POV
Fifth hour of a FaceTime call. My friend is on a break at the other end, scrolling on his phone, and I can hear his feed: the voice isolation that strips the call of everything but speech does not know what to do with a phone lying next to his laptop's microphone. A filter built to pass only the human voice is passing someone else's feed instead. Neither of us apologizes. This is what work sounds like now: two rooms, four screens, one channel of audio between them.
My own feed is open in my hand. Between a recipe and a man restoring a rusted knife, it serves me politics: a party account has taken a video that a politician of a rival party made of himself, tired after a run, saying something harmless about running, and recut it under a caption in the platform's grammar. POV1, colon, a joke about a young man explaining to his parents how hard his job is. A dozen words turn a national figure into a boy at a family dinner. I laugh. I watch it again. The second view is recorded somewhere, and it counts exactly as much as the first.
The page that chose it for me is called For You2. It never says who does the choosing.
I know the fashionable culprit, and it is not the right one. The role the politician is playing was cast long before the platform existed. Between 1968 and 1988 the average unedited stretch of a presidential candidate's speech on American network evening news fell from 42.3 seconds to 9.83. Television had finished that compression while the founders of every feed on my phone were children. By the time I could vote, Polish prime ministers sat on breakfast-television couches and the opinion weeklies fought wars of photomontage covers; none of it needed an algorithm.
In 1995 the casting arrived in Poland as a profession. Jacques Séguéla4, the adman who had sold Mitterrand to France as a quiet force, advised the campaign of a smiling forty-year-old against the hero of Solidarity. Remembering it later, he calls Wałęsa the star of stars. Not a statesman, not a legend: a star. A salesman's noun, on the record thirty years before any politician filmed himself after a run.
A standard is what a gatekeeper can enforce. As long as the studio was the only door to the voters, the studio could demand a suit and whole sentences and the performance of gravity, and the politicians paid the toll, because there was nowhere else to be seen. Then the scarcity ended and the rent lapsed. Nobody lowered the standard; the standard stopped being collectible. The tired man filmed himself because filming yourself is now simply the job, and in the office of a rival party someone was paid, within business hours, to recut him.
Somewhere, making fun of a tired man is a deliverable.
Here is where I am supposed to be sad, and I have checked, and I am not.
I publish a newspaper. A serious one, or one trying hard to look it. It grows the way everything grows now: vertical video, cut to the rhythm the platform taught us all. I know which second of a clip loses people. I know what a face in the first frame is worth. My posts go out on schedule whether I am awake or not. When the politician finished his run and raised the phone, I recognized the gesture. I have made that video. I will make it again this week.
Civic engagement and engagement rate have become one word, and nobody had to sign anything.
The lament writes itself and I do not believe a word of it: the decline of discourse, the infantilization of the public sphere. The discourse whose decline is mourned was a rent-seeker's etiquette; the public sphere was a studio with one door. What replaced it is not better. But my failure to mourn is not a failure of taste. It is a conflict of interest, and I am declaring it.
The declaration is too comfortable, so here is what sits under it. My numbers run highest on the worst days: the flood, the verdict, the border scare. On a quiet morning I catch myself checking the feed like a shopkeeper checking the sky, and finding the calm faintly disappointing. A man disappointed by a calm morning has no standing to laugh at a tired man. I laughed anyway. The feeling does not go away by being written down; writing it down is one more product I have learned to make from it.
One thing I did do before writing this: I went looking for the original. The uncut video, the context, the man before the joke was made of him. It took four taps. There is no backstage in it. The original is also produced5: shot by himself, framed by himself, posted to the same platform in the same grammar, for the same seconds of the same attention. I had imagined that somewhere behind the recut there was a room where the performance stops.
Behind the camera, another camera.6
Later I open my own dashboard, because it is evening and that is what my hands do in the evening. Rows: watched, skipped, finished, shared. Each row is a person lying in the dark with a phone, and to some other dashboard, in some other office, I am the row. It is just the accounting.
I send the video to my friend. Sixth hour of the call now. A second later I hear it begin again, tinny, coming back down the chain: his phone, his laptop's microphone, the filter built for voices, my ear. He laughs. So do I, second time tonight, and I write it down plainly, because it is the one fact this essay cannot do without: it was a pleasure7.
Tomorrow at nine a video of mine publishes itself. It is rendered and captioned and waiting in the queue. I will be asleep, or running.
1 POV: point of view. In film grammar, the shot taken through a character's eyes. On the platform the abbreviation has drifted into a caption particle that simply announces a scene, and most POV captions no longer assign any point of view at all.
2 Guy Debord (1931-1994): French theorist, founder of the Situationist International. "La société du spectacle" (1967), thesis 4: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." He was writing about television and advertising; he did not live to see a social network. The book is two hundred and twenty-one numbered theses, and it reads today less like theory than like documentation.
3 The shrinking soundbite: Kiku Adatto's 1990 Harvard study measured the average uninterrupted block of a presidential candidate's speech on American network evening news: 42.3 seconds in 1968, 9.8 seconds in 1988. In 1968, one sound bite in five ran over a minute; in 1988, none did. Daniel Hallin, working independently, confirmed the curve. The compression was complete before the first browser existed. Television built the format; the feed inherited a finished estate.
4 Jacques Séguéla (b. 1934): French advertising man, co-founder of Euro RSCG. In 1981 he sold François Mitterrand to France under the slogan "La force tranquille." In 1995 he advised Aleksander Kwaśniewski's presidential campaign against Lech Wałęsa; two weeks before the first round his candidate trailed in the polls, 37 to 43, and won. In his own account of that campaign he calls Wałęsa "the star of stars." The vocabulary of the man doing the selling is the earliest honest record of what was on the shelf.
5 Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004): American historian, later Librarian of Congress. "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" (1962) defined the pseudo-event, an occurrence staged in order to be reported, and the celebrity: "a person who is known for his well-knownness." He was describing the America of 1962.
6 Joshua Meyrowitz: media theorist. "No Sense of Place" (1985) argued that electronic media dissolve the wall between front stage and back stage (Goffman's terms), so that public figures are watched rehearsing, resting, failing. The politician loses control of access to his own backstage; intimacy becomes a broadcast genre. Meyrowitz was writing about television talk shows. The argument never needed updating; the equipment did.
7 Walter Benjamin (1892-1940): "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), epilogue: mankind's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Fascism, he wrote, renders politics aesthetic, and "all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war." He wrote it in exile; four years later, cornered at the Spanish border, he killed himself. The only alarm this essay contains, and it is in the fine print.