Camera Phones: The Great Equaliser - Enjoy It While It Lasts

Crowd for Kneecap - Glastonbury 2025

There’s something to be said for a technological sweet spot. I’m talking gunpowder before the advent of rifles, I’m talking cinema before digital killed film, I’m talking Gary Neville before he became miserable. These are moments in history where everything perfectly aligns to create something beautiful and memorable: Chinese fireworks, Taxi Driver on 35mm, the commentary for Torres vs Barcelona. As is always inevitable, these moments can’t last forever. As technology improves, and access to said beauty becomes more widespread, there’s more opportunity for change, and development, and “improvement”. People will come in, and they’ll see your wonderful dragon-shaped fireworks, and they’ll say:

“Huh, that’s cool and all, but what if I instead used this technology to make a gun that the CIA can then use to mow down hundreds from the Mandalay Bay Hotel? What if I made The Eternals (2021)? What if I invented The Overlap?”

In many cases, these people don’t realise that they’re doing something evil. They see it as forward thinking. Progressive. The most famous example of this is the inventor of the Gatling gun, Richard J. Gatling, who is said to have designed the weapon because he thought that a higher rate of fire would mean that less soldiers would be required for wars, resulting in less deaths overall. To me, this is obviously incredibly stupid, but I suppose he didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. This is a running theme throughout history, and I suppose it always will be. As long as people continue to invent new things, others will continue to find a way to exploit them.

Richard J. Gatling - An idiot.

I think we’ve been in a technological sweet spot for the past fifteen years or so. Smart phones have come with a lot of downsides, of course, but the proliferation of phones with high quality cameras installed as default has completely changed the way the world works, in a way that is often understated, if stated at all. We’ve been living in the age of the image for close to a century now, with written word falling more and more by the wayside as time went on and TV took over, but the past two decades have introduced the age of the digital image, which is something completely different and much more powerful. Camera phones have given you the ability to make immediate, inarguable documentation of events unfolding in front of you, and since almost everyone on earth has access to this ability, it has caused incredible sweeping change across culture, policing, and warfare. Your behaviour in public is no longer ephemeral and unnoticed, because if you pick your nose on the train, someone might snap a picture for Twitter. Every moment of every gig at Glastonbury this past weekend has been captured and stored in an iPhone, those intimate moments in the crowd no longer existing solely in the unreliable minds of those who were there. All sorts of crimes can be captured and reported with ease, whether it’s a guy cheating on his girlfriend in the garden at a house party, or a police officer kneeling on the throat of a helpless victim. For the past fifteen years, those images haven’t lied. Or at least, it was very difficult to make them lie.

In this sense, and I understand this is an uncomfortable sentence to read, the ongoing genocide in Palestine couldn’t have happened at a better time. The oppression and colonisation of Palestine at the hands of Israel, aided and abetted by the United States and the UK, has obviously been going on for a very, very long time, but if the events of the past two years had taken place as recently as twenty years ago, who knows how bad it could have been? And I ask that literally, because we wouldn’t have known. We wouldn’t have known anything at all. With Israel outright banning foreign journalists from entering Gaza, Palestinians have more or less relied solely on themselves, and the accessibility of their own cameras, to report on the horror. Of course, the documentation of the horrors that Palestinians are subjected to on a daily basis hasn’t resulted in the kind of international action that a more optimistic liberal might hope for, and in fact most governments of the world have chosen to largely ignore it, reminding me of that famous Kurt Vonnegut quote on Vietnam: “Every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high”.

But small pockets of meaningful resistance have cropped up, such as the peaceful activist group Palestine Action, currently on their way to being proscribed as a terrorist organisation, which has successfully blocked and shut down a number of warehouses and factories in the UK and across Europe which had been supplying Israel with arms to continue the genocide. And as I watched Kneecap perform in front of thirty-thousand people waving Palestinian flags this weekend, and as I saw clips of Bob Vylan leading a large crowd in chanting “Death, death, to the IDF”, I couldn’t help but wonder how long we’ve got until the kind of transparency that allows this build-up of worldwide support is completely muddied and suppressed. For now, it’s clear that the general public will remember the crimes of Israel, and the IDF, and the British State, and there’s hope that at some point justice will be brought upon them, but I do wonder if victims of the next genocide will have the same level of global advocation.

