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes have devoted their careers to separating the wheat from the chaff on the web.
At The Week, Grayson Quay considers how the move away from physical storage media makes it easier to memory-hole information. Problematic content is one reason. Old cartoons with racially derogatory and sterotypical depictions of people and groups disappeared long ago from TV, but may still be found on the net. Other materials may simply be “stealth edited” or erased from our timelines:
Last week, for example, Joe Rogan deleted over 100 episodes of his podcast from Spotify after a compilation video of him saying the N-word went viral. Five episodes of the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that feature blackface, brownface, or yellowface have also been tossed down the memory hole, though in all five cases, the joke is at the expense of the white character doing the impression, not of the group being mocked.
Of course, when dealing with problematic content, there are options other than stealth editing and memory-holing. One is to contextualize. Pull up Lady and the Tramp on Disney+, and you’ll be served with a title card explaining that the 1955 film “contains negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures … Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
But providing clarifying “context” to now-offensive, once-common language or content and allowing it to remain — Confederate generals on horseback, for example — would be seen as an attempt to whitewash white supremacy.
These days, Quay argues, “it’s probably easier to seamlessly alter a digital file than it is to add fig leaves to a fresco without anyone being the wiser.” Winston Smith endlessly rewrote history. Guy Montag burned it. Both characters were fiction. But reality could in the near future bear an unsettling resemblance. As physical storage disappears, so might the untidy past it contains.
Editing technology still has its limits, but that too will change. If we aren’t careful, we’ll find ourselves in an eternal present in which every fleeting whim, sentiment, and taboo could be projected back across the entire history of human cultural production. The memory hole will never be full.
I have a DVD of the James Coburn, Cold War satire, The President’s Analyst (1968). There is an abrupt cut in which Coburn goes from walking the night streets of Manhattan to inexplicably waking up with a woman in his bed. Cut is the scene where the two meet in an art house theater run by a gay director as over-the-top as Christopher Hewett’s Roger De Bris. But if there is no record of it, did I just imagine it?
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