This is fascinating.
Everyone who watched the Superbowl halftime show last night heard Alicia Keys hit a sour note in her opening appearance. Everyone heard it.
However, the version of the show hosted on the NFL's official YouTube page has the audio cleaned up to remove Keys's sour notes (link: ).
Bootleg clips containing the original, authentic audio are being scrubbed from YouTube at a breakneck pace.
In 5-10 years, we'll all be fighting over whether Keyes actually flubbed the opening notes of her Superbowl performance because our memories will be at odds with the “official” record.
For all the recent discussion re: the post-truth world, we need to talk more about what record-keeping should look like in the Internet era. Because things like this audio swap – with no explanation or heads up given – is crazy-making.
How are we ever supposed to return to something approximating a consensual reality when even the trivial things we experience as a nation undergo stealth edits?
Doesn't help that this was the same weekend that I showed my kids Monsters Inc. and was like, "Stick around for the credits! There's a surprise!"
…
Turn out Disney removed the blooper reel. But **I** didn't know that, so now I'm frisking my own memory, feeling like I'm nuts.
Why did they remove the bloopers? To pump up some stupid "special features" section elsewhere. Meanwhile, I'm left feeling like an insane person, swearing before God and all eternity there was a blooper reel during the end credits.
The point isn’t the blooper reel or Keys's performance (honestly, good on her for going live). The point is that the CONSTANT unannounced tweaks and edits are an unnecessary strain on our memories & recollections. Keep it up and soon people won't trust *anything* they see online.
Keep going and pretty soon they won't trust ... anything.
Just throwing this out there, but it seems really bad when any entity, let alone a mega-corporation, gets into the habit of insisting against the factual record that the thing you saw and heard didn’t actually happen the way you saw and heard it.
If they'll do it for something as trivial as one sour note during a halftime show, they'll do it for the really consequential stuff.
For it to become a matter of routine that our collective memories enter into direct conflict with the "official record” – that's one way to accelerate the demolition of a high-trust society.
Buy physical media. And, Pixar: Put the bloopers back in the credits.
PS: This isn't a giant conspiracy, btw. YouTube scrubbed = aggressive copyright enforcement. Keys edit is also industry standard. *That’s the point* Routine edits coupled with routine culling of authentic versions = normalizing conflict between “records” & collective experiences.
PPS: Also, none of this was intended as a criticism of Keys, you gigantic weirdos.
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