I've decided to look at the situation in Cyprus and of course the rest
of the banking world and how it may be pushing the use of alternative
currencies. I'm guessing you don't have much idea of what money is or where it comes from so please take a few minutes to watch this before Thursday:
Bailing out Cyprus was always going to be tricky. But it didn’t have to be like this
EVEN by the standards of European policymaking, the past week has
been a disaster. In the early hours of March 16th, nine months after
Cyprus first requested a bail-out, euro-zone finance ministers, led by
the Germans, offered a €10 billion ($13 billion) deal, well short of the
€17 billion needed. Who ordered whom to do precisely what is not clear,
but the Cypriots then said they would raise a further €5.8 billion by
imposing a levy on depositors—of 9.9% on savings above the €100,000
insurance-guarantee limit, and 6.75% for deposits below it. Chaos
ensued, not least among the many Russians (reputable or not) who have
parked their money in the lightly regulated island. On March 19th, with
crowds in the streets and all the banks firmly shut, the Cypriot
parliament rejected the bail-out package (see article). As The Economist
went to press, the scene had shifted to Moscow, where the Cypriots were
trying to persuade Vladimir Putin and his cronies to contribute some
money in exchange, perhaps, for future gas revenues.
Cyprus is a Mediterranean midget, with a GDP of only $23 billion. But
this crisis could have poisonous long-term consequences. Eight months
after the European Central Bank appeared to have restored stability by
promising to do whatever it took to save the currency, the risk of a
euro member being thrown out has returned. It has increased the chances
of deposit runs (if Cyprus can grab your money, why not Italy or
Spain?). And it has revealed the lack of progress towards a durable
solution to the euro’s troubles. Ideally, all this will prompt the
Europeans to push ahead with reforms, but with a German election in the
autumn that seems unlikely.
Towards Cyprussia?
Cyprus is broke. Its debt, if it took on its banks’ liabilities,
would hit 145% of GDP. This newspaper suggested recapitalising Cypriot
banks, on a case-by-case basis, directly through the European Stability
Mechanism (ESM), thus breaking the vicious circle where weak sovereigns
bail out weak banks. We also argued for depositors and senior
bondholders to be spared—not out of any particular love for rich
Russians, but because of the fear of bank runs in larger weak euro
economies. The Europeans instead decided to lend the money directly to
the Cypriot government; and the Cypriots, perhaps bullied by some
creditors, then decided to clobber all the banks’ depositors, even the
insured ones.
This was ingeniously loopy. Cyprus is odd, because virtually all its
banks’ liabilities are deposits (as opposed to longer-term bonds). Yet,
of the 147 banking crises since 1970 tracked by the IMF, none inflicted
losses on all depositors, irrespective of the amounts they held and the
banks they were with. Now depositors in weak banks in weak countries
have every reason to worry about sudden raids on their savings.
Depositors in places like Italy have not panicked yet. But they will if
the euro zone tries to “rescue” them too.
The blame for this should be shared between Cyprus and its creditors.
Cyprus is guilty of a lot. It welcomed in the Russians and allowed its
banks to get far too big: their assets reached 800% of GDP in 2011. The
banks were in trouble even before the restructuring of Greek government
bonds opened up a €4 billion hole in their accounts last year. As for
the creditors, Angela Merkel’s priority seems to have been to appear
stern before the German election, and the European Central Bank, whose
job it is to protect financial stability, was party to a scheme that
ended up jeopardising it.
What should Europe’s leaders do now? The worst outcome would be to
allow the Cypriots to slide towards the exit. That would be disastrous
for the island. And the euro zone would be wrong to imagine that Cyprus
is tiny enough to let go safely. The currency’s credibility rests on the
idea that it is irreversible.
Leaving it to the Russians to save Cyprus, by letting them
recapitalise its banks and grab a slice of its gas, is an answer, but
not the best one. However tricky the politics of using German taxpayers’
money to bail out Russian depositors, a deal that ends up entrenching
Cyprus’s status as an offshore Russian satrapy would be a perverse
outcome. A revised deal with the euro zone would be better.
The yoke of union
This newspaper would still prefer to recapitalise Cyprus’s banks
directly through the ESM. That option is plainly not on the table. The
best that can probably be done now is to spare the insured depositors,
bail in other bank creditors and, given the economic damage caused in
the past week, increase the amount of the bail-out. The financial
assumptions in the rejected deal are already out of date. There will be
capital flight when the shuttered banks eventually open; the island’s
offshore-finance business plan is now bust. It needs to find new sources
of prosperity, including faster exploitation of its recent
Mediterranean gas finds—although these can be overplayed (see article).
The best long-term plan for its economy would be a deal with the
Turkish-Cypriots to reunify the island, which would boost tourism and
GDP.
More broadly, Cyprus’s tragicomedy should prompt Europe’s leaders to
get a move on. Even if only uninsured deposits are hit, a line has been
crossed. A formal European bail-in regime is needed as soon as possible,
one that requires banks to hold a layer of loss-absorbing senior debt
designed to spare depositors, both insured and uninsured, in all but the
last resort. That promises a more predictable environment, but it will
also entrench fragmentation, with borrowers in weak countries finding it
harder and more expensive to gain access to credit. The only solution
to such fragmentation is a proper banking union and limited
mutualisation of sovereign debt.
The political consequences are toxic. Cyprus is the latest peripheral
country to feel mistreated by creditor countries. For their part
creditors resent the fact that their financial support is summarily
discounted. The euro-zone economy is stagnant. Protest parties are
gaining popularity. The euro was supposed to be the manifestation of a
grand political project. It feels more like a loveless marriage, in
which the cost of breaking up is the only thing keeping the partners
together.
