Funny how I find myself agreeing with everything except for the last paragraph, which I would replace with something like: “if this is the best evidence you can get, maybe it’s time to admit that you have no evidence”.
I mean, in a universe where Hitchens actually defended waterboarding (and it was a topic important enough for him that he actually tried it), we would expect to find stronger evidence than “one blogger said so” and “it makes a good story”. Like, he would actually mention it somewhere in writing or in an interview.
It can be shockingly difficult to track down stuff like this. Even the most high-profile magazines like Time or Newsweek can be hard to get a copy of if you aren’t in exactly the right place or if they happen to have not digitized a particular range or your citation isn’t exactly right. Television is even worse. Archives of somewhere like CNN are… hard. If you know someone said something at exactly 12:11PM on 15 September 2004 on CNN, on what was perhaps the most watched & influential TV channel in the world, you may seriously struggle to get it if it’s not already conveniently excerpted from fourth-hand copies of copies of copies on YouTube.
(This reminds me of a BBC TV documentary on cats and life in cat colonies that I wanted to watch back in 2018. It was a high-profile documentary, even published as a book, and I wanted to watch it because it apparently covered parts that the book did not. After a bunch of searching, I concluded that I had exactly 2 options for accessing it at the time: I could either drive several hundred miles to an obscure library in North Carolina that still had one of the only VHS tapes in the world according to WorldCat, and hope that it worked, and maybe bring along a VHS player just in case; or I could fly to London, and submit a request in writing to the BBC archives to be allowed to watch it—and naturally, I would be strictly forbidden from making a copy or taking any photos of it etc. Meanwhile, the book was a few clicks & $13 to scan… I scanned the book. I have not seen the documentary.)
I recall reading a few months ago an enlightening article on Jon Stewart in the 2000s: why could Stewart marshal so many devastating clips of people saying stuff on TV? Because old stuff on TV disappeared the instant it was broadcast unless someone made a point then and there of videotaping it and making it ‘go viral’. Otherwise, it vanished without a trace, as if it were an opium dream, with any copy buried deep in the TV network’s vaults.* Technically, it still existed, but it was unfindable, like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Sort of like social media: if you don’t note down something right now, you may never refind it, even assuming it’s not deleted or anything.) So people spoke freely and never worried about old clips resurfacing. But Stewart invested in researchers and paying for access to archives, and pulling up the newly-digitized records to take down guests or subjects.
I imagine there will be similar issues in trying to understand 2010--2030 streaming and Tiktok culture. In theory, it should all be super-legible and everything should be able to be immaculately cited… In practice, you’re quickly reduced to rumors of rumors and you know more about the Roman Empire millennia ago than some events beheld by millions on streams just years ago. (AI may be able to help by bruteforce searching gigantic corpuses for the kernel of truth behind the garbled versions which become the standard account, but that won’t help in many cases because you won’t have the video to analyze—most streaming video, if it was saved at all, is going to be deleted at the first opportunity because video is gigantic & expensive to store. A single streamer could easily be generating tens of terabytes.)
This is one technical point that younger people are often amazed to hear, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of TV broadcast was perfectly ephemeral, producing no records at all. Not just that the original copies were lost or never digitised or impossible to track down or whatever, but that nothing of the sort ever existed. The technology for capturing, broadcasting, and displaying a TV signal is so much easier than the tech for recording one, that there were several decades when the only recordings of TV came from someone setting up a literal film camera pointed at a TV and capturing the screen on photographic film, and that didn’t happen much.
(This also meant that old TV was amazingly low latency. The camera sensor scanned through, producing the signal, which went through some analog circuitry and straight onto the air, into the circuitry of your TV and right onto the screen. The scanning of the electron beam across the screen was synchronised with the scanning of the camera sensor. At no point was even a single frame stored—I need to check the numbers but I think if you were close to the TV station, you’re looking at the top of the frame before the bottom of the frame is even captured by the camera)
Funny how I find myself agreeing with everything except for the last paragraph, which I would replace with something like: “if this is the best evidence you can get, maybe it’s time to admit that you have no evidence”.
