The End of Linear History
VEO3 (Google's video generator) gets me thinking that we’re in the “beginning of the end of linear history.” That isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. All it really means is that the year, as a unit, will lose its power to act as a collective anchor. We can all look back to 2001 and remember specific events, celebrities, and media. I’m predicting that the 2030’s could be the first decade where— because of abundance, distortion, and customization at nauseating levels—two people wont' don’t have the same context. It’s the full realization of “electronic tribalism.” We’re already there in some fashion, but we perhaps aren’t considering how much stronger and disorienting it could get. We are only in the early innings of electronic tribalism. The full realization is the collapse of a shared ledger.
Only slightly related: there is paranoia if the Johny Ive announcement video was AI-generated. People are citing that the bottles in the back are changing locations, but that is easily explained through video editing (maybe there was 3 minutes of cut video, and in that time a waiter moved the bottles, which would make it seem like they suddenly jumped). Now that AI video is good enough to be real, everyone is over-interpreting little artifacts. Internet news already has low epistemic certainty, and people already fracture into groups based on how they would like to interpret something, so this will only accelerate the decline of a shared narrative.