I still don't know if I'm going to be able to get a projector and the technical stuff figured out yet, so check back here before Thursday, I might post a couple short videos for you to watch.
If you're completely financially and economically illiterate, first off,
congratulations, you've avoided the indoctrination. However, your
ignorance is the weapon the elite use to make things worse for the rest
of us. It would be helpful if you knew what the sequester is, here's a
relatively good article about it that you could read: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/03/the-sequester-explained
Americans
have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate
massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1
percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an
inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
THE FAT AND THE FURIOUS
The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles,
says the author, but “their fate is bound up with how the other 99
percent live.”
It’s no use pretending that what has
obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of
Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income
every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent
control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably.
Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33
percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that
brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide
lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1
percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade,
those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with
only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in
the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and
more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America
lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President
George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia
with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of
inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in
recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and
reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists
long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so
troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale
shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they
came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell,
this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a
greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been
cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin.
The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past
three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own
companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses.
In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards
“performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to
“retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad
performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to
our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers
of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those
responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global
economy to the brink of ruin.
Some people
look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this
person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how
the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is
fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing
worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well
over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.
First,
growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking
opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that
we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the
most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead
to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and
preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the
efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new
distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one
example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the
astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields
that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.
Third,
and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective
action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and
technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from
government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in
public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an
under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our
highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research,
and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie
ahead.
None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what
happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more
divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the
wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to
rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal
security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process,
they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy
they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that
could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth,
and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about
the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it
just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything
but lower taxes.
Economists are not sure
how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary
dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving
technologies have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class,
blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace,
pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled
workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance,
the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American
workers and now represent about 12 percent.
But one big part of
the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it
that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax
rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of
their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride.
Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic
power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to
Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially
during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1
percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the
financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought
and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best
investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at
close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable
terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of
transparency and to conflicts of interest.
When you look at the
sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country,
it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially
American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing
inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building
on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is
self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During
the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions,
by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was
asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had
spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence.
“I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United
case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by
removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the
political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators,
and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1
percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1
percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be
rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the
key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also
come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a
trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the
largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come
as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot
emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the
wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would
expect the system to work.
America’s inequality distorts
our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a
well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent
increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a
chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively
distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the
military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay
enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so
far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when
the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign
policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and
national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no
price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is
no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and
contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are
likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among
countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations,
weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used
to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to
collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the
rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for
workers. Governments would compete in providing economic
security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a
clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t
need to care.
Or, more accurately, they think they
don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent,
perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in
which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are
so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society,
where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics
suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class
citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many
countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this
sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the
conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and
persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth
unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and
among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of
six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out
of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering
from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that
something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1
percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect
of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the
last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.
In
recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the
millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the
oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in
Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain.
The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their
air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry.
These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less
than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a
main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or
another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively
in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.
As
we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask
ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our
own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places. Alexis
de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the
peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest
properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone
possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me
right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means
appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in
other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own
ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was
anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was
suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those
canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy
isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.
The top 1
percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and
the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to
have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the
other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the
top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.
Hey guys. Here's the article for the presentation Thursday!
How Viewers Grow Addicted To Television
By DANIEL GOLEMAN Published: October 16, 1990
THE
proposition that television can be addictive is proving to be more than
a glib metaphor. The most intensive scientific studies of people's
viewing habits are finding that for the most frequent viewers, watching
television has many of the marks of a dependency like alcoholism or
other addictions.
For instance, compulsive viewers turn to
television for solace when they feel distressed, rather than only
watching favorite programs for pleasure. And though they get temporary
emotional relief while watching, they end up feeling worse afterward.
For
a decade or more, researchers have pursued the hypothesis that some
television viewers are addicted to watching. But only this year have a
handful of studies produced the strongest evidence yet that some
compulsive viewers are indeed addicted under standard diagnostic
criteria.
There is no definition of television addiction on which
all researchers agree. But people who call themselves ''television
addicts,'' studies find, watch television twice as much as the average
viewer. One study found that self-described addicts watched an average
of 56 hours a week; the A. C. Nielsen Company reports the average for
adults is just above 30 hours a week.
Recent
studies have found that 2 to 12 percent of viewers see themselves as
addicted to television: they feel unhappy watching as much as they do,
yet seem powerless to stop themselves.
Portraits of those who
admit to being television addicts are emerging from the research. For
instance, a study of 491 men and women reported this year by Robin Smith
Jacobvitz of the University of New Mexico offers these character
sketches:
A 32-year-old police officer has three sets in his home.
Although he is married with two children and has a full-time job, he
manages to watch 71 hours of television a week. He says, ''I rarely go
out anymore.''
A 33-year-old woman who has three children, is
divorced and has no job reports watching television 69 hours a week. She
says, ''Television can easily become like a companion if you're not
careful.''
A housewife who is 50, with no children, watches 90
hours of television a week. She says, ''I'm home almost every day and my
TV is my way of enjoying my day.''
Insights on Normal Viewing
The
studies also shed new light on more ordinary viewing habits, showing
that people who are emotionally dependent on television simply represent
extremes of behavior seen from time to time in most viewers.
