No one’s ready for this

Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.

By Sarah Jeong, The Verge, August 22, 2024 (excerpts)

An explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake. 

Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place.

Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule. 

If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. 

Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes. This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after...

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature. 

We are fucked!

Link to the full text.

What the 2024 Olympics tells us about global geopolitics

1. By Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy, SKEMA Business School and Paul Widdop, Associate Professor of Sport Business, Manchester Metropolitan University
2. 
   
3. Published in The Conversation, August 2, 2004
4. 
   

Since the Olympic Games in Paris began, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has posted the statement “This is France!” several times on his social media platforms.

Macron has been implicitly asserting that he is delivering on his personal vision of the event, and of France. Since his election in 2017, he has sought to project a diverse, cosmopolitan and outward-facing France while at the same time strengthening existing preconceptions of its style, culture and history.

The opening ceremony was therefore the embodiment of Macron’s ambitions. It combined landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and key figures from French history, such as Marie Antoinette, with cultural, musical and fashion representations of modern France. These included surfers, rappers and members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Since the Olympic Games in Paris began, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has posted the statement “This is France!” several times on his social media platforms.

Macron has been implicitly asserting that he is delivering on his personal vision of the event, and of France. Since his election in 2017, he has sought to project a diverse, cosmopolitan and outward-facing France while at the same time strengthening existing preconceptions of its style, culture and history.

The opening ceremony was therefore the embodiment of Macron’s ambitions. It combined landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and key figures from French history, such as Marie Antoinette, with cultural, musical and fashion representations of modern France. These included surfers, rappers and members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Meanwhile, those from the extreme right have long resented and resisted Macron’s Parisian-centric and urban-led vision of diversity and modernity. This was evident in reactions to the opening ceremony’s depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, in which drag queens, a transgender model and a naked singer appeared. France’s Catholic church condemned the sketch as a “mockery of Christianity”.

Paris Olympic organisers have since issued an apology, though this is unlikely to have placated Muslim communities around the world. Some among them labelled parts of the opening ceremony “absurd”, “disgusting” and a “promotion of satanic forms”. Others saw it as an attempt by the west to impose its values on them.

This sentiment was apparently shared by the Chinese state broadcaster, China Central Television, whose event commentators went quiet during the segments in which members of LGBTQ+ communities appeared. China has a record of seeking to suppress these communities.

For some French Muslims, there may also have been dismay at the depiction of a religious scene at an event being staged by a French state entity. After all, it was announced late last year that Muslim women would not be allowed to wear their hijabs when competing for France at the Olympics. The justification for this decision was that it would breach the country’s secularist principles, which create a clear separation between religion and state.

That decision came at an especially sensitive time, following the Hamas-led October 7 attacks and Macron’s invitation to France’s chief Rabbi to light Hannukah candles at the Élysée Palace. The war in Gaza continues to cast a shadow over the Games. Indeed, there are rumours of some athletes being prepared to withdraw from the event if they are required to compete directly against an Israeli athlete.

The simmering threat of such direct action has already manifested itself at the Games. During a football match between Mali and Israel on July 24, members of the crowd unfurled banners condemning the latter country and waved flags in support of Palestine. The vast majority (95%) of Malians are Muslim, and there are 120,000 people from Mali living in France.

Limited Russian presence

Israel is not the only country where there is some disquiet. Following recent doping scandals and the invasion of Ukraine, most Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from participating in Paris. A few athletes are competing as neutrals, but national flags, anthems and other national symbols are banned, and no government or state officials have been invited.

The exclusion of Russia has led to speculation that its agents may have been responsible for a series of railway sabotages that caused significant travel disruption on the opening day of the Games. Though nobody was hurt or killed, such attacks undermine public confidence, impose economic and social costs on people, and were clearly an attempt to tarnish the image of France.

France has a long-held reputation for successfully delivering numerous major events each year. However, there was also disruption at the Uefa Champions League final in 2022, which was being staged at the Stade de France (the main Olympic venue this summer). Many Liverpool supporters were put through a traumatising experience when entering the stadium, and riot police teargassed spectators while failing to protect them from being attacked by local thugs.

This followed Paris quickly stepping in to stage the match after Uefa removed St Petersburg’s right to host the game following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whether these events were another deliberate attempt to diminish France or just a coincidence remains debatable.

Some have suggested that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has wanted to undermine the IOC for much of the past decade. He sees it as a western institution governed by values and rules that maintain a dominance he resents.

As such, Russia has been planning to host the World Friendship Games a little more than a month after the Paris Olympics finishes. While there is some confusion over whether the event will be postponed to 2025, there are claims that more than 100 nations have already committed to participating in what may ultimately come to pose an existential threat to the modern Olympic movement.

The IOC normally does its utmost to control the places and spaces that it selects to host Olympic events, whether that means suppressing displays of activism, preventing acts of terrorism, or even minimising the commercial intrusion of brands that have no legal right to associate with the event.

However, such is the currently fractious nature of local and global geopolitics that we should expect more controversy before the Olympic flame in Paris is finally extinguished.