I mean, in a universe where Hitchens actually defended waterboarding (and it was a topic important enough for him that he actually tried it), we would expect to find stronger evidence than “one blogger said so” and “it makes a good story”. Like, he would actually mention it somewhere in writing or in an interview.
It can be shockingly difficult to track down stuff like this. Even the most high-profile magazines like Time or Newsweek can be hard to get a copy of if you aren’t in exactly the right place or if they happen to have not digitized a particular range or your citation isn’t exactly right. Television is even worse. Archives of somewhere like CNN are… hard. If you know someone said something at exactly 12:11PM on 15 September 2004 on CNN, on what was perhaps the most watched & influential TV channel in the world, you may seriously struggle to get it if it’s not already conveniently excerpted from fourth-hand copies of copies of copies on YouTube.
(This reminds me of a BBC TV documentary on cats and life in cat colonies that I wanted to watch back in 2018. It was a high-profile documentary, even published as a book, and I wanted to watch it because it apparently covered parts that the book did not. After a bunch of searching, I concluded that I had exactly 2 options for accessing it at the time: I could either drive several hundred miles to an obscure library in North Carolina that still had one of the only VHS tapes in the world according to WorldCat, and hope that it worked, and maybe bring along a VHS player just in case; or I could fly to London, and submit a request in writing to the BBC archives to be allowed to watch it—and naturally, I would be strictly forbidden from making a copy or taking any photos of it etc. Meanwhile, the book was a few clicks & $13 to scan… I scanned the book. I have not seen the documentary.)
I recall reading a few months ago an enlightening article on Jon Stewart in the 2000s: why could Stewart marshal so many devastating clips of people saying stuff on TV? Because old stuff on TV disappeared the instant it was broadcast unless someone made a point then and there of videotaping it and making it ‘go viral’. Otherwise, it vanished without a trace, as if it were an opium dream, with any copy buried deep in the TV network’s vaults.* Technically, it still existed, but it was unfindable, like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Sort of like social media: if you don’t note down something right now, you may never refind it, even assuming it’s not deleted or anything.) So people spoke freely and never worried about old clips resurfacing. But Stewart invested in researchers and paying for access to archives, and pulling up the newly-digitized records to take down guests or subjects.
I imagine there will be similar issues in trying to understand 2010--2030 streaming and Tiktok culture. In theory, it should all be super-legible and everything should be able to be immaculately cited… In practice, you’re quickly reduced to rumors of rumors and you know more about the Roman Empire millennia ago than some events beheld by millions on streams just years ago. (AI may be able to help by bruteforce searching gigantic corpuses for the kernel of truth behind the garbled versions which become the standard account, but that won’t help in many cases because you won’t have the video to analyze—most streaming video, if it was saved at all, is going to be deleted at the first opportunity because video is gigantic & expensive to store. A single streamer could easily be generating tens of terabytes.)
* Itself far from guaranteed. You may know about the BBC Dr Who episodes and other lost TV broadcasts, but this is endemic. Hence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
This is one technical point that younger people are often amazed to hear, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of TV broadcast was perfectly ephemeral, producing no records at all. Not just that the original copies were lost or never digitised or impossible to track down or whatever, but that nothing of the sort ever existed. The technology for capturing, broadcasting, and displaying a TV signal is so much easier than the tech for recording one, that there were several decades when the only recordings of TV came from someone setting up a literal film camera pointed at a TV and capturing the screen on photographic film, and that didn’t happen much.
(This also meant that old TV was amazingly low latency. The camera sensor scanned through, producing the signal, which went through some analog circuitry and straight onto the air, into the circuitry of your TV and right onto the screen. The scanning of the electron beam across the screen was synchronised with the scanning of the camera sensor. At no point was even a single frame stored—I need to check the numbers but I think if you were close to the TV station, you’re looking at the top of the frame before the bottom of the frame is even captured by the camera)
I think you are vastly overestimating the 2001-2010 internet’s ability to preserve and catalog evidence.