In a
study comparing television viewing with leisure activities like sports,
reading or gardening, television fared poorly as a diversion. While
ordinary viewers say television relaxes them while they watch, afterward
they feel far less relaxed, less happy and less able to concentrate
than after participating in sports or other leisure activities.
To
be sure, many people in the television industry, as well as some
researchers, object to the idea that the medium can be addictive.
''People
may watch to kill time or for escapism, but I've never seen anything
conclusive that shows television to be psychologically addictive,'' said
Richard Ducey, senior vice president of research and planning with the
National Association of Broadcasters in Washington. ''It's a proposition
with no support, except in some metaphorical sense, the same way you
might be addicted to dessert.''
The issue of whether the most
frequent viewers of television are addicted to it is being argued
against the backdrop of a larger debate within psychiatry on the nature
of addiction itself. For the most part, psychiatry has held to a strict
definition of ''addiction,'' restricting its use to describe dependence
on a substance like heroin to which the body develops a tolerance and
shows withdrawal symptoms when deprived of it.
But in the current
version of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, issued in 1983, the
category of addiction was redefined and broadened to include compulsive
behaviors that people turned to for relief from distress, and continued
to rely on despite negative effects on their emotional or social
functioning.
''Under the broader definition, many kinds of
compulsive behavior could be considered addictive, including obsessive
sex or compulsive television viewing,'' said Dr. Allen Frances, a
psychiatrist at Cornell University Medical School, who is overseeing the
revision of the diagnostic manual.
Watering Down of Concept
''However,
the broad definition is under debate,'' he said. ''Many of us think it
has become too vague, watering down the concept of addiction.''
The
most commonly used scale to measure television addiction includes using
television as a sedative, even though it does not bring satisfaction;
lacking selectivity in viewing; feeling a loss of control while viewing;
feeling angry with oneself for watching so much, not being able to quit
watching and feeling miserable when kept from watching it.
''They
turn on the TV when they feel sad, lonely, upset or worried, and they
need to distract themselves from their troubles,'' said Robert
McIlwraith, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba. Dr. McIlwraith
reported his findings on television addiction at the annual meeting of
the American Psychological Association in Boston last August.
The
most exhaustive data on television watching data is from studies done
between 1976 and 1988 on several different groups involving close to
1,200 men and women who volunteered to fill out questionnaires about
their activities and moods whenever they were alerted by beepers they
carried.
In analyzing the data for people's television-watching
habits, Robert Kubey, a psychologist now at the School of Communications
at Rutgers University, worked with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a
psychologist at the University of Chicago.
Their findings are
reported in ''Television and the Quality of Life,'' published this year
by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. While their conclusions are drawn from
the studies involving more than a thousand people, the most detailed
results come from a study in which 107 men and women reported on their
experiences at randomly selected moments throughout the day for a week.
The
third of the men and women in the smaller study who watched television
the most were markedly different from the rest of those studied. As a
group, the compulsive watchers were more irritable, tense and sad than
the others, and felt they had little control over their lives.
For
most people, there was a strong relationship between being in a bad
mood and watching television to get out of it. The strongest pattern
predicting that people would watch television in the evening was that in
the morning they felt the day was going badly, and by the afternoon
they were in a bad mood.
Lowered Brain Activity
For all
viewers, researchers have found, television tends to elicit a state of
''attentional inertia,'' marked by lowered activity in the part of the
brain that processes complex information. That inertia, said Dr. Kubey,
may explain why a mediocre television show can have high ratings if it
follows a popular one.
''It's common for people to say they are
selective television watchers,'' said Dr. Kubey. ''They'll say they sat
down just to watch 'L.A. Law,' but they're still watching three hours
later. A great many people feel powerless to get up and turn it off.''
For
compulsive viewers, that inertia becomes extreme, so that the longer
they watch, the more passive and less discriminating they become, Dr.
Kubey found.
Oddly, while most people said they were more relaxed
while watching television than they had been before starting, they ended
up feeling far less relaxed once they stopped. ''We found no evidence
that television offers emotional rewards that extend beyond viewing,''
Dr. Kubey said. Moreover, the longer people watch television, the less
rewarding they find it, the intensive study of 107 people showed.
These
experiences with television were strongest among the compulsive
viewers. Not only did they report feeling worse than most people as they
watched television, but their spirits drooped all the more once they
stopped watching. What little lift they get from television, though, is
enough in many cases for most frequent viewers to become dependent on
it, Dr. Kubey said.
An additional pressure to watch television for
the compulsive viewers arises from feeling uncomfortable when they are
alone with nothing to do, the study showed. For such people, idle time
is unpleasant, making them all the more ready to seek solace from
television.
Testing Addiction Theories
In other recent
research, Dr. McIlwraith tested several theories of television addiction
in a study of 135 students at the University of Toronto. In his study,
the one in eight students who said they were addicted to television
watched twice as much as the others: 21 hours a week instead of 10.
One
prominnent theory of television addiction, proposed by Jerome Singer, a
psychologist at Yale University, holds that people who watch too much
television from childhood grow up with a deprived fantasy life. For
them, watching television substitutes for their own imagination. But Dr.
McIlwraith found no difference between the television addicts and other
students in their abilities to have pleasant, vivid fantasies on their
own.
Another theory, proposed by psychoanalytic theorists, is that
television addicts have an ''addictive'' personality, which makes them
vulnerable to dependencies of all kinds. But Dr. McIlwraith found no
evidence for that view. ''Television addicts don't eat more junk food,
or smoke or drink more alcohol than other groups,'' Dr. McIlwraith said.
