I was nerding out with some friends last night around a gaming table, laughing, playing, eating, and enjoying the break from real life for a few hours. In the midst of all of this I heard, quite clearly, a train whistle. I instinctively looked around the table to see whose phone had made the noise. Had someone gotten a text? The game continued as I heard the noise again, but a slightly longer version of the noise this time. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me a minute to realize what had made the train whistle noise. Obviously, it was a frickin’ train. The open basement window had let the sound in as an actual train had gone by a few blocks over, but for some reason that possibility had never occurred to me.
I remember when people first started getting cell phones. The earliest ones just had a pre-programmed ringtone, but soon people began to have options. You could choose from a variety of ringtones. You could download new ringtones for $1.99. You could assign different sounds to different contacts! You could make your own ringtones! People would set surprising sounds as their alerts and notifications. Maybe a train whistle? And when the phone went off, passersby might look around and wonder where the train was. Ha ha! Got you! It was only my phone! I still remember the first time I ever heard the “classic telephone” ringtone on someone’s phone. I glanced madly about the room, looking for the landline that was ringing. There was no landline; it was just the latest hilarious old school piece of aural trickery.
Like the boy who cried wolf, I have been tricked too many times. We have all been tricked too many times. Not that it is always in a bad way, mind you. We can go to movies and see whole worlds created before our eyes and find them virtually indistinguishable from reality. What once looked real on screen to me as a child I now look back at and think “how did I ever believe in that?” So fake. But movies are supposed to be fake. We go into a movie with the idea that we are going to be fooled, that there will be some fiction involved. Suspension of disbelief was a thing long before CGI rendered it moot. The problem is, special effects did not stay in the theaters.
Every image we see has been digitally altered. Cover models are photoshopped, heavily. We do it ourselves, with our filters and our cropping. There are natural ways to try and make something appear as it is not, through optical illusion, perspective, and forced angles. But when you start manipulating the data digitally, how can we trust it at all? Holograms of dead singers grace concert stages worldwide. Don’t tell me that technology will not continue to improve until we can’t tell if what is on stage is a real person or a projection. Taylor Swift could perform one concert from her living room and have it broadcast to twenty different stadiums, and the audience would have no idea. Maybe she is already doing it. How would we know?
Maybe I was just too young to know about it before. Maybe this type of cynicism and skepticism has always been there. I know people think we faked the moon landing. Are some things just too fantastic to be believed, even with evidence? And what is evidence anymore? Is seeing really believing? I can point out every single piece of damning evidence regarding the disastrous impact of human beings on the climate, and I can still hear “data can be faked, people can lie, information can be manipulated to creat any conclusion you want.” Is this true?! Is data, is information now meaningless? What kind of society can we possibly live in happily if we can’t trust anything, or anybody, that we see or hear?
There is injustice in the world. There has always been, and will always be. And there have always been people who want to deny that it is happening, because they benefit from it. Sometimes I am that person. Sometimes you are that person. But I have no desire to be manipulated and fooled by people who mistake my desire to believe in something for a naive lack of understanding. I know how the world works. I know that those in power are going to struggle to stay there. I know that almost everything being presented to me has been adjusted in some way to make it more marketable. I can’t say it is unexpected. I just wish I could hear a train whistle once in a while without wondering what it was that I was hearing.