How does one authenticate experience in virtual worlds in absence of authority?

Welcome to the VideoDrome

The question of how to authenticate experience in virtual worlds is a fundamental dilemma of the medium. The previous mode of authority is [and reflexively is] "authority" itself, with its self-referential reliance on the power of writing, authorship, etc. However, the real authority embodied in the written word emanates from its framing within a world that still remembered and revered the superceded pre-literate modes of "authority" (ancestor worship, nobility -- all of which assert some sort of recursive intellectual or cultural "provenance"). This now-ancient revision of authority positioned the written word as a tool of mastery wielded by only a few masters.

As time progressed and written systems of arbitration, contracts, laws, etc. devolved into the merely mundane, holy instruments of power our parents knew them to be, authority of written documents became necessarily bolstered by witnesses, (whose pre-literate mode of seeing and possibly re-telling the circumstances of an event make the truth of the event "worth more than the paper it's written on"). Thus marriage licenses, "deeds" of "writ", treaties, articles of surrender [all] were really backed up all along by the watching eye of the observer.

However, today we have the endlessly hyper wrinkling, unfolding, and paginated text-based internet. But in this hyper-literate world of the internet, traversed by so many mighty scribes and scribblers, there is a larger more ferocious devil-spider in the web. And this beast can't be tamed by even the post-nuclear bomb of authority, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), whose monumental power is using SkyNet for web banking, to "help" you balance your checkbook.

This is because the grand mechanics of an AES implementation rival the Deathstar for complexity and expense, making it like the manifest will of the Vatican. By comparison Video is like the out-of-control, hidden printing presses of the Protestant Reformation. Like the rude, irreverent, disrespectful, and salacious cartoons printed on the Gutenberg Press, web videos (with their focus on back-yard wrestling, Jack-Ass antics, and riots), flout authority, and flaunt their power to sway minds. And they can do so with impunity for several inevitable, unbeatable reasons.

1. Video is ubiquitous, both in terms of the means of distribution and the means of reproduction.
2. Video sources (cameras) are ubiquitous; they are installed because they document the truth -- and they are so powerful because they seem to do so no matter what the intentions of their owners or subjects are.
3. And, while it must be admitted that a video text is a product of editing and authorship, good video is widely considered self-effacingly authoritative, regardless of how it is created. It achieves this paradoxical quality precisely because it enters the mind through the senses. It beats reason to the cerebral cortex and is processed as an exigent physical truth before it is ever deconstructed and interpreted.

Video is truth. And it is considered true because "truth" (as we experience it, as a narrative story, impression, belief in our mind -- really just a half-life of electrons/afterglow of recently fired synapses) is much, much, much more like video than a book, a contract, a magazine, a dollar bill, etc.

The power of video right now is obscured by the slow death of writing, printing, hyper-textual production, etc. as a mechanism for trafficking in authority. It is so, just as the creation of writing didn't immediately result in the dissolution of the spoken word and its form of knowledge. Right now you still have to make-pretend to sign your name at the checkout (the alter). But as video advances, and becomes truly ubiquitous (a camera on every car, on every soldier's helmet and in every citizen's work place), on every street corner, in every court room, in every doctor's office, trained on every possession, witnessing and recording every act of love or aggression, it will rapidly assume its inevitable destiny as the preeminent vehicle for authority of our lifetimes.

Like the press before it, video is a transport mechanism for communication. Like the press, video has demonstrated its power as a tool of oppression and as a transformative tool of liberation. And like the press, both roles are inevitable. However, video has an anti-intellectual, organic bent and tone. As a medium, it frames and transfers a mechanical message -- how something, anything looks and sounds. By comparison with the written word, video's audience is limitless and economical, because the price of entry is not the luxurious extravagance of literacy. The world of words requires speakers, writers, and readers engaged in a rich communications economy. Tomorrow we will watch and listen where today we read. And like monarchists and scribes before them, operators of the written word will see their world usurped by mechanically-mediated communication of a yet purer form of data -- a purer product.