Instead,
his study supported the findings of Dr. Kubey. The addicts were far
more likely than other students to say they watched TV when feeling
lonely, sad, anxious or angry, and to use it to distract themselves from
things that bothered them or when they were bored. 3 Patterns
Identified From this study and another of 476 men and women done with
John Schallow, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, Dr.
McIlwraith has identified three main patterns of television use. ''One
common use is to alter mood,'' Dr. McIlwraith said. ''These people turn
on the television when distressed. Another is to fill time when you are
bored. People who feel they are addicted fall into extremes of these
types.''
On the other hand, he said, ''there is a rarer group who
use television selectively. They tend to watch only a few favorite
shows.''
How “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” Ruled The Internet
Four Canadian film students were assigned a project: Create a YouTube hoax video that gets 100,000 views.
They got nearly 42 million instead. Here’s the definitive
behind-the-meme look at how — and why — their homework snowballed into
one of the most popular and rapidly spread videos ever.
It's one depressingly typical minute of the 6.2 million uploaded to
YouTube every day: In a Montreal park, nothing much is happening. The
camera pans around a clear blue sky, tracing the arc of a golden eagle
as it twists and turns through the air. The bird pulls a generous sweep
around a large tree, 30 feet or more, shorn of its branches by the
bitter frost that hits the Quebec city this time of year. And then
things turn from dull nature documentary into snuff film.
The
eagle doesn't continue its elegant acrobatics. Instead, it suddenly
picks up pace. The sweep becomes a swoop, and it's dropping altitude.
Eleven seconds into the video, a small boy in a warm insulated jacket
comes into frame. He's sitting faced away, staring into space.
Eleven
seconds into the video, you realize what's going to happen. Eleven
seconds into the video, the eagle is 10 feet behind the little boy, and
you're damned if the way the bird's wings are drawn up doesn't remind
you an awful lot of the way Dracula wraps himself in his cloak before
biting. It's horror-movie stuff.
A second later, the eagle's
talons have latched on and the boy's taken up off the ground; he's dead
weight. A guy in a black-and-white striped sweater rooting around in a
bag nearby runs over as the boy takes flight. He's in mid-air, and when
the talons release, he's flying for a split second before hitting the
ground.
We hear an appropriately startled "Oh, shit!" and the
cameraman sprints over, the grass speeding past as the lens points down.
The little boy is crying. He's wearing a bright red hat with big googly
eyes, and his face is that emotionless expression small humans get when
they just don't have an appropriate response to what's gone on. The boy
is alright, and the horror you felt gives way to relief. Thirty-five
seconds in, the video replays the moment in slow motion because that's
what happens at the end of every dunk on SportsCenter. The screen fades to black.
And
then you copy the video URL, go to your Facebook account, and paste it
in the status box, add a "what the fuck!" or something equally trite,
and share.
You've just done precisely what Professor Robin Tremblay wanted you to do.
Robin Tremblay of Centre NAD
Tremblay is a lecturer at Centre NAD, a technology university
in Montreal, where he's been teaching a video-effects class since 1992.
In October, he challenged his students — as he did the previous two
semesters — to make a viral hoax video. If it got more than 100,000
views, then congratulations, you got an A.
"The students have to
shoot live-action, integrate 3-D effects, and make it so believable
that it can look real," he explains in a thick French-Canadian accent.
That's the core component of the VFX course and has been for years. "But
I was always trying to think of new ways to teach it. New ideas. I
think, 'Oh, maybe I should try a prank film.'"
Though the
primary aim of Tremblay's class was to teach his students how best to
use software to create 3-D visual effects, the assignment became an
object lesson in what we find interesting, why we find it interesting,
and how we disseminate things we find interesting. What do we believe,
and why? And unlike 2009's Balloon Boy
debacle, which smacked of opportunism and exploitation, this was the
rare public hoax that remains victimless and good-natured and
unmotivated by malice or greed — one that could actually be a teachable
moment, not just for the perpetrators, but for all of us who
participated by clicking, or by telling others to. And these moments are
worth examining closely because they're the ones in which we're all
watching, and wondering, together, in real time, if only for a short
time.
Four of Tremblay's most industrious students, Normand
Archambault, Félix Marquis-Poulin, Loïc Mireault, and Antoine Seigle,
created a video called "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid"
— 17 million views within a day, just shy of 42 million views in total,
14 million minutes in viewing time in the U.S. alone, embedded on major
news websites worldwide,
broadcast on morning talk shows, and linked from countless message
boards — which proved this in historically impressive style."I
still don't understand how it went that big," says Marquis-Poulin, 23.
"I go from step one to the final result. I see all the work we did. I
can't comprehend somebody on their phone, watching the video, saying,
'Look at this! An eagle catches a baby! That's awesome.' I can't imagine
how many people had this moment. It's weird."
They got an A.
1. Thunderbirds Are Go
Tremblay wants his
students to be at least as adept as the major professional movie studios
they will hopefully end up working for. He also knows that the way
visual effects are being deployed is changing — they're no longer used
only to portray the incredible; often they're used in place of the
mundane. If a director doesn't want to deal with 4,000 extras cheering
in a football stadium, he'll populate the stands with computer-generated
fans waving banners. Tremblay also knows how much video content we
watch and share (4 billion hours a month on YouTube alone), and that if
you can separate yourself from the dross, there is a potentially huge
audience out there.
Tremblay's 25 students were separated into
teams of two to five, and let loose. "Babies and animal videos were very
much popular," explains Mireault, 21. "We started brainstorming how we
could mix those two ideas."