If you open Twitter right now and search the words “clearly AI”, then look at the latest tweets, there are thousands and thousands of arguments happening. We’re only really two or three years into AI being a staple feature of our daily lives in the West, whether we like it or not, and the technology isn’t even close to hitting its peak in terms of how believable it can become, but, already, the level of mistrust that the existence of such tech encourages is at an all-time high. And there’s a weird divide too, in that on Twitter, which I suppose skews younger, there’s a lot of scepticism and disbelief, whereas on Facebook, which definitely skews older, people are looking at a thousand cartoonishly fake images of Jesus Christ returning to earth wearing a Union Jack jockstrap every day, and they’re commenting things like “This is what I new would happen, I told my son”.

Facebook AI Slop

There is no doubt in my mind that there are people in intelligence agencies across the globe, from Mossad to MI5, seeing this division of gullibility, and rubbing their hands together at the possibilities. There is no doubt in my mind that there are pale, creepy, little AI experts in a dark room somewhere, testing prompts designed to produce fake videos of brown people killing dogs, or murdering children, or committing sexual assault. And they know that it doesn’t need to be perfect, that it just needs to be close enough to real that it casts doubts in people’s minds. The governments of the world have seen what happens when people are exposed to the reality of their weapons and their foreign policy, and they don’t like how people have responded. But they also know that all it takes to slow someone’s so called “radicalisation”, is a seed of doubt. Just one fake piece of information that makes them think that maybe they’ve got it wrong.

Throughout the Cold War, it was common for the CIA to setup honeypot operations, where they would lure a member of the political opposition into a moment of disarmed intimacy using women or drugs, then record the exchange and use it for blackmail. Within the next few years, AI will be capable of creating that entire scenario wholesale, from scratch, for anyone, with anyone, and it will probably only take a few minutes worth of computational power to do it all. Now, you might be thinking, well, we’ll all know that this is possible, so no one will take it seriously, it will just be assumed that things like that are fake. But what about when they’re real? It’s long been rumoured that infamous sex criminals Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were known to make tapes of high-profile celebrities such as Donald Trump having sex with underage girls, to be used as political leverage by whoever those two were working for (Israel). As of right now, none of these tapes have been released, but really the window for their effective release has been closed for a while. It’s an easy wave of the hand from Trump, and a classic use of his favourite term: “Fake News.” And how could we ever prove otherwise?

Police constabularies using AI to fake CCTV footage of crimes being committed in order to break a confession, militaries using AI videos to justify war crimes, news outlets using AI videos of celebrities that they can later disavow to generate Ad revenue. We’re entering the age of the fake image, and it’s hard to know how bad things are going to get. It’s not impossible to imagine that in ten years’ time the internet will be almost unusable, with the only people we can trust online being those who we know off of it. And maybe this will create a sort of imperfect revisiting of the 90’s, with most people rejecting the slop on their phones in favour of the reality before their eyes. But it seems unlikely. What’s more likely is that we just get used to it, like we always do. We’ll get used to not trusting anything we see, or anything that’s said, and a tidal wave of apathy will crash over a population that was once enraged by the images it saw on TV screens of the My Lai massacre and Twitter feeds of dismembered children in Gaza. Maybe we’ll still see things that upset us, and that should demand our action, but it won’t be worth the punishments imposed on those who do act, because why would you risk being called branded a terrorist when you could just stay at home, and order Uber Eats, and generate a fifteenth season of the US Office?

Kneecap’s DJ Próvaí, on stage at Glastonbury 2025 - A terrorist, apparently.