(A version of this first appeared in the Mint newspaper)
Until a few years ago, most people in the world had never seen a human die. Today, we can watch shootings, fatal accidents, plane crashes, executions, and even people just dropping dead after being hit by lightning.
The humanitarian impact of mobile phones is immense. People react to an extraordinary video of an atrocity as though what separated them from compassion was hard evidence. An extraordinary clip triggered a (nominal) no-confidence motion against the government of Narendra Modi. The clip showed two women being paraded naked in Manipur as a part of a sexual assault against them. For many weeks before the release of the video, most of the nation was not moved by the communal violence in Manipur. The video probably ended the violence in the state. The grabs of two fatal shootings by America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement surely played a hand in restraining America’s war against its own.
In the force such images have is the persistence of wonder; the fact that we are still astonished.
Most extraordinary videos are not political in nature. I will list out, without any deep attempt to recollect, what comes to my mind when I think of ‘extraordinary clips’: two Chinese women having an argument in a car; one of them stepping out and a tiger nabbing her by the neck and taking her away; a tyre coming off a distant passing truck that rolls across the road, jumps over medians, and hits a passing pedestrian on the head, who then lies motionless; a video grab from a camera inside a bus moments before and during an accident that killed most of the occupants, or perhaps all. These extraordinary events have a different timbre from what we used to consider extraordinary clips not very long ago — Taliban executing people by shooting them, beheading them, or throwing them off buildings.
There are also more pleasant extraordinary video clips of killer whales working in tandem to dislodge a seal from an iceberg, though they may not be very pleasant if you ask seals. Maybe in olden times, people saw some extraordinary things, but surely never such a wide array of remarkable sights. It is odd that we don’t marvel enough at this. This has happened not only because of the invention of the smartphone, but also because it has now become so ubiquitous that wherever there are humans, there are as many phones. This is all very new. Even 10 years ago, the very definition of a remarkable event was that there was no video of it. Today, it is taken as a mystery, even as shady, if something remarkable has occurred and there is no video of it.
Recently, I watched a cow on a street in Chennai attack a nine-year-old schoolgirl, who screamed in fright. Her mother watched in horror as the cow repeatedly tried to gore the girl, flinging her on its horns. There are many videos from Indian street life that show the sacred animal attacking pedestrians. Also of stray dogs mauling people, including children.
The time has passed when a video of a cow goring people or a dog biting off bits of a child can force India to make its streets marginally more intelligent than what they are today. This portends a world that will be accustomed to extraordinary videos, where a clip would retain its power to shock but will not set in motion the process to prevent what is shocking.
In fact, people have already stopped reacting to the extraordinariness of it all; they are only reacting to the newness of the genre.
The extraordinary has become vast, multifarious, and common, without becoming ordinary. Even 25 years ago, we were so naïve that two parachutes of skydivers getting entwined would become global news. It was in such a naïve era that two aeroplanes crashed into the Twin Towers. The world was stunned for days. People suffered trauma from just watching the event on television. A few years later, in 2006, Saddam Hussein was hanged, and the execution was caught on camera. Only a fraction of the world may have seen the clip because mainstream news channels did not show it. Somehow, clips didn’t go viral yet in 2006. The media, ironically, used to protect people from extraordinary images.
Often, the most surprising thing in a viral clip is human behaviour. For instance, the final moments of Hussein showed him as a man who was more courageous than what we were told of despots. He looked dignified and honourable. As he spoke to his executioners, he looked like a man who was giving directions in his palace. He refused their offer to put a hood on him. He was in the middle of his prayers when the plank under his feet gave way. The speed of a human fall — that too was surprising.
It was a time when most of the world had never seen a hanging, or even a person die in a less dramatic way. Now, we are veterans in that arena. Many people have even watched streamed suicides.
What happens to a society when it cannot be shocked or even surprised anymore by a visual, only mildly entertained? It would be a very familiar world — a world just before the mobile-camera era, where writers struggled to captivate people about things that did not directly concern them.
When I was little, I thought people who said they believed in God were liars because if they truly believed in such a supernatural force, wouldn’t they be in a trance of awe at all times? What can be more captivating than God? I now realise the error in my thinking. People get used to the extraordinary without ever denying its extraordinary nature. If an alien appears tomorrow, people will be stunned, of course, but only for a few weeks. The fifth alien appearance may not even go viral unless he has newer content.
I had thought, as recently as 2023, that what would end our wonder at the extraordinary video was our weird ability to come to terms with the extraordinary. I thought it would take another ten years. But something else has come about that will hasten the death of our wonder.
All through our loss of innocence, we retained something ancient. No matter how common the extraordinary became nothing changed the fact that we believed our eyes. The video grab was evidence that something had occurred. Today, that is gone, taking with it the final layer of our collective innocence.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence has complicated the ultimate human treaty with nature: that seeing is believing. Suddenly, not only do we look at an extraordinary event on screen without wonder, we also suspect it might be fake. And when it becomes obvious that an event is not real, it tampers with our pursuit of wonder. Because if AI can create such reality, it diminishes reality itself.
The era of extraordinary videos has been one of the shortest spans of a new human experience. Even the electronic typewriter and the pager, which were doomed to be very brief parts of human life, seem to have lasted longer.
At least electronic typewriters and pagers were killed for honourable reasons by more advanced ideas. The deluge of AI-generated videos, though driven by a fast-developing technology, is all about fooling people and earning money from mass appeal. Oddly, many of the fake AI videos around are of wild animals attacking women.
A good thing may yet happen. It is possible that the proliferation of AI videos might return the value that we once used to place on real-life incidents, just as mind-numbing visual effects in cinema have increased the value of a Tom Cruise doing things any middling stuntman can do. A star performing ‘real stuff’, like jumping off a plane, is so special today that studios think it is worth a hefty insurance bill; they even spend money promoting that fact.
Today, the only images that guarantee to retain our primordial wonder are space images. For instance, one of the most famous pictures to appear in recent times is the image of a ‘black hole’, a dense object whose gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape it and, as a result, it is invisible. It is a phenomenon that was theoretical until recently and is still only theory for niche scientists who doubt its existence. However, there is an ‘image’ of a black hole that has thrilled millions across the world. But it is not really an image as we know images, but a reconstruction of data put together to generate something that the human eye might see. Yet, the world paid it the ultimate compliment. It believed what the eye saw.
(Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’. Check Manujoseph.substack.com.)