"We didn't have the idea right
away," explains Archambault, 22, who seems the natural leader of the
group, comfortable explaining the process behind the creation of the
video and the least fazed of the four by the attention the runaway
success of the video eventually garnered. In November, he says, the four
began batting around potential concepts for the project, including
exploding pigeons and a plane landing on a busy Montreal street."But
we decided an eagle would be more..." — there's a slight pause to find
the right word — "subtle than a plane," adds Marquis-Poulin. Montrealers
would be more likely to question why they didn't hear the sound of a
747 touching down on Saint Catherine Street; they could feasibly miss a
bird snatching a child in a park. And while the students' reasoning may
have ultimately boiled down to a simple tenet that serves to remind how
much W.C. Fields would have loathed the internet, there is much
historical precedent to suggest that the concept of a bird attack had
the potential to be shared widely.
Enough people saw Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
50 years ago for it to earn more than $11 million at the box office —
nearly four times its $3.3 million budget. French avant-garde filmmaker
François Truffaut was "convinced that cinema was invented so that such a
film could be made." Certainly it got people's attention, and it
hardened the primal premise in our minds that birds are considered potential human predators.
Indeed
a whole academic field is devoted to such events. Some cryptozoologists
spend their life's work trying to piece together historical references
to (often giant) birds snatching babies and adults from their
comfortable lives and flying them away. One of the most respected in
this field is Mark A. Hall, 66, who worked for the USDA after gathering
intelligence in West Berlin during the Cold War. He isn't coming up with
these theories off the top of his head: There are firsthand historical
written accounts testifying that bird attacks are real.
Roc from Arabian Nights
Though some might question whether birds with a 25-foot wingspan ever
existed (Hall believes they could have), there are certainly stories,
apocryphal or not, that nod to their existence. Early Native Americans
told stories around campfires of attacks by birds, including those of
the Piasa, or "Bird that Devours Man." In One Thousand and One Nights (also known as Arabian Nights),
the giant bird Roc features heavily in the narrative. Like stories of
gorgons, mermaids, and Cyclopes, historical, scientific, or factual
evidence is scant, but the looming shadow of birds has hung over
humanity for thousands of years.One such report was contained in the May 17, 1888, edition of The Equity
newspaper out of Bryson, Quebec, a three-hour drive from Montreal.
Seven-year old Georgie Richards of Brier Hill, New York, repelled "a
very large bald eagle" with "as large a club as he could wield." The
paper said it was "the first instance in which one of these voracious
birds has attempted to carry off a child in St. Lawrence County."
"Looking back over the century and a half of reports," Hall wrote in his 2004 book Thunderbirds: America's Living Legends of Giant Birds,
"it would seem encounters in which a person is harmed occur every 30 to
40 years. At that pace, it's about time for another incident of such a
dangerous and dramatic nature."
The students figured that if they could present footage that backed up
thousands
of years of apocryphal written evidence, that video could be huge.
Their research uncovered a series of reported bird attacks throughout
history — mostly based in northern Europe, says Archambault — and knew
they could tap into that fear for their viral video.
"We had to
do two kinds of research: one about the anatomy and the feathers, and
the other was how the eagle flies," Marquis-Poulin explains. "How he
moves, how he attacks his prey."
The video-effects course aims
to accurately mimic the process of producing a real movie, says
Professor Tremblay. That meant the students had to scout out locations,
storyboard the action, and find some leading players.
Original storyboards for "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid"
"When we got the idea, we wanted to make sure it was possible to see an
eagle in that region of the province," adds Archambault." We saw it
could be in Montreal — but it's rare. It's possible."
The
students had their arch villain, but now they needed their ingenue to be
swept away. Seigle, the oldest of the group at 24, seemed the most
likely to know someone who had a child willing to take part. Eventually,
a friend's 18-month old son, Jacob, was cast. "It was the only
available baby we had access to," Seigle admits, laughing.
The
choice of location seemed obvious to the group: It had to be Mount Royal
Park. The 500-acre expanse of greenery is pretty much the only place in
the city you might see a rare golden eagle and a happy, innocent child
in the same space. It had some name recognition, and the right kind of
surroundings to correctly frame and track the shot so that the 3-D
smoothly integrated with the real-life footage.
A group of
eight, including their teacher, young Jacob, and Jacob's parents,
gathered near the 155-year-old stone-built Smith House inside the park
and shot their footage on Nov. 18. On arrival, the group made a crucial
executive decision: Initially, the bird was going to fly away with the
child. "We decided on a happy ending," says Mireault.The crew
spent two hours filming four or five takes in the park. In one, explains
Archambault, "the baby actually cried for real. We really liked that,
so we put it in."
Over the next month, they ran their footage
through three different programs: Autodesk Softimage (a 3-D-modeling app
where they created the eagle and the computer-generated baby), Autodesk
Maya (a program used to texture the eagle's feathers), and NUKE, a
post-production program that digitally composited the different source
material and gave the studio-quality footage a believable rough quality.
All
told, from being given the assignment on Oct. 29 to turning it in on
Dec. 18, the four estimate they worked some 400 hours on the project.
"We did a couple of all-nighters," adds Mireault, during which the group
would act as a tag team: One person would take a much-needed nap while
the others worked. When refreshed, they'd swap roles.
With weary eyes, the 25 or so students in the course gathered
in the Blinn/Phong screening room on campus at 4:00 p.m. EST on Dec. 18.
People sat on the floor and propped themselves up against the walls:
This was the conclusion of their class, and everyone wanted to see what
everyone else had produced. One team made an infomercial for an alarm clock (402 views to date), another
for an iPhone app that punches people in the face (2,634 views). "We
still had our doubts, right until the end," says Seigle. But the video
was well-received.
"Everyone applauded, everyone laughed at the
little slow motion at the end," says Archambault. "There are more things
to improve, but we had to hand it in." He pauses. "We thought it looked
pretty good."
As soon as the class screening was over, all four
quickly made their way to a computer. Seigle pushed the big red upload
button on YouTube at around 7:00 p.m., surrounded by his three
classmates. An innocuous username — MrNuclearCat — was chosen for the
account. (The name was a breadcrumb for those on the trail of unveiling
it as a hoax; the students had created a video
earlier in the semester called "Nuclear Cats," which they had submitted
to the Montreal International Game Summit.) Within 30 minutes, the
first post on Reddit appeared. Within an hour, the first user tweeted out the video. Major sites were picking up on the story by midnight.The
four students, meanwhile, were with their classmates in Le Pourvoyeur, a
red brick building on Rue Jean Talon Est, a 15-minute walk from the
Centre NAD campus. It's the students' regular haunt, bustling, even on a
Tuesday night —upwards of 60 students and their teachers, powered by
adrenaline, relief, and 5.0% ABV beer.
Tremblay was proud of his
students' work, and told them so. "It was kind of a big endeavor to
animate a bird and everything," says Marquis-Poulin. "He was very proud
of us for succeeding on something he himself was calling very
difficult."
The teachers had taken the students out to decompress,
but easier said than done: They were all on their phones. "We checked
how it was going, and it was around 1,000 views. We were already very
happy with that," says Archambault.
"The first comments on the
video were very positive. Everybody was fooled, and that was kind of a
good sign," adds Marquis-Poulin, who had managed to sneak in a power nap
before presenting to the class at 4:00 p.m. "We were expecting to have
at least 10,000 views in the morning. We weren't expecting 1.2 million."
Not everyone was fooled, though.
2. Outbreak
Mark Twain once said, "A lie can
travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its
shoes." Except that he didn't, because C.H. Spurgeon said it first — in
1859 — and said it a little differently: "A lie will go round the world
while truth is pulling its boots on." Even that is an adaptation of a
Jonathan Swift quote first penned 150 years earlier. The major aphorism
people use to warn about the spread of falsehoods is itself based on a
lie so widely spread that it has turned into one of those common
cultural constants everyone knows and parrots back to each other.
"Golden
Eagle Snatches Kid" didn't just pull on a pair of jackboots; it slipped
itself into Nike running shoes, did some stretches, and set off at a
sprint. The race to debunk the video was on.
Cyatek, real name
Tiago Duarte, lives in Barcarena, Portugal, less than 10 miles west of
Lisbon. Like a lot of teenage boys, when not on YouTube he spends a lot
of time playing hyperrealistic video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II,
and he's a whiz at Photoshop. And to him, watching the video 20 minutes
after it was uploaded, the whole thing just didn't sit right.
"It
looked so fake to me," he explains. "The main thing that gave it away
was the baby falling down." When the eagle snatches the child in its
talons, it drags along the ground. As the bird gains a little altitude,
the child slips. "It really looked like a 3-D model to me," the kind of
models that populate Call of Duty, says Duarte. This was a worry
of the students too: "Making a realistic human in 3-D is very hard. When
it looks fake, it's very unconvincing," explains Archambault.
But
others were less skeptical than Duarte. "Every single person was
believing it, and the top comment at the time was something like, 'If
you want to say this is fake, you better provide some proof.' So I did."
Duarte
downloaded the video from YouTube and opened his copy of Sony Vegas Pro
11, a video editing package. He ran the file through some manual
stabilization filters and corrected the color to make his proof more
vivid. A frame-by-frame analysis found that at one stage of the video,
the shadow of the bird disappears, and when the little boy slips from
the eagle's talons, he in fact still travels upward for a fraction of a
second. All in all, it took the 17-year-old less than five hours to
debunk a month-and-a-half's worth of work.
Duarte used his video
editing skills to put together a short video. "If I just commented [on
the original YouTube video], people would just call me names," he says,
so he uploaded his version to YouTube at 5:20 a.m. Western European Time
(12:20 a.m. EST), a couple of hours before the four students headed
home from the bar.
At that point everything "happened so fast,"
he says. Duarte's first move was to go to the original video and link to
his response. People still didn't believe him; two users ganged up in a
chain of comments, one asking, "How is this proof?" The other said it
was "proof Cyatek is retarted [sic]."
Duarte didn't mind: That's
the internet, after all, and people "really believed it was legit."
Rather than deal with YouTube commenters, he thought he'd post the
rejoinder to the Centre NAD video to Reddit, where he'd first seen the
original.
He was too late. He tried to upload his clip,
"Golden Eagle Snatches Kid — Fake," but the site threw up an error page
— someone had already put his clip up. It had been only five minutes,
max. Now there were two videos in circulation, one countering the other.
Both were racking up views, comments, and coverage at a prodigious
rate, and neither creator had control over their spread.
3. Moon Unicorns and Space Monkeys
The person who
oversees YouTube's vision of what will become viral is Kevin Allocca.
He's the company's trends manager, a buzzy title that essentially means
he is ahead of the curve when it comes to babies on Roombas and cute
dogs burping the alphabet. Allocca has identified three pillars of
virality: tastemakers (those who decide what is cool, and spread it),
communities (such as Reddit), and unexpectedness (which a bird-brained
kidnapping has in droves).
"If there's anything we like more than
watching outrageous footage of the impossible, it's discussing and
reacting to outrageous footage of the impossible," he says. The video
lingered, even after its debunking, because it gave people, he
continues, "a topic for us to engage on and debate with each other
about. We know that videos depicting the seemingly implausible —
especially in nature — can become very popular. Add in the fact that
there's just a lot to react to and that tons of blogs and news sites
were embedding the video, and you've got a recipe for viral success."
Ryan
Cordell, a lecturer at Northeastern University specializing in
19th-century periodical literature, analyzes how newspapers and other
mass media of the time disseminated news, and perhaps unsurprisingly,
the criteria for what makes a story spread haven't changed much. "It
needs to be easily shared; have some level of cuteness — or," he
explains, "in this case be something horrifying; and have some kind of
challenge, or puzzle, or mystery." "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" has all
three.
One of the most outlandish hoaxes in history was gently ushered into the world via the pages of the New York Sun
in August 1835. A supposed friend of famous astrologer Sir John
Herschel wrote in the paper that he had been pointing his telescope (one
made "of an entirely new principle") at the surface of the moon one
night and saw — amongst other things — unicorns, goats, and men with
wings building giant temples to their gods. The story is, of course,
baloney, but no more so, certainly in 1835, than the notion a bird could
swoop down and snatch a child from a Montreal park.
Eventually the hoax was uncovered — but not before it got the Sun
an awful lot of new readers handing over their one cent each day to see
what new miracles would happen. This was one of the first big hoaxes
that fooled people in great numbers. After it, says Cordell, "lots of
others came along and tried to mimic it, but lots failed. People had
become attuned to be skeptical of similar things." That skepticism has
continued ever since.
For some hoax creators, the goal is
monetary gain and notoriety. Smart advertising companies have co-opted
the popularity of the viral video to get their clients' products in
front of millions of eyeballs. Some work, some don't. Some wear their
branding on their sleeve, while others (such as this video of a Fiat
attempting a U-turn in Naples, Italy) don't seem that blatant. Yet a lot
of the people behind these hoaxes aren't necessarily trying to probe a
boundary: They're simply responding to a common human impulse to fuck
with our fellow man. And they find a receptive audience, because despite
our pessimism, we're drawn to the extraordinary.
"Then, as
now, we like to share things that resonate with our cultural ideas or
values," Cordell says. "That gives us this sense that we are
participating in and creating a community." And from time immemorial,
one of our main cultural experiences is that we will do anything we can
to make sure our young come to no harm.
Whereas previous bird
snatchings in a pre-internet age still linger with uncertainty as to
whether they're true or not, this one was categorically debunked — and
quickly. "We're more and more on the lookout for a con," posits Cordell.
One need only look at the skepticism in the initial online response to
last week's footage of the Russian meteor shower; and when Iran's state
news agency released photographs of the monkey it sent into space
earlier this month, an online brouhaha broke out over its legitimacy.
People believed it was fake based on, of all things, a mole on the
animal's forehead. (The news agency wasn't trying to fool anyone: It
simply used an archive photo of another space-bound monkey to illustrate
the story.) If something seems remotely out of the realm of possibility
— and we're presented with a lot of things that seem questionable on
the internet — then our first response nowadays is to be circumspect.
Some believe what they see. Some don't. In a way, it doesn't matter.
From left: Mireault, Seigle, Marquis-Poulin and Archambault
4. The Morning After
More than 1 million people
had seen the original video by the morning of Dec. 19. Everyone, from
Professor Tremblay to the students, couldn't quite believe it. Being
that kind of success was a crapshoot, believes Tremblay. "There's a lot
of things we can't control. You can do the best thing," have the best
and slickest 3-D effects, "but you need the spark," he says, when 72
hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. "There's an
undefinable quality to what makes a hoax a success. There's an X factor,
which is kind of elusive."
Claude Arsenault, Centre NAD's
public relations director, began getting press calls early on the
morning of Dec. 19. "What happened was," says Arsenault, "we confirmed
very quickly it was a hoax. It was not generally accepted that it was a
hoax. There was a 12-hour window where no one claimed it. We claimed it
very fast."
"Well, that's a lie," Tiago Duarte replies when this
is quoted to him. He links me to a screenshot of his YouTube analytics
screen for the video, and seems to have a point; around three quarters
of a million people had seen "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid — Fake" by Dec.
19, around the time Centre NAD was releasing its admission — and getting
its star pupils ready to meet the swarming press.
"We had to call the students to wake them up because camera crews were showing up" at the college, Arsenault explains.
There
was one problem: Marquis-Poulin's cell phone was dead. Archambault was
dispatched to bang on his front door. "I knew it was kind of a special
situation then," Marquis-Poulin sheepishly explains.
All present
and correct and groggy, the four students underwent a crash course in
media training — the main tenet of which was breathe and think before
you answer a question, but also to, for some reason, drink a lot of
water and eat a lot of fruit — before being coaxed and cajoled from one
TV studio to another.
"From noon until 9:00 p.m. they barely had
time to eat," says Arsenault of the full press blitz. "It was interview
after interview after interview." The students were caught off guard by
the response, and found it challenging traversing the world's media in
English and their native French. Not one of them was an eager interview
subject. "They really just wanted to get back to their projects,"
Arsenault explains.
Amid the chaos of television, print, and
radio interviews, the students still had term papers to hand in. (They
were eventually given an extension for their essays into the holidays.)
By the second day — and following a good night's sleep — the group were
alternating interviews in groups of two and four with a little downtime
to tend to their essays and play Ping-Pong in the student lounge
downstairs from the press office.
The students were happy with
one aspect of their fame, though. It allowed their family members to
better understand what their degree involved beyond playing about on
computers. "My family was treating me a little bit like a star," says
Marquis-Poulin. "For them to be proud was the best feeling."
As
people panicked and freaked out, the school had to admit the video was a
hoax, and the second phase of the viral half-life of a YouTube video
kicked into action. Now that people knew it was smoke and mirrors, they
wanted to learn more about how it was done.
One fear — that
potentially killer birds were on the loose — was replaced with another:
If a bunch of students can make something so convincing, what's to say
that CCTV footage, or news footage, couldn't be forged? That week before
Christmas saw the students everywhere, on every channel, in every
language.
Two months on and inevitably the number of views has
slowed on the video. The graph's leveled out; in truth, it'd been
inching toward a plateau 24 hours after it was first uploaded. Such is
the supersonic speed of the internet, chewing trends up and spitting
them out, before moving down the road and onto the next phenomenon.
"Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" did better than most, though. "There aren't a
ton of videos so far that have been able to pick up over 15 million
views in a single day," says Allocca. Centre NAD and Tremblay took some
flack from veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators. Their video —
though meant in jest — gave a species struggling to survive around the
world bad press. (It also freaked out a few kids.) Though largely, people were simply impressed by the quality of the fake.
Because
the Centre NAD students made their video with educationally licensed
versions of Autodesk Softimage, Autodesk Maya, and NUKE, they weren't
entitled to make money from the video — and with nearly 42 million
views, a potentially significant amount of revenue was about to go
unclaimed. However, the school could take the money, which will be used
to help fund a scholarship for students who ordinarily might not be able
to afford Centre NAD's tuition.
The four students are happy
with the impact their work will have on future students at the school.
For now they're being coy about what'll happen when they graduate,
though some already have work experience with professional studios.
Archambault has won an individual VFX competition and will visit Pixar's
studios in Emeryville, California this summer.
Tiago Duarte
won't be making quite as much as Centre NAD from his video, though he
was as quick off the mark. His debunking of the hoax, despite passing in
front of more than 4 million pairs of eyeballs, has earned $94.77 as of
Feb. 2. YouTube keeps $8.78 of that, and the remaining amount is split
40/60 between Duarte and a network called Maker Studios he joined months
before coming across "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid." For a 17-year-old,
that's not an inconsiderate amount of money — it'll keep him in games
for a month or so — but it's not the amount it could've been. "Honestly,
I don't really care much," he says. "I didn't want to have the video
monetized in the first place…so I'll get whatever I get and I'm OK with
it."
I mention to him that the profit from the original video will go toward scholarships.
"That's really awesome!" he responds. "Can't wait to see what they produce this year."
5. "We're Under Scrutiny"
A good portion of the
nearly 42 million people (as many people as the entire population of
Argentina) who have watched "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" will be waiting
for this year's hoaxes too. The next crop of students are already
planning their hoax videos. Archambault, Marquis-Poulin, Mireault, and
Seigle are still at the school, jokingly goading their peers to top
them. They hope their success motivates those who come next, and by all
accounts they're already impressing. Robin Tremblay knows people are now
on the lookout, and he also knows how difficult it will be to follow up
on this year's success.
Tremblay began working on Hollywood movies in 1995 with work for the schlocky Witchboard III: The Possession and Screamers.
Since then he's contributed to 30 or so films since as a matte painter
and digital effects artist. (The movies have stepped up in quality:
Tremblay has since worked on 300 and Brokeback Mountain.)
In his years in the business, he's seen a change in the way special
effects are produced, and a way in which his work is distributed and
received.
In the two months since "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid,"
the school has fielded calls from people who have seen natural disasters
and wondered whether they had something to do with it. They even took
queries over the Russian meteorites, Arsenault says.
That people
are linking such events to Centre NAD shows both how impressive 3-D
computer-generated animation has become — even outside of professional
Hollywood studios — and how suspicious people have grown. The balance of
power has shifted: Hearsay was once the preserve of the people, while
the media were detached and coolheaded. "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid"
inverted those roles. "The press is now less skeptical than many of the
citizens they purport to serve," believes Clay Shirky, one of the
foremost thinkers on the social impact of the internet.
Truthers,
conspiracy theorists, and cranks are no longer out on a limb in
distrusting everything they see. Given that undergraduates have the
computing power and the tools to distort reality, there's no telling
what more power and higher investment can do. Tricks that were once
Stalinist methods of rewriting history are now within the reach of
anyone with a copy of Photoshop.
Tremblay, forever the wide-eyed
youngster watching Hollywood's finest effects — one of his first works
as a child auteur was to make his brother, playing a wizard, appear and
disappear in a short film called The Evil Witchcraft — prefers to
look at the positive reasoning behind why the video spread so quickly.
"We crave the unexpected, the crazy, the impossible," he says. "Like the
poster in Mulder's office in The X-Files, 'We Want To Believe.'"
That's
going to be harder and harder to do. "A lot of people are now familiar
with VFX techniques," says Tremblay. "They know what to look for to
detect computer imagery. People are now used to seeing great VFX and
they know it is not real. We're under scrutiny."
But Centre NAD
will continue to try to push the boundaries of computer-generated
effects while fooling the general populace. It'll be difficult, Tremblay
points out, but don